In search of a lost tone/sound

[midnightsun]

Hopefully, someone will understand what I am talking about and be able to direct me to where I can get clips or recordings of this tone.

I was a five years old in the mid 50s. The radio with its elegant wooden cabinet stood 4 or 5 feet tall and had only three big knobs. The center knob was gigantic and was the tuner. We lived in a little own in Idaho so there weren't more than a couple of broadcasts on the entire AM bandwidth.

The tones and sounds that I want to hear again are the sounds of trying to dial in a radio station. I remember the tones and sounds were warm, often distorted, pleasant, scratchy, incredibly variable pitch. I would essentially play the radio and make tones by spinning the tuner dial and tone knob. I can't remember the last time I heard these tones. I am sure that the tones were the result of the entire chain including tube radio, 50s electronics & speaker, broadcastc, etc.


Does anyone else remember this lost sound?

[joeq]

how about This?


there are dozens of such sites and most are searchable and have a preview mode so you can check out the sound before buying. Don't know how 'warm' these things are in terms of what you remember, but you can always run it through a nice tube something or other.

Your other option is to hit the garage sales...

[midnightsun]

Originally Posted by joeq

how about This?


there are dozens of such sites and most are searchable and have a preview mode so you can check out the sound before buying. Don't know how 'warm' these things are in terms of what you remember, but you can always run it through a nice tube something or other.

Your other option is to hit the garage sales...

Many thanks...... this link is exactly what I was looking for. AudioSparx had some shortwave sounds that hit the nail on the head. My day is made. Interestingly, I would not access AudioSparx using my Mac I had to fire up the pc.

[joeq]

I was able to access the site on my mac, as well as hear a preview. I did not try a purchase.

I did notice that they said something about "download to PC", and I thought was odd.

[bunnerabb]

Originally Posted by joeq

I was able to access the site on my mac, as well as hear a preview. I did not try a purchase.

I did notice that they said something about "download to PC", and I thought was odd.

Well, PC isn't a platform, it means Personal Computer.

Macs are as well as Win boxes.

[Kiwiburger]

A lot of those early radiograms sounded amazingly warm because they were designed to be lofi. To avoid cabinet resonances, excess hum and hiss, the lows and highs were purposefully attenuated. Or, simply not designed in - which is almost the same. In other words, single 12" speaker, no tweeters or horns, open back, not ported or sealed.

You could probably get a very similar effect by plugging a cheap transistor radio (like from a $2 shop) and driving a guitar cab with it. Or use it to drive a reamp into a tube guitar amp.

The reference to "incredibly variable pitch" has got me wondering though ... maybe you had single sideband transmission you were listening to then? That brings me back to my school ham radio days. Single Side Band is a method of maximising power, and was mainly used by hams and ship radios and stuff - not normally for speach. An AM RF signal has an RF carrier, and when modulated it has two sidebands (like the positive and negative crests of the wave). The idea of single side band was to remove one of them, and the carrier, and just put all your power into transmitting one sideband only. But to listen to it, you had to put the carrier back in. So you had a seperate knob for dialing in the carrier, and this meant the pitch was variable - wierd sounding and cool to play with.

It also allowed morse code to be transmitted as bursts of RF carrier, and together with this heterodyne effect you could listen to your morse code at any pitch you chose. Just wondering if this is the effect you are missing, because it's very cool, and I haven't heard it for years ...

[midnightsun]

I am still not able to play the previews on my MacBook and get the following message. When I click on the link it takes me to a Windows MediaPlayer site.

Any thoughts?


The page “cheap a.m sound effect” has content of MIME type “application/x-oleobject”, but you don’t have a plug-in installed for this MIME type. A plug-in should be available on this page:

http://www.microsoft.com/Windows/MediaPlayer/

Do you want to open the page?



Kiwiburger-- I think that the radio was very simple but one of the best for that era. The knobs were volume, tuner, and I think tone.