Stage Door Records are a record label that specialise in preserving cast recordings of West End musicals from the past 50 years. I was contacted recently by Stage Door’s Tim Hutton with a view to digitising records and tapes as they become available from the appropriate record companies, prior to their CD release on the […]

The heart of any audio restoration business is invariably the ‘vintage’ audio equipment used to transcribe the analogue signal from the various record and tape sources. By its very nature, the kit tends to be fairly old and no-longer serviceable or supported by the manufacturer. As time goes by, there is often an increased need for […]

A trip to the Montagu’s “National Motor Museum” at Beaulieu permitted me a photo opportunity I wasn’t expecting – and the chance to sit in a vintage Hillman Imp into the bargain! How did this come about? Well, Beaulieu called upon owners of pink cars to take part in it’s inaugural ‘Simply Pink‘ rally which […]

Back in 2011, I was commissioned to transfer and restore a set of shellac 78s to CD, the subject of which were two after-luncheon speeches given by Wing Commander Arthur Donaldson and the guest of honour, Winston Churchill in the Officers’ Mess, at RAF Biggin Hill on 18th June 1951. It was in fact Wg Cdr […]

It’s February again, and time for another trip out to the ExCeL exhibition centre in London’s Dockland to attend the ever popular BVExpo. This year’s event was held over three days (23rd to 25th Feb) and for my money (notwithstanding the free admission!) it was even better than last year. As always I was impressed with the […]

Recently, we took a trip to London’s dockland area to visit, amongst other things, the ‘Elvis at the O2’ exhibition. Prior to ‘seeing’ Elvis, we’d stopped off at the Thames barrier for a quick look around the exhibition, and a cuppa. As the weather was fine, we decided to walk to the O2, which involved a […]

8-Track carts are a bit fiddly to repair – opening them up can sometimes break internal clip fastenings, made brittle with age. However, a cart which arrived recently held some very personal family conversation, singing etc. from over 40 years ago, so a repair to the snapped tape was called for. The excess tape had been […]

Frodsham Folk Club, founded in 1968, has held it’s Friday night musical evenings in a number of small venues around the Frodsham area of Cheshire, where its popularity has grown steadily over the years. Its home between 1969 and 2005 was in the stables behind the Queens Head pub! After 2005, the club relocated to […]

Back in the late 1930s, Dr. Julian Huxley, then director of Whipsnade Zoo London, commissioned the production of a ‘Sound Book’ – a set of six flexible, one-sided gramophone records, each featuring a series of different animal calls. These 78 rpm discs, each lasting about 2 minutes and narrated by Huxley himself, were supplied in […]

I was contacted a while ago by Martin Astell, the sound archivist from the Essex Sound and Video Archive, Chelmsford, with a view to pro-cleaning their entire collection of vinyl, shellac and lacquer discs. The archive, which is part of the Essex Record Office, holds historically important recordings from the Essex area, on record, tape […]