Hi Tom, Didn't bel Canto reissue most of this stuff on Lp ? I'm sure we've all seen those cazy spectrally-coloured vinyl records they issued.Many of these were in print,though not on coloured vinyl,well into the 60s.I must admit I have seen very few of the stereo demonstration recordings on tape.Mostly on vinyl.Last year,I scored one of the real classics of this genre (?) ,"Bob and Ray Stage a Stereo Spectacular" on eBay,for six bucks. Roger Kulp
--- Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Roger:
Yes, I totally forgot Omegatapes and Audiophile. The
record labels don't "count" in my interest because of course they all got into the tape game.
I'm more interested in these little companies that sprang up to do tapes only. Some did morph into
record labels but it seems like most just died out after an initial "hifi bug" craze.
Here's a for instance. Bel Canto did original
recordings back in the mid-50's, before they became one of the major duping houses in the 60's. One of
their tapes is "That Geller Feller" by Herb Geller. I think it was recorded while Geller was
under contract to Mercury/Emarcy but the material was never issued on Mercury to my knowledge. It's a
good album, along the lines of Geller's mid-50's Emarcy records, which were all mono. So, what
happened to the Bel Canto masters and was this stuff
ever reissued? That's the kind of info I'm seeking.
Another thing I'd love to know is what ever became
of some of those crazy stereo demo tapes like "Sound in the Round"? I have the quarter-track
version, which is vastly inferior to the little snippet of the 2-track version that's on Ampex's
original 2-track stereo demo tape they included with their first consumer tape machines.
There were some funny, interesting and creative
stereophony tricks and gimmicks going on in this very early tape era that never made it to the stereo
LP era two years later. By the time quarter-track became the consumer format, the tape
business seemed to be much more just an adjunct to the LP business like 8-tracks and then cassettes
would later be. The next time tape was king was the very end of the LP era, right before CD's became
the mass format. The two years between LPs and CD's, if memory serves, cassettes outsold LPs
because the Walkman was king and the boombox was
still a very strong presence.
-- Tom Fine
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