26. Radio Sounds on my pages

In January 2005 I bought myself one of these small MP3-players, and my model can not only play sounds but record sounds as well. This inspired me the idea to enhance Gerard's Radio Corner with a sound sample archive.

Goal of the archive

When radio descriptions are accompanied by sound, I hope that you can get an idea of how a radio sounds. Understandibly, the quality of reproduction is seriously reduced by the recording process and digital storage, but I still hope that you can hear the differences between the various radios. Second, I hope that the samples will be valuable as a small scale historic sound archive. To this end, I'll try to have my radio play news items or sounds of historical interest, particularly interest for radio collectors. My succes in this aim cannot be appreciated before 2025.

How it is done

The sound quality of the MP3 player was horrible due to bad microphone and compression, so I soon started to use my Canon A40 digital camera to make the recordings. All sound recordings you can play are truely recorded from the displayed equipment. The radio plays the news or interesting music at normal room volume, and I record the sound from circa 30 to 50 cm distance. The camera has a sampling rate of 11kHz (limiting audio frequencies to about 5000Hz) and a sampling depth of 8 bits (giving a SNR better than that of most tube radios). I try to have the sound samples about 20 to 30 seconds in length. The sound is of course added to the page of the radio from which it was recorded.

In 2007 I replaced the Canon by a Fuji F30, which I now (2014) use for all my GRC photos and sounds.

Most recordings are made from a broadcast of an item of interest, but there are a few recordings that were made from an audio source (walkman, CD) and injected to the radio through the pickup jack.

You find historic sounds, for example, in the Interval Signals archive.


Gerard Tel