page_title: Victor Talking Machine Company
section_title: Acoustical recording era
hierarchical_section_title: Victor Talking Machine Company / Acoustical recording era
caption_attribution_description: A w:Victor Talking Machine and Victor records, taken at the w:William D. Hoard Historic Museum in w:Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, USA.
context_page_description: The Victor Talking Machine Company was an American record company and phonograph manufacturer headquartered in Camden, New Jersey.
  The company was founded by engineer Eldridge R. Johnson, who had been manufacturing gramophones for inventor Emile Berliner, to play his disc records. After a series of legal wranglings between Berliner, Johnson and their former business partners, the two joined to form the Consolidated Talking Machine Co. in order to combine Berliner's patents for the disc record and Gramophone, along with Johnson's patents for improving its performance and fidelity. The Victor Talking Machine Co. was incorporated officially on October 3, 1901 shortly before an agreement with Columbia Records to share their various disc record patents.
context_section_description: Before 1925, recording was done by the same purely mechanical, non-electronic "acoustical" method used since the invention of the phonograph nearly fifty years earlier. No microphone was involved and there was no means of electrical amplification. The recording machine was essentially an exposed-horn acoustical record player functioning in reverse. One or more funnel-like metal horns was used to concentrate the energy of the airborne sound waves onto a recording diaphragm, which was a thin glass disc about two inches in diameter held in place by rubber gaskets at its perimeter. The sound-vibrated center of the diaphragm was linked to a cutting stylus that was guided across the surface of a very thick wax disc, engraving a sound-modulated groove into its surface. The wax was too soft to be played back even once without seriously damaging it, although test recordings were sometimes made and sacrificed by playing them back immediately. The wax master disc was sent to a processing plant where it was electroplated to create a negative metal "stamper" used to mould or "press" durable replicas of the recording from heated "biscuits" of a shellac-based compound. Although sound quality was gradually improved by a series of small refinements, the process was inherently insensitive. It could only record sources of sound that were very close to the recording horn or very loud, and even then the high-frequency overtones and sibilants necessary for clear, detailed sound reproduction were too feeble to register above the background noise. Resonances in the recording horns and associated components resulted in a characteristic "horn sound" that immediately identifies an acoustical recording to an experienced modern listener and seemed inseparable from "phonograph music" to contemporary listeners.
  From the start, Victor innovated manufacturing processes and soon rose to pre-eminence by recording famous performers. In 1903, it instituted a three-step mother-stamper process to produce more stampers than previously possible. After improving the quality of disc records and players, Johnson began an ambitious project to have the most prestigious singers and musicians of the day record for Victor, with exclusive agreements where possible. Even if these artists demanded high fees or royalty advances which the company could not hope to immediately make up from the sales of their records, Johnson shrewdly knew that he would get his money's worth in the long run in promotion of the Victor brand name. These new celebrity recordings bore red labels, and were marketed as Red Seal records. For many years, Victor Red Seal records were only available single-sided:  not until 1923 did Victor begin offering Red Seals in more economical double-sided form. Countless advertisements were published, praising the renowned stars of the opera and concert stages and boasting that they recorded only for Victor. As Johnson intended, the majority of the record-buying public assumed from all this that Victor Records must be superior.
  In the company's early years, Victor issued recordings on the Victor, Monarch and De Luxe labels, with the Victor label on 7-inch records, Monarch on 10-inch records and De Luxe on 12-inch records. De Luxe Special 14-inch records were briefly marketed in 1903–1904. In 1905, all labels and sizes were consolidated into the Victor imprint.
  The Victor recordings made by world-famous tenor Enrico Caruso between 1904 and 1920 were particularly successful and were often used by retailers to demonstrate Victor phonographs; Caruso's  powerful voice and unusual timbre highlighted the best range of audio fidelity of the early audio technology while being minimally affected by its defects. Even people who otherwise never listened to opera often owned a record or two of the great voice of Caruso.
  Victor recorded numerous classical musicians, including Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, Victor Herbert, Ignacy Jan Paderewski and Sergei Rachmaninoff in recordings at its home studios in Camden, New Jersey and in New York. Rachmaninoff, in particular, became 
caption: A Victor Talking Machine
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