Radios Caroline & London on MP3 CD

[Old Sparky]

A couple of years ago, at the NVCF, I bought two CDs, one of the last hours of Radio London, and the other of R. Caroline North broadcasts of 14 August 1967. Playing part of the latter yesterday, I wondered how these came to be recorded. There are no liner notes with the discs, only a picture of the Radio Ship with the date & time span of the broadcasts, plus the words 'In Mp3 format -Plays on any computer-GREAT QUALITY RECORDING(Their Capitals!). Does anyone know if these were recordings made 'on air', or how they came to be produced? There's no address or other contact info. on the discs. The seller had other Mp3 CDs of various subjects, not all to do with offshore radio, but i haven't seen these on sale anywhere else since.

[Keithstv]

I suspect there were many people making off air recordings of the last day(s) of the pirates for nostalgic reasons. Some of these will have disappeared and several will have been transferred to CD/MP3.

A former work colleague found a set of tapes he'd made of the last whole day of Radio 270 off the coast of East Yorkshire. There were also recordings from early 1967 and 1966. I've transferred these to .wav format (about 25Gb in total). All that needs to be done is to clean them up.

I would think that recordings of the pirates other than the final day and of Radio Caroline or Radio London would be rarer. There were probably fewer people with the necessary recording equipment around in the sixties. Back then there were plenty of programmes I'd like to have recorded but couldn't afford the recorder. Now I've got the recorder but there's nothing I'd like to record!

Keith

[milairuk]

Agree with Keith, many recordings around, I have the last hour of Big L in my loft recorded at seven and a half inches / second (HiFi then !!) I was at work then so had wired a timeswitch up to switch on the radio and Truvox Tape deck to catch it !! I even allowed for the warm up drift on my Lafayette KT-340 Rx, so that it was on frequency at the start of the last hour.

Great days, the kids of today don't realise what it used to be like - perhaps it would do them good to do without the hundreds of stations pumping out adverts for Wonga !!

I also have a high quality set of the original american jingles used by the likes of Caroline and Big L - I think they were called the 77 series ?

Nothing to play them on these days, sigh.

John

[Old Sparky]

Presumably the recordings i have (and other non-pirate radio related from the same seller) were converted from tape recordings and processed to give good quality sound. Could the R. Caroline & 'Big L' discs have been made from recordings actually made on board the ships? I guess we'll never know! Members may be aware of another set of discs called 'Don't touch that Dial!', two of which i have, but these are land-based re-creations of Radio Caroline Broadcasts from March 1966 & early 1968.

[Keithstv]

It's quite suprising how well modern PC audio processing software can remove the clicks and change the frequency response to compensate for the limitations of the original off air recording. I passed the Radio 270 files to a friend of mine who's a big 60s pirate fan and he has cleaned up a sample of one of the recordings and it does sound significantly better.

However for the genuine 60s experience of listening to the stations on a Medium wave radio nothing beats listening to the original recordings!!

Keith