Editing Golden Age of Radio (section)

===Home radio recordings in the United States===
There was some home recording of radio broadcasts in the 1930s and 1940s. Examples from as early as 1930 have been documented. During these years, home recordings were made with disc recorders, most of which were only capable of storing about four minutes of a radio program on each side of a twelve-inch [[78 rpm]] record. Most home recordings were made on even shorter-playing ten-inch or smaller discs. Some home disc recorders offered the option of the [[LP record|33{{fraction|1|3}} rpm]] speed used for electrical transcriptions, allowing a recording more than twice as long to be made, although with reduced audio quality. Office dictation equipment was sometimes pressed into service for making recordings of radio broadcasts, but the audio quality of these devices was poor and the resulting recordings were in odd formats that had to be played back on similar equipment. Due to the expense of recorders and the limitations of the recording media, home recording of broadcasts was not common during this period and it was usually limited to brief excerpts.

The lack of suitable home recording equipment was somewhat relieved in 1947 with the availability of [[wire recording|magnetic wire recorders]] for domestic use. These were capable of recording an hour-long broadcast on a single small spool of wire, and if a high-quality radio's audio output was recorded directly, rather than by holding a microphone up to its speaker, the recorded sound quality was very good. However, because the wire cost money and, like [[magnetic tape]], could be repeatedly re-used to make new recordings, only a few complete broadcasts appear to have survived on this medium. In fact, there was little home recording of complete radio programs until the early 1950s, when increasingly affordable reel-to-reel tape recorders for home use were introduced to the market.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://audiolabo.free.fr/revue1999/content/History_tape.htm|title=The History of Magnetic Tape|website=audiolabo.free.fr|access-date=30 March 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110720220508/http://audiolabo.free.fr/revue1999/content/History_tape.htm|archive-date=20 July 2011|url-status=live}}</ref><ref name=UnivMemphis>{{cite web |url=https://umdrive.memphis.edu/mbensman/public/collectingarticle.html |title=A History of Radio Program Collecting |access-date=2007-05-18 |author=Bensman, Marvin R. |work=Radio Archive of the University of Memphis |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100618065554/https://umdrive.memphis.edu/mbensman/public/collectingarticle.html |archive-date=2010-06-18 |url-status=dead }}</ref>