Today I spent part of my afternoon happily dubbing a beautifully preserved album of Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony performing the Brahms 4th Symphony, on five 12" shellac discs, RCA Red Seal DM-730. The records are in stellar condition, with only the pops and clicks that they were very likely born with. The case is in equally immaculate condition save a bit of wear on the edges. It has time-travelled from 1938 to 2011 with its dignity intact, hardly the worse for wear.
It's obvious that DM-730's original owner really, really loved it. That owner cared enough to keep it out of the sunlight and cold, probably in a fairly consistent temperature year-round. I know that because the discs are almost perfectly flat; most 78s have suffered some warping over the years. DM-730 was played on a good-quality record player with nice fresh needles; I know that because groove wear is minimal. The shellac is chrome-shiny. There is no visible wear around the spindle holes. The labels haven't aged a day. The disc edges are smooth and undinged. The bound paper sleeves don't have even the slightest tearing along their top. I gave the five discs a gentle bath in the Spin-Clean, dried them thoroughly then applied a last light brushing with a Discwasher. One by one they strutted their stuff on my ultra-modern Rega Planar 78 turntable with its fine Grado 78E cartridge. The Boston Symphony of 73 years ago sprang back to life in my house. It sounded damn good even to 21st-century ears accustomed to the crystalline transparency of digital recordings.
DM-730 is worth protecting and cherishing. Oh, it lives on in modern reprints and remasterings—you can get one right here if you want—but RCA will never make another copy of DM-730 in its original, heavy and imposing, form.
The liner-notes booklet contains a listing of Brahms orchestral records in the 1938 RCA Red Seal catalog. The longer works—such as the Koussevitzky Brahms 4th—were priced at $12.00 at the time of their introduction. That intrigued me. $12.00 is right in the ballpark for a compact disc right now in 2011. But 2011 dollars aren't 1938 dollars by a long shot. Just how expensive was a brand-new DM-730?
Consider that the 1938 minimum wage was 40¢ an hour for a 44-hour workweek. Thus DM-730 required 30 hours of work—3/4 of a workweek—for a minimum-wage worker to buy.
The average 1938 monthly income was $144.00. The average monthly rent was $27.00. With bread a 9¢ a loaf, hamburger 13¢ a pound, Lipton's noodle soup 10¢ a can, your grocery bill wasn't likely to be more than $20 per month.
Average new car: $763.00. Gas: 10¢ a gallon. House: $3,900.
So let's see here: if a car cost $763, and RCA Red Seal DM-730 cost $12.00, that means that:
1 car = 63 RCA Red Seal DM-730s. Put differently, DM-730 cost 1/63 the price of a new car.
If in 2011 an average new sedan costs $16,000 (that's a Honda Civic DX), then the equivalent price of DM-730 is 1/63 of that, or:
$254.00
Roll that one around on the tip of your tongue for a moment. Two hundred fifty-four dollars for a record of the Brahms 4th Symphony. Two hundred fifty-four dollars.
No wonder they took such immaculate care of it!
Records were special. They cost a fortune. They were a lot of trouble. They broke. They weighed a lot and took up tons of shelf space. Playing them required either a cumbersome record changer or a "tonmeister" for the evening who flipped and changed the discs. Said tonmeister was also responsible for replacing the needle about halfway through a 5-disc set like the Brahms 4th. There was no putting it on and forgetting about it. Playing DM-730 was a hands-on activity, up close and personal.
Which means that there was nothing casual about it. DM-730 was expensive, fragile, and demanding. Playing it was less trouble than getting dressed and going out to the Symphony, but not all that much less trouble.
In the late 1940's flick A Letter to Three Wives, music-loving Kirk Douglas has just acquired a pre-War recording of a Beethoven symphony. He is going to play it for his dinner guests as a special after-dinner treat. But a callous, imperious society biddy manages to break one of the records. "I won't say it doesn't matter," says a devastated Kirk through clenched teeth, "because IT DOES!!"
It matters. That's the message of those grand old recordings, the ones that have been consigned to the attic or the garage or the basement, unless they have been so fortunate to wind up in the hands of a sympathetic dealer with an equally sympathetic clientele. RCA Red Seal DM-730 cost me only about $25.00, but it arrived in packing that treated it like something utterly precious, which in fact it is.
Not long ago I paid $200 for a two-disc album from 1947. Yes, it's exceedingly rare. But in 2011 dollars that's not really all that much more than it would have cost in 1947. And those dollars, whether 1947 or 2011, are chicken feed compared to what it's actually worth to me.
Or should be worth to anybody.
RCA Red Seal DM-730: expensive, fragile, and wonderful