Spanish Radio History
From CTLpedia
Project Summary: A Mesa citizen, Gloria Moraga discovered some early 78 records made from the broadcast of the first Spanish radio station in Phoenix (KIFN). Since this represented Phoenix and Mesa history, it was decided to help her retreive these lost audio treasures.
Contents |
Project Goals
Transfer the audio from the 78 rpm records to audio CDs and to mp3 audio files.
Current Status
Complete. Interested instructors can find links to these recordings in this article. The below links are transfers from each side of the records. They are about 5 minutes or less in length.
Programa de La Linda Mujer Mexicana
[[Media:http://www.mc.maricopa.edu/~costello/KIFN/GloriaPart1smoothed.mp3]|Side 1]
[[Media:GloriaPart2.mp3]|Side 2]
[[Media:GloriaPart3(flipof6).mp3]Side 3]
Relation to CTL Department Plan Initiatives
Project Staff
- Ken Costello
Project Timeline
Jared Langkilde requested the service in mid-spring of 2007. He then connected Gloria Moraga to Ken Costello so they could work directly with each other.
Gloria dropped off a box of 10 vinyl records. Seven were dated May 12, 1950. They were a Mother's Day broadcast of a play called "La Redentora" (The Redeemer). It was a one hour broadcast that took seven records to record it. About eight people were used for voices in the play. Gloria and her husband, Pete, were two of them.
The other three records contain a 30 minute program that Gloria use to do around that same time period of 1949-50. The show was called "Programa de La Linda Mujer Mexicana"
The college did not own a record player that could play these old 78 rpm records; fortunately, Ken had a friend, Bill Seder, who is a record aficianado and was willing to loan the college a 78 rpm record player. Luck was also with us because it had a headphone jack which would improve the quality of the transfer.
When Ken tested the record, he could hear a lot of noise from dust. Even though the records were well taken care of and were boxed away from dust, the paper sleeves of the records slowly disentegrate and place dust into the groves. Ken researched various cleaning methods and consulted with Bill Seder on cleaning tips.
Ken began with a dust cloth, but had to create a solution 50:50 mixture of distilled water and propyl alcohol to do more vigorous cleaning. He used pieces of velour cloth along with the alcohol mixture to clean the groves. He also played the record multiple times so that the record needle could scrape out lint and dust. This effort improved the sound but still wasn't able to eliminate dust noise.
After cleaning, Ken recorded digitized the sound at 44,100 KHz sample rate, which is the same as an audio CD. He only did mono, since the record was mono. He used various filters to reduce the noise. The clicks from scratches were mostly eliminated but dust noise could only be softened but not eliminated.
Gloria had images from that era of her and her husband by the KIFN building. She also had promotion photos of the two of them that were used by the radio station. Ken used these images to make a cover design for the CDs. One CD for the play and the other for the Gloria's show.
Project Resources
A record player capable of playing 78 rpm records was borrowed from Bia friend of Ken's.
A PC was used to digitize the audio from the record player via the player's headphone jack and the PC's sound card.
Sound Forge software was used to capture, edit and clean up the audio from the records.
Project Outcomes and Future Directions
Gloria was extremely happy by having the records' audio on a CD that could be shared. Instructor at MCC who were aware of the project were also quite thrilled with this historical resource.
