Upgrading The Radio Collection

My current project

Upgrading The Radio Collection

As I’ve mentioned before, my collection of radio broadcasts comes mostly from Danrick Enterprises.

Danrick, by the way, was around for quite a while. You can find articles about Charlie in newspapers going back to the late 1980s, if not earlier:

From The Cincinnati Enquirer, June 8, 1989, page B-1. Don’t ask me why this was in the “Tempo” section instead of the Sports section.

And some of the old advertisements are fun to look at:

From The Atlanta Journal, August 21, 1988, page 342. Page number is approximate; this appears to have been part of an advertising supplement.

The problem, though, with Danrick’s games is that they were only available on audio cassette.

Charlie told me once in our old email correspondence that this was part of a deal that he made with Major League Baseball, thanks in part to George Steinbrenner. Apparently there was an attempt by certain owners to try to push Danrick out of business through a lawsuit. The legend is that Steinbrenner intervened and helped Danrick get an exclusive contract to distribute the games — with the caveat that he only distribute them on audio cassette.

A friend and I spent quite a bit of time around 2007 and 2008 digitizing as many of these games as we could. The problem, though, is that we digitized them to MP3 format, mostly to save space. After all, converting one of these games to FLAC in the highest possible quality can take up as much as a gigabyte per game. We didn’t have that much space back then.

There are other problems, especially with the games on transcription records. Some of them suffered from skipping when they were first converted to audio tape. Somebody needs to go through the games carefully and remove the repetitive audio.

And that’s what I’m hoping to start doing.

I’ve created a few high quality FLAC copies of old radio broadcasts, starting with the 1975 World Series. I’ve got high quality audio for a few more, and have a way of obtaining even more as we go along. I’ll continue to upload these for paying subscribers in the members area.

My hope is that we can create remastered and improved versions of these games for the future. The stuff that is out there now is certainly listenable, but it’s not as good as it could be.

And the big difference today is that storage is nowhere near as expensive as it once was. We should take advantage of that and try to preserve these games for future generations.

So please consider becoming a paying subscriber! Your support helps make this project a reality.