Whistler USAFE aircheck recordings

The Joe Hehn Memorial Collection

These are 1960s airchecks from Armed Forces Radio, likely recorded on home equipment by a service person stationed in Europe or a member of their family. Some of the recordings sound as if they were recorded by a microphone in front of a speaker. Others sound like a properly connected radio to a home tape recorder. USAFE was the Defense Department organization that commanded the various aspects of the air forces. Their message in sponsoring these programs was usually to promote educational initiatives for service personnel. Most of those advertising-style messages were edited out in the original recordings. They were not usually clean edits and can be easily detected. In the early days of collecting radio programs, there were few episodes of The Whistler from original transcriptions. For many late 1960s and early 1970s collectors, these episodes were the majority of episodes in their collections. Since that time, most of the recordings of the network broadcasts have become available, and usually in nice sound. Still, however, few broadcast recordings exist after 1951, and these home recordings remain the primary surviving episodes from the later years of the series. The episodes have always been in relatively poor sound, with electric hum and strong background noise. Over the years, collectors have tried to adjust sound with equalizers and other equipment. They were working with tape, which meant that while they were attempting to make the programs sound better, they were also adding hiss and other audio issues that technology had as each generation of copying was done. These reels were traded to Joe Hehn in 1968, and were close to the original recordings. They do have defects, but had less buildup of noises inherent in making copies of tapes (background electric hum, signal loss, and tape hiss). These recordings have been processed to minimize these problems and reveal underlying audio that may have defects but have more clarity. This set of recordings is likely in the best sound of these episodes since the 1960s. Admittedly, this means that the recordings are still not excellent, but are at least "less bad." Some of these episodes have not been in circulation for many years because their sound was so unacceptable that they were not traded. In some situations in this more modern reprocessing, tradeoffs had to be about how aggressively to clean out sound defects knowing that some digitizing artifacts might be in the new recordings. In many cases, it was decided that the artifacts were a small price to pay to remove other more serious sound quality attributes. Be sure to check some of the other episodes of The Whistler that are at the Internet Archive from the Joe Hehn Memorial Collection. They are from earlier in the series and are in much better sound than the USAFE recordings. Many are from the original transcription discs. Click here * * * These recordings are part of the Joe Hehn Memorial Collection. Mr. Hehn (1931-2020) was a pioneering collector of radio recordings when the hobby emerged in the 1960s. Digitizing his collection of reel tapes and discs is the effort of a wide range of North American volunteers, and includes assistance of some international collectors. The groups supporting this effort with their funds, time, technology and skills are the Old Time Radio Researchers and a small group of transcription disc preservationists who refer to themselves as the "The Knights of the Turning Table."

This recording is part of the Old Time Radio collection.

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