To a handful of music critics, Victor last week sent samples of the first non-breakable records ever made for home use an album of Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks (played by Serge Koussevitzky's Boston Symphony) on transparent, ruby-red plastic discs. They were the shape and size of Victor's familiar twelve-inch Red Seals, but engineers promised that they would exceed the shellac Red Seals' normal life expectancy of some 1,000 playings. The samples seemed to have more fidelity and less surface noise than ordinary records.
Two jumps ahead of its competitors, Victor fondly believed that its vinyl resin plastics were the biggest...
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