The "Tower Sound and Communications" (TSC) company that recorded many of these was located a few miles up the road from my home town. The booming male voice on the recordings also sounded familiar to me, too. I'm fairly certain I heard him on the local radio station that my father played over the PA system in our family grocery store when I was growing up.
Turns out that Cecil "Lee" Rutherford, the voice on the recordings, did VO work for local radio stations near my home town, too. He died in November, 2020.
He was involved in some ventures that persist today. His company EchoSat[1] (which I'd heard of because I had some involvement in the convenience store / retail petroleum industry) merged with an IT security firm to become "ControlScan", doing PCI testing stuff because gas stations and credit cards.
Quoting the obituary[2]:
He started Tower Sound and Communications while in Greenville to pursue a venture that would eventually spearhead "in store" broadcasting for companies such as Kmart (he became the voice of Kmart) and Jamesway which evolved into another corporation in KY called EchoSat that would use satellite technology in helping with multiple stores for POS processing and security.
There's an interview with Lee Rutherford in 2011.[3] He absolutely still has that "radio voice".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25271464
[1] https://www.dandb.com/businessdirectory/towercommunicationsg...
[2] https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dailyadvocate/obituary.asp...
Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Collected K-Mart background music tapes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35593133 - April 2023 (8 comments)
Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Piped Music Collection on the Internet Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25271464 - Dec 2020 (91 comments)
Attention K-Mart Shoppers: Recordings of K-Mart In-Store Music from 1992 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10369105 - Oct 2015 (13 comments)
(for those curious, EvanAnderson's prior comment was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25296389 from the Dec 2020 thread)
[0]https://archive.org/details/KmartJuly1992Generic?start=447
Leave it to k-mart to never let you down.
Trust me. It was the '80s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdVEez20X_s
He got his source material directly from this archive.org collection, as it says in the opening titles:
"On October 2, 2015, Mark Davis posted his prized collection of digitized K-mart elevator music cassette tapes to archive.org, free for anybody to use.
Vaporwave producers rejoiced."
I thought this remark in the comments was pretty interesting:
> Something that helps identify Vaporwave is the natural vibrato that occurs from using tape cassettes etc. I often wonder if vibrato, as an effect, gains it's ability to evoke emotion through a psychological connection with the natural vibrato of a person's wavering voice while near to crying. If so wouldn't that be a potential factor in this kind of music's popularity?
https://juicytheemissary.bandcamp.com/album/attention-kmart-...
It was apparently the first recording of its type, clocking in at 19 hours: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WJSV_broadcast_day
I chopped up bits of it for the 'Old American radio' option on an ambient sound mixer I made called Ambiphone: https://ambiph.one/?m=1-Ambient+old+radio-bf37bi80
The one that I and my older brother remember from our local K-Mart is the sit-down experience with the brown chairs and tables, the server greeting you with the brown coffee canister. (Brown dominated the palette.) It was removed from the store before my younger siblings could register memories of it. They thought we were trolling when we brought it up.
Remember blue-light specials? They had a little cart with a flashing blue light that they would roll around the store and have short-term unadvertised sale prices on things.
I announced Blue Light Specials from time to time myself. There were a bunch of rotary-dial phones throughout the store, and if you dialed a certain number (I forget what it was) you could talk on the PA system. It's surprising it wasn't abused.
https://archive.org/details/Kmart30thAnniversaryProgram
All the facts about 1962 from a perspective 30 years later, but 30+ years in the past to us!
For example the fact that when K-Mart opened no one could have predicted that it would be one of the biggest real outlets in the country. :)
Two years ago I got into a docker compose project to use mpd and rern/rAudio to stream music 24/7 over multiple channels on a bunch of pis with dac hats, including my wood shop out in the woods.
So I'm out there at midnight a year or two ago and I had it pinned on these kmart rips.
It's creepy out there.
All of a sudden this booming voice yells "SECURITY TURN CAMERAS TO AISLE 13" or some such thing.
So be careful if you are likely to get into the same predicament.
For those too young to have to suffer through your youth of listening to such inferior sounds, just be grateful. For those trying to be hip and bring back old formats, stick to vinyl. Cassettes are worth losing to history.
I had it on CD, he bought the tape.
The CD sounded (obviously) so much better than his tape. But a little while later I made my own tape copy of the CD, and my copy sounded really close to the CD! Way better than his store-bought copy.
Those bastards didn't even have the decency to use Type II cassettes for the released album.
A Type II (or even better, Type IV-Metal) tape could sound pretty damn good. Still sucked to have to rewind or fast-forward, though.
(Also, Dolby NR was terrible. I'd rather have the hiss than have the muted highs)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk71h2CQ_xM
even the tape hiss in the ad about a cassette tape is golden
It would be very common for a new band in that time to have their first release on cassette, and then after they could scrape up the dough, press a vinyl single (CDs being very digitally uncool). There were several niche labels from that time whose bread was buttered with cassette sales.
You're absolutely right the sound quality sucks, but as a child of the '80s whose first music collection was purely cassette based and played back on a Radio Shack cassette dictation player, that sound has a nostalgia for me.
We all put up with stuff when we have to. We no longer have to. Bringing back formats for nostalgia is fun, but for anything other than cassettes. Hell, my first car had an 8-track in it. My dad had a supply of blank 8-track tapes and an 8-track recorder in the home HiFi setup. I would record modern releases from CD to 8-track and rock it in the car. So yeah, been there done that
That's a neat Idea. I once did something along those lines when I was a kid. A friend and I were trying to dub as many albums as we could on to a 160 minute VHS tape in LP or SLP, whatever gave you nearly 6 hours of play time. Was just for fun though.
That was my setup for many years until one day I made friends with this new kid at school and stopped by his house afterwards. They were, uh, not so hygienic and had trash and clothes laying all over the house. In the mess I found some 8tracks just laying around. He didn't even know what they were so I tossed one in my backpack and took it home to try on my stereo that had an actual 8track player.
I remember being shocked by the sound quality. To me, it sounded way better than a cassette. I was also amazed that you could push a button and hear a different song. That seemed way better than a cassette that you had to rewind and fast forward through to get the right spot. I ended up taking the 8track apart for fun and of course got tape everywhere so in the trash it went. And that was my first and only 8track experience.
Probably will need to develop an SDK for it..
Sadly, they only draw power from USB-- no controlling them in software.
(They got me a cheap laugh when I started singing "Turn on your Woot light..." to the tune of Neil Diamond's "Heartlight". Yeah, I'm a dad... >sigh<)
tapes could also stretch which would give you some of that wow. the tape duplicators motors/belts could wear out so that even if the original tape used to make the dubs was solid, the dubs would have that wow when played back in other cassette players that turned at a more consistent speed than the recorder. dirty heads on the dubbers would also lower the overall sound quality.
I used to make cassette dubs with professional dubbers for years. We'd clean the heads after every X number of passes. The value of X changed depending on the length of the tapes used. I'd check for loose belts at the beginning of any dub order. For primarily talking content, we'd use the more brown colored tape. For music content, we'd use the darker tapes. At least that's what we'd recommend, but plenty of people would choose the cheaper tape regardless.
can't forget the tying cassette tape to your antenna as a streamer. kids today look at cars and ask what's an antenna. no, i don't mean the sharkfin for XM radio.
> The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That's becuase they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse. If you do the math assuming that each tape is 30 minutes per side, that's over 800 passes over a tape head each month.
[^0]: https://archive.org/details/S.S.KresgeTraining-TheABCsOfFrie.... It's also really trippy that the tips being given here STILL apply today at a basic level, even in complex technical sales!
[0] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX9D5dmCM8Lo3
[1] https://open.spotify.com/playlist/47t3ywNfFeeqSj6gJDjvgF
The younger generation caught on to vaporwave's appealing use of slowed and reverbed samples, and created their their own spin on it now with "Frutiger Aero", which is 2000s vaporwave with a graphical/audio aesthetic that brings to mind Windows XP/Vista, Nintendo DS/Wii, Neopets, Flash games and early Youtube but cuts off before the iPhone age.
Week of 3/1 is presumably what they played on the other 6 days of the week.
Reminds me of this, similar vein: https://twcclassics.com/