Miller's Way

A pair of bloodhounds on a recent Hobby Lobby show bayed like banshees during rehearsals, then closed up like mummies when the program went on the air. A CBS announcer a few Sundays back inadvertently attributed the Bab Ballads to Shakespeare. Three years ago Al Jolson ad libbed something about a Pennsylvania hotel that may cost NBC $15,000. If Radio Engineer James Arthur Miller had his way, embarrassing and costly mishaps like these would not happen on the radio.

James Arthur Miller (Stanford '13, U. S. Navy, Warner Brothers) has a sound-recording system which picks up sound on a film tape in much the same way that the sound track on a talking cinema film does it. Engineer Miller's theory is that most radio shows, concerts, interviews could and should be staged, directed, polished up and edited beforehand, Hollywood style, and then transmitted from recordings. With radio's prevalent system of disc recording, cutting and editing is almost impossible. But with Millertape a complete, timed-to-the-second radio show can be pieced together by matching approved takes just as Hollywood film editors make feature films from the results of many days of takes and retakes. Expert editors and retouchers with Millertape can eliminate single words, can even correct lisps and other lingual mishaps.

Millertape has been used abroad for four years, mostly for BBC and the J. Walter Thompson agency in London, which records commercial shows in England, airplanes them to Luxembourg and Radio Normandie for airing. Last week Millertape's first big job in U. S. radio was under way: cutting the hour-long Ironized Yeast Good Will Hour into half-hour (2,000-foot) recordings for transmission from 46 local stations in the U. S. and Canada.

Main obstacle to Engineer Miller's complete conquest of U. S. radio is the fixed belief in the radio business that the listening public, conditioned to "live" shows, will never learn to respect recorded entertainment. But Engineer Miller is old enough (48) to remember a similar objection 30 years ago to the motion picture.

Biding his time, he is working on another application of his system, an invasion of the phonograph field. Capable of a wider fidelity range than wax recordings, film sound tracks suffer virtually no deterioration, since they are played back by a light ray, not by a needle. Engineer Miller plans a sound-track phonograph containing a changeable supply of recordings that may be selected and played just as a button-tuner radio is operated. Estimated phonograph price range: $150 to $3,000. Estimated cost of recordings: about $2.

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