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electronics which allowed him to make the stylus smaller, make the motor work--a 33 ⅓ [rpm] motor on a record has to play at a very constant speed, or you get “wow,” and up until that time motors for record turntables weren't very reliable. The development of vinyl allowed us to do things that we couldn't do with shellac. And RCA was still shellac.

I remember Sarnoff saying to his people, “Now, don't come back to my office and say what's wrong with it. If you've got any questions about it, say it to me right now, so that CBS can answer.” It was a rough presentation, because he was shaken by the development and could see that there was perhaps something here that he just hadn't counted on.

So in a couple of days he said: “We want you to come down and see a development we got.” They had a demonstration studio down in the thirties someplace, and half a dozen of us went down there. They showed us that little record that [had] the big hole in it--that dropped [45 rpm]. And that was something that they had developed. We knew they had it, but they had never launched it, because they were doing very well with the Red Seal records that they had at that time. And this was still a questionable product.

I don't know whether they had done any market testing on it, but it didn't strike me that it had any of the qualities--because if you were playing an opera or if you were doing a long symphony, every time you dropped the record you had an interruption. With the long- playing records you had 30 minutes of uninterrupted music. So I thought we just had a better product.

So he said: “We'll let you have--if you come out with this--this, we think, is a better product than what you've got.” And, he said: “We've got a 33 ⅓ record. We don't think it's good