BBC SOUND EFFECTS CENTRE / BBC SOUND EFFECTS
Borderline, this one, as I don't think that the BBC made
these recordings available to the general public. However, they may have been available to
production companies, so perhaps that justifies their inclusion on this site. There are
no dates on the majority of BBC Sound Effects Centre EPs that I have
seen pictured, and where dates are provided they are
give the year when the track was recorded, not when the record was
put out. Numbers started at EC-0. ECs were mono and had red-and-white labels;
some of the later ones have recording dates in 1970-71 (1).
Recording seems to have started to be done in stereo around 1972; the label
colour changed to dark-blue-on-white for stereo EPs, the 'Centre' part of the label
name was dropped, and the catalogue numbers were changed to an ECS series (2).
Some mono EPs also have 'Sound Effects' rather than 'Sound Effects Centre' on
their labels. The latest year I have seen on a stereo EP so far is
1979. There was also a set of 'BBC Wildlife Sound Effects' records, which
were numbered in the NH-0s and have their own page (q.v.).
Presumably for ease of access the numerical part
of the catalogue numbers of mono records was shared by several EPs
which had similar contents, with a suffix being used to distinguish them: for
example EC-182-H was entitled 'Railway Station Announcements', while EC-182-F was 'London Railway Stations' and
EC-182-G was 'Railway Station
Booking Halls'. With the advent of the stereo EPs this
practice was discontinued in favour of a system which included
a letter referring to the type
of sounds and a number referring to a record's place in the series: thus
ECS-1-C-10 was the tenth EP in a
'Crowd Noises' series, ECS-1-D-3 was the third EP
in a 'Doors' series, and so on. The style
of the matrix number in the run-off of the example shown above suggests a Decca
pressing; narrow dinking perforations in others hint that EMI was responsible for their manufacture. The discography below owes a huge debt to the list of BBC Sound Effects tracks compiled by Laura Sinnott of the Pro Sound Effects company. The years in the 'Date' column are taken from that list, which is currently (2018) available in Excel format as a download from that company - a search for their name plus "BBC" and "Excel" should lead you to it.
Copyright 2018 Robert Lyons.