Absolutely. I’ve kept your voice and content, fixed the typos/encoding glitches, tightened a few awkward sentences, and pulled the bolding way back.
US $295 — Offers Encouraged
This is one of those tapes I pulled out intending simply to sell.
Then I started researching it.
And now I'm wondering why I'm selling it at all.
Oh yeah... life is terminal.
The Harp of Edward Vito, Stereo Age Recordings C-2, dates from 1958—an extraordinary moment when stereophonic sound was moving out of laboratories and professional studios and into the homes of serious hi-fi listeners.
This is the original ¼-inch, 7½ IPS, two-track stacked-head stereo release.
The original box specifies: “Full Stacked Heads • 7½ ips • Time: 26 mins. • Price: $12.50.”
Twenty-six minutes of music for $12.50 in 1958.
Stereo Age wasn't selling convenience. They were selling an experience.
On the box: “This stereophonic recording marks a milestone in the art of high fidelity reproduction.”
Today that might sound like advertising hyperbole. In 1958, it really wasn't.
Edward Vito was one of the important American harpists of his generation, including many years performing with Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra.
Here he performs works by Debussy, Prokofiev, Pierné and Hindemith.
And the harp was a wonderful choice for demonstrating stereo.
The attack of the strings, their decay, the resonance of the instrument and the acoustic space surrounding it make a harp extraordinarily revealing of a recording system.
Apparently Stereo Age got it right.
A contemporary 1958 review of this exact C-2 release in HiFi & Stereo Review rated the recording:
Recording: “Top rank”
Stereo Depth: “Enchanting”
Nearly seven decades later, that's what I want to hear again.
Is that presence still there?
Here's where this gets particularly interesting.
In researching C-2, I have located only one publicly documented sale in roughly the last eight years—an eBay sale in June 2019 for $29.99.
Comparison of the distinctive foxing, spotting and wear visible in those archived photographs with this copy strongly suggests something rather wonderful: I believe this is that very tape.
I was apparently the buyer.
Which is wonderfully typical of my collecting habits.
I bought it. Played it. Liked it—or perhaps loved it. Added the red leader, wound it tails-out, put it carefully on the shelf...
And immediately went looking for the next tape.
And the next one.
And the next one.
That single documented sale obviously doesn't prove another copy hasn't changed hands privately. But I have yet to locate another publicly sold example.
For a small specialist stereo label from 1958, perhaps that shouldn't surprise us.
I've collected reel-to-reel tape for about 25 years. What began as an interest became something of a magnificent obsession.
Eventually there were mountains of tape.
I have two wonderful daughters, and one of them is deeply into tape herself—but apparently not quite deeply enough to inherit The Harp of Edward Vito.
So Edward and his harp are looking for their next home.
I'm now retiring from roughly 90% of this hobby and slowly working my way through the collection. Some tapes are easy to sell.
Then there are tapes like this.
Researching Stereo Age has reminded me why I started collecting these things in the first place.
Imagine being there in 1958.
Two loudspeakers. A serious tape machine. Seven and a half inches of magnetic tape moving across the heads every second.
And maybe, for the person sitting there, the first time they had ever heard stereo.
You press play.
And suddenly the harp isn't coming from a box.
It's occupying space in front of you.
For someone accustomed to recorded music coming from a single point in the room, that experience must have been astonishing.
Before this leaves, I'm listening to it again.
I'll play it on a properly calibrated professional two-track machine and add my present-day listening impressions to this listing.
Can a magnetic recording from 1958 still produce that extraordinary sense of presence?
Can it still make you forget, even briefly, that you're listening to a recording?
After 25 years of collecting, this little reel has reminded me of something I occasionally lost sight of while accumulating all those boxes:
The point was never owning the tape. The point was hearing it.
Recorded sound changed my life.
Tape in particular changed my life—the machines, the engineers, the strange little labels that appeared and disappeared, the endless pursuit of better sound, and those wonderful moments when you press play and hear something with such immediacy that your mind simply wanders into the recording.
This is audible history from that pursuit.
Original Stereo Age presentation box and reel.
The packaging exhibits age-related foxing, spotting and wear, clearly shown in the photographs. I have made no attempt to cosmetically restore it.
The tape has been in my personal collection for years. I played it after acquiring it and added the red leader myself.
I will listen to and evaluate the tape again before shipment and add my current listening observations.
Please examine the photographs carefully, as they form part of the description.
Title: The Harp of Edward Vito
Artist: Edward Vito, harp
Label: Stereo Age Recordings
Catalog: C-2
Year: 1958
Format: ¼-inch prerecorded magnetic tape
Configuration: 2-track stereo / Full Stacked Heads
Speed: 7½ IPS
Reel: 7 inch
Running time: 26 minutes
Original price: $12.50
Label location: Upper Montclair, New Jersey, USA
There isn't enough sales history for me to pretend that this tape has an established market value.
It doesn't.
I've located only one public sale in roughly eight years—and remarkably, I believe it was this very copy.
So the $295 asking price is really about giving an extraordinarily rare recording time to find the right person.
I'm in no hurry. Please make an offer, particularly if this listing has been here for a while.
I'm not trying to squeeze every possible dollar out of Edward Vito. I'm retiring from most of a 25-year tape-collecting obsession, and ultimately I'd like these recordings to end up with people who understand what they are, preserve them and—most importantly—listen to them.
If somebody else finds this obscure little corner of recording history as fascinating as I do, wonderful.
Maybe you'll hear what those listeners heard in 1958.
Maybe you'll hear something they couldn't possibly have imagined surviving for nearly seven decades.
Or maybe you'll simply sit down, stop doing everything else for 26 minutes, and listen to Edward Vito play the harp.
That's reason enough to own it.
And if nobody feels that way?
Edward can play harp at my place a little longer.