Michael Thomas' Website

The recording quality was very good, excepting the early electric recordings in 1925. Brunswick used a technique known as "Light-Ray" for their electrical recordings, and it was poor to start with, but inproved within a year of its introduction to become a very good sound. The surfaces were also very smooth, though with a tendency to wear easily, as with other Pathe-pressed records.

In the later 1920s (circa 1926-27), Chappells relinquished the agency, and a new company, British Brunswick Ltd, was set up. With this, the Cliftophone label was dropped and replaced with the more familiar Brunswick "shield" label, in an identical design to the American label. This design was used right up into the 1950s, though by then it looked very old-fashioned. It was replaced with a smart modern Black and silver label (see right). Cliftophone labels may be found up to numbers in the lower 3400 range. Various companies seem to press Brunswick records in the second half of the 1920s, including Pathe still, and it is thought that Brunswick now had their own pressing plant, though its location is not known to me. After British Brunswick started issuing the records, the matching up with the British catalogue series numbers with the American series became less obvious and it may be that the British series was just allocaed numerically, with no regard for the American originals, from that point.

In 1928, Duophone took over the pressing when they bought the ailling Brunswick company. Duophone themselves went under soon after and Decca bought the concern, but dropped the Brunswick label. In 1930, a new company was set up: Warner-Brunswick Ltd. This was a Nritish offshoot of the American Warner Bros. company. However, within a couple of years, they decided to get out of the record business. The early 1930s was a very poor time in this, as well as many other, businesses, especially in the United States. In the UK, Decca stepped in and bought the label and it's US links, and from then on remained Brunswick's owners.

There were many differnt series over time, and these are detailed in a table just below.

As no-one else seems to have published any Brunswick listings, with the exception of Arthur Badrock's 100- 10"  series booklet, and also the 1950s "pop" listings, I want to try and put that right here.

Below, I will list all the series ranges in a table, with links to the listings further down the page. I will admit that the non-popular series will be very sparse at this point as I have just two catalogues and a few "Gramophone" magazines as my source. It would appear that Brunswick rarely, if ever, placed adverts in "The Gramophone" and were not reliable in providing records for review. All help will be gratefully received!