Clark Johnsen 78rpm Collection

About the donor and collection:

Clark Johnsen (né Roger Clark Johnsen) started working with audio equipment and listening to classical music in high school. His love of classical music grew over the decades as did his interest in accurate sound reproduction. His degree in Applied Mathematics (Harvard College ’63) helped him understand the technical aspects of sound propagation. He started building his own audio equipment in high school. He delved into various aspects of sound reproduction that interested him and in 1998 he wrote and published a book regarding the audibility of the absolute polarity in sound reproduction, “THE WOOD EFFECT – Unaccounted Contributor to Error and Confusion in Acoustics and Audio”.

Clark felt strongly about the importance of maintaining our audio legacy so that future generations would be able to hear great musical performances as they were originally recorded. In this regard he was concerned about the re-packaging of old performances on new musical media because the quality of music reproduction might be sacrificed. For instance, he was concerned that Compact Disc (CD) media did not capture all the information that was present on old recordings from early in the 20th century. Similarly, for the MP3 format of musical storage in digital format.

Because of his concerns, Clark began seriously collecting old recordings. His goal was to find the best performances (and there might be several great performances of a single piece of music) and to preserve them for future listeners. He hoped that new techniques would emerge for accurately reproducing the sound captured on these old recordings. He learned which labels produced the best quality recordings and which pressing plants were consistently reliable. In his opinion, the recordings issued under a particular RCA label in the first half of the 20th century were especially noteworthy for the quality of the performances and the quality of the pressings; he acquired many of those.

By the time of his death in 2020, he had a collection of over 70,000 items that occupied over 300 linear feet of shelf space in his home. As he searched for recordings, he acquired genres such as jazz and popular music, reflecting his broad musical taste.

Donation item: https://archive.org/details/ClarkJohnsenDonation78RPMRecords