It is remarkable that we are still seeing the release on compact disc of newly discovered off-air recordings of live performances from the thirty or more years after the mid-1930s, which many assumed had not survived. It reminds us how important was the emergence at this time of direct-cut disc recording. Its development in the UK by Cecil Watts in 1928–32 is vividly recounted by Agnes Watts in her 1972 biography of her husband.

The use in Germany of disc pressings of broadcast material to disseminate programmes between German radio stations meant that such recordings (a few of which survive) were of remarkable fidelity from 1931. From 1935 they began using tape coated with iron oxide, with increasingly high quality as a result, though this Magnetophon sound recording and reproducing technology was not generally available outside Germany before the end of the Second World War, when it was disseminated by the celebrated British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee report in 1946. While as early as 1927 Reith had told the BBC Board that close touch was being kept with developments in the recording field, even in the 1930s recording was not a mainstream activity of British broadcasters. In the UK a succession of clumsy, crude recording systems came and went, but the mindset of broadcasters and musicians was not to preserve concerts. Even repeats of concerts on the BBC were achieved by booking the performers twice, and as late as the mid-1950s the major concert series on the Third Programme were always played on Friday evenings and again on Sunday afternoons, and were preserved only if the composers, artists or private individuals had them recorded off-air.