PHONO

PHONO was a very short-lived French 78rpm label produced around 1907–1908 by the company Société Générale d’Impressions Phonographiques (SGIP), based in Ivry near Paris. SGIP, founded in December 1906, held several patents on disc recording and on a special 435 Hz reference tone used to check the speed of talking machines – tones that actually appear in the locked grooves of some PHONO discs.

The records were vertical-cut, sapphire-played discs, roughly 28 cm (≈11″), often centre-start and running at about 70 rpm. Surviving examples include Paris recordings of violin solos and operatic/Salon repertoire, dated to around 1907; overall production was tiny, and original PHONO issues are now extremely rare.

In October 1908, PHONO briefly appears in the British trade press when a London importer (Lacroix & Co.) advertises French-made, vertically cut PHONO discs as a new line. Some early English discographies attribute these to a “Compagnie Internationale Phonétique (CIP)”, but the securely documented French side shows that the brand and technology belong to SGIP; the exact relationship between SGIP and “CIP” remains unclear.

By December 1908, SGIP is wound up and the PHONO label disappears. A successor firm at the same Ivry address launches new vertical-cut labels such as Aspir and Idéal, sometimes with the same artists, but the PHONO name itself is not revived.