Although motion pictures with synchronized sound first screened in Egypt in 1906, Gaumont’s chronophone exhibition waxed as novelty, as the device itself proved little more than an industrial experiment. “Talkies” would arrive permanently in Egyptian cinemas in 1928, with the screening of three musicals in Alexandria--Miss Venus (1922), Das Mädel von Pontecuculi (1924) and The Jazz Singer (1927). Soon, Egyptian cinemas were being built or refurbished to integrate sound reproduction systems. This conversion began with first run cinemas in the major cities and spread to smaller locales and lower rung venues. However, the exhibition industry’s adoption of synchronous sound technology was delayed by the currency of two competing formats, sound-on-film and sound-on-disc, and by the reverberating global effects of the Great Depression in the United States. The first Egyptian talkies would appear in 1932, Sons of Aristocrats being the first. Despite longstanding and varied grievances about the talking cinema, by audiences and reviewers alike, Egyptian producers seemed bent on getting with the new. Although Egyptian silent films would be produced for a few more years, the unprecedented success of the White Rose in 1933 convinced even the naysayers that the talking cinema (al-sinema al-natiqa) was here to stay. This essay discusses reception of talkies beginning before their reemergence 1928, up to their assumption as the standardized form for commercial cinema. It does so by drawing mainly from two short lived but significant film periodicals of the time—fan al-sinema (1933-34) and Kawakib al-sinema (1934)—as well as from US Department of Commerce papers relating. Despite similarities to cinemagoers and cultural critics’ reactions to synchronized sound film worldwide, language, literacy, and national political interests inflected Egyptian audience reception to sound cinema in distinct ways. This study interrogates and revises existing and at times contradictory historical accounts of the silent-to-sound conversion, accounting for relevant political developments of the day, against turbulent economic times in Egypt and beyond.