
Wax cylinder recordings digitized - tintinnabula
http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/index.php
======
Animats
Those recordings aren't bad. The mechanical cylinder recording process was
reasonably good, as was the duplication process; it was mechanical playback
that introduced most of the distortion, because the playback mechanism was too
massive to reproduce high frequencies well.

The Library of Congress has a machine which can read scratched and broken
records, by optically scanning and building a 3D model of the surface.[1] But
undamaged cylinders don't need it. They can be read out with a stereo
cartridge and a suitable stylus.

Edison cylinders and records are vertically recorded; the groove bottoms go up
and down, not left and right. Later records (RCA Victor, etc) were
horizontally recorded. Stereo records are both; the groove format is called
45-45 Westrex, with two axes, both 45 degrees from vertical. This has the nice
property that mono records played on stereo players, although one channel is
phase-reversed.

If you want a cylinder phonograph, they're easily available on eBay for about
$500.

[1]
[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1185184...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11851842)

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marincounty
A few hundred years ago someone threw out an Edison voice recorder. You would
speak into it and it would record on the wax cylinders. I brought it home and
looked up its value on the Internet. I was suprised this particular model was
not bringing in much money. I didn't have much room, and my girlfriend at the
time talked me into throwing it out.

Before I threw it out, I took the AC/DC motor out of the device. I just
couldn't throw out that beautiful little motor. I now have that motor on my
desk as a paper weight. People look at it, and ask why does it have a DC
switch. I don't actaually know, but my thoughts were Edison was unsure of our
electrical future?

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Edison had strongly held views about the superiority of DC over AC :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents)

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raverbashing
Very interesting

I wonder if it would be possible to enhance the reproduction by compensating
for things like frequency response, wow and flutter, and perform some kind of
denoising (some have a periodic noise to it which I think may be attributed to
scratches or damage to one side of the cylinder)

~~~
jonah
On the old version of their website you could download the raw rip, a cleaned
up version, and the settings file for whatever software they used for the
audio processing. You could download the original rip and the settings and
adjust them to your own taste. I haven't looked to see why those other files
are no longer available.

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sohkamyung
Interesting. Checking the overview page [
[http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/overview.php](http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/overview.php)
] shows how they got the recordings.

At first, I though the recordings might have been based on the optical imaging
technique outlined in this article [
[http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/june-2015/lhc-
physic...](http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/june-2015/lhc-physicists-
preserve-native-american-voices) ] but it is apparently been used for a
separate effort to preserve native American recordings.

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borski
I've tried to buy this domain a hundred times, but there's a guy who digitizes
these here too, once a month: [http://www.tinfoil.com](http://www.tinfoil.com)

~~~
paxcoder
That design is a delightful blast from the past. tinfoil.com/tinfoil.htm
especially triggers my nostalgia.

The .ram format on other pages, however, does not.

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keithpeter
These sound great. I've not heard any cylinder recordings before. I'll fish
out some of the popular music of the time.

I like old recordings: a couple of sources...

Early classical recordings available with search function

[http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/sound/sound.html](http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/sound/sound.html)

The first few bars of this are wonderful...

[https://archive.org/details/rhapblue11924](https://archive.org/details/rhapblue11924)

~~~
johansch
Yeah, the sound quality is much better than I would expect...

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S_A_P
I wanted to download all of the available recordings so I built a tool to do
so:

[https://github.com/CraigAlbright/hotwaxresidue](https://github.com/CraigAlbright/hotwaxresidue)

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markbnj
This is a great project and a fascinating archive to browse in.

