Posted on 11/23/2015 6:22:37 PM PST by sparklite2
From cakewalks to carols, historic sounds of all kinds are preserved at the University of California, Santa Barbara's Cylinder Audio Archive, home to a vast collection of recordings. The UCSB Library first made this archive available online in 2005, but it recently launched a new website that now features over 10,000 cylinder recordings - all available to download or stream online for free.
Cylinders, as the website explains, are what people listened to "before MP3s, CDs, cassettes and vinyl records - First made of tinfoil, then wax and plastic, cylinder recordings, commonly the size and shape of a soda can, were the first commercially produced sound recordings in the decades around the turn of the 20th century." Similar to vinyl, they had engravings of audio recordings on their exterior surface, which phonographs could trace and play.
(Excerpt) Read more at hyperallergic.com ...
Yes, that is true, I have seen a photo of the original painting before it was modified. The cylinder phonograph was a British Edison-Bell office dictating machine. The painter offered the painting to Edison-Bell, but they were not interested. He decided to paint a prettier horn and borrowed one from the Gramophone Company in London. They asked to see the painting and offered to buy it if the artist would superimpose their machine’s likeness instead. The Gramophone Company shared the trademark painting with its sister company, the Victor Talking Machine Company in this country. Nipper first appeared on record labels in 1902.
My parents had an Edison with a rack of cylinders. I found a needle at a record store and got it working. My brother has it now.
ping for later
I’d never heard of these until you posted this. I guess I always assumed people used flat records of some sort.
I was surprised to learn these were around for fifty years. They held up better than the scratchy records that followed.
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