The Reproduction of Cylinder Recordings [Part 1]

Abstract

Cylinder records in most cases were made of a relatively soft wax mixture. For this reason the grooves wear very rapidly with repeated playback. Thus, a cylinder recording is often irretrievably ruined by the time the speech or music recorded is transcribed. If the recording found on the cylinder is to be preserved for further study it must be transferred to another type of recording which is relatively more permanent as, for example, magnetic recording tape or some type of disk. The purpose of this article i s to discuss the problems involved and the methods now available in making such a re-recording. However, it will first be useful to review the methods used in the past in reproducing phonograph cylinders.