The wax phonograph cylinder invented by Thomas Edison in 1885 was the medium for recording sound until about 1930. Although a lot of historically valuable cylinders have been preserved all over the world, most of them changed in quality by re-crystallization and had many cracks on their surfaces. We have developed a portable record player (3.4kg-weight, 45cm-width, 33cm-length, and 10.5cm-height) for the cylinders (2-minute, 55-mm diameter, 105-mm height, 400 grooves) using both laser-beam reflection and stylus methods. In this article, the record player is shown to be useful for carrying it by a hand and reproducing sounds in real time from damaged wax cylinders as well as the undamaged.

Authors: Fukube, Tohru; Shimizu, Yasuyuki
Affiliations: Japan Women's University; The University of Tokyo(See document for exact affiliation information.)
AES Convention: 121 (October 2006) Paper Number: 6880
Publication Date: October 1, 2006
Subject: Instrumentation and Measurement

Click to purchase paper as a non-member or you can login as an AES member to see more options.

No AES members have commented on this paper yet.

Subscribe to this discussion

To be notified of new comments on this paper you can subscribe to this RSS feed. Forum users should login to see additional options.

Start a discussion!

If you would like to start a discussion about this paper and are an AES member then you can login here:
Username:
Password:

If you are not yet an AES member and have something important to say about this paper then we urge you to join the AES today and make your voice heard. You can join online today by clicking here.