Dear ARSC friends ,

Wow ! I stirred up quite a debate it seems . It is my personal belief
that recordings made in the
pre-electric era are most realistically and authentically enjoyed in the
present and preserved for
the future by playing them on the best of the original equipment made to
reproduce those recordings . I respect the opinions of those who differ with
me and hope that they respect mine as well .

In the case of Edison commercially manufactured cylinders , that equipment
is either a Triumph machine with a cygnet horn , an Opera machine or a
Concert Amberola . These types of machines all have the
exponential taper horn and the top of the line reproducers which the
Edison studio technicians used to audition their work in process .

I must add that the Edison staff came up with the design of this horn
around 1908 , and it wasn't until the 1920s that others ,such as Maxfield and
Harrison, quantified Edison's prior empirical work in developing exponential
taper horns such as the patented " Edison Cygnet Horn " used on the best
models of Edison cylinder phonographs .

In addition , the use of a microphone placed in the near proximity of the
horn in an acoustically treated room( like a vocal booth in a modern studio
) captures the audio quality of the sound coming from the horn and
introduces little or no " room effect" .

It was not my intent to suggest that all preservation be conducted
utilizing original top of the line equipment ; but I wished to point out that the
original equipment does play those records with amazing quality and
authenticity and transfers so done can be of outstanding quality without any
doctoring after the transfer !


John Eberle : MEMBER AES NASHVILLE & IBMA
AMERICANA CD MASTERING
313 EAST COLLEGE STREET SUITE 3A
DICKSON , TENNESSEE 37055
615-441-4660