There was a pretty good interview with Carl Haber of Lawrence Berkeley Lab on PBS Newshour tonight. 
Basically, the tinfoil was in the museum in the former GE complex in Schenectady NY, known to have 
been used in an exhibition in St. Louis. The curator at the museum was able to find from-the-day 
newspaper clippings and identify the speaker and I think Carl said that the cornet player was known 
previously. It's not Edison speaking on the recording, so it must be that previous tinfoil 
recordings made by Edison either cannot be retrieved by Carl's method or no longer exist. Perhaps 
other listmembers know more facts in that area?

In case Carl or any of his crew are on-list, that's really phenomenal work you've done. I'm thinking 
about a day when between optical scanning of grooves and computer synthesis and artificial 
intelligence, it will be common to "erase" wear and damage so something like a one-of-a-kind 
Paramount can be played as clearly as when it left the factory (which in those cases may not be all 
that clear, but better than what we have on the one nearly-shot suriviving specimen when played by 
conventional methods).

Speaking of all this, has anyone looked at revisiting Tom Stockham's work on "de-horning" acoustic 
recordings, I think that was the first or some of the first commercially-used digital signal 
processing (used by RCA to "de-horn" Caruso recordings)? Also at marrying the "de-horning" 
algorhythms with Carl Haber's work on optically reading grooved media? My thinking is, you can 
improve the audibility of the old acoustic recordings he's retrieving if you compensate by either 
partially eliminating the effect of the recording horn or creating the effect of the playback horn. 
I think Stockham's research went both ways and his DSP ended up being a little of both, but I admit 
never being able to fully digest his AES papers on the topic, not being an engineering or math 
student.

-- Tom Fine

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2012 7:28 PM
Subject: [ARSCLIST] Tinfoil recording revived from 1878


> Hi,
>
>  Has anyone seen this story? Who did the restoration and by what  method?
>
> _http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/soundtrack-history-1878-edison-a
> udio-unveiled-17558671#.UInFXNjRa-g.email_
> (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/soundtrack-history-1878-edison-audio-unveiled-17558671#.UInFXNjRa
> -g.email)
>
> Allen
>
>