In my opinion, while Edison's musical tastes left something to be desired, his recordings - at least his disc recordings were technically far superior to their lateral cut Victor and Columbia etc. counter parts.  I'm sure this is because the vertical cut records have much less distortion than lateral cut recordings.  My 1917 Edison player still has the original stylus in it and it was recently checked and found to be "like new".

db


On Wednesday, September 3, 2014 11:59:41 PM, Paul Stamler <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
 

>
>
>On 9/3/2014 7:28 PM, Tom Fine wrote:
>> Edison and staff never stopped experimenting with acoustic recording.
>> Screaming into a small horn and recording on foil or soft wax will
>> produce only the most primative low-fidelity results. Their methods got
>> much more elaborate and heavy-duty (ie big horns) to get better
>> fidelity. I've never heard any Edison recordings that I would say
>> approach "high" fidelity, but some of the Blue Amberols that I've heard
>> sound somewhat like what I imagine the source sounds might sound like in
>> a room (ie the "tone" is somewhat accurate), and there's much less
>> background noise than more primative recordings from earlier days.
>
>There was a recording of the Hellelujah chorus from "Messiah" in the 
>UCSD collection that I thought was remarkable quality for an 
>acoustically-cut cylinder. The artists are listed as "Oratorio Chorus" 
>(not too helpful) and the date was 1916. I don't know if it was an 
>Edison, but buried way back in my memory is something that says it 
>wasn't. Google "vintage-christmas-wax" (include the hyphens) and 
>"paulfucito". You may have to go to the Wayback Machine.
>
>Peace,
>Paul
>
>
>