UPDATE: Quite a number of people commented that the Standard machine has a separate control to set the speed - the lever is just used for on/off. Thanks for this info. As mentioned in the video - if you need to know more about these machines you should consult an expert in the subject…I’m not one of them.
As a rule of thumb, anything which was recorded before the first commercially produced electrically recorded 78 rpm record is in the Public Domain, and can be played without needing to pay royalties. Therefore, the cutoff date is somewhere around mid-1926. This includes player piano roll arrangements, which you have not yet covered on this channel. I use some of those for the basis of music arrangements for the street organ which you can see in my avatar.
When cylinder records first came out, they didn't have the mold process figured out so as to be able to duplicate them, so they would set up, say, a dozen machines, bunch the horns all together, and have the band play to thus make a dozen "copies." Then, they would set it all up again and have the band/singer play again to make another batch, etc. So the early cylinders of a particular recording were all different.
I loved the way old cylinder singers shout out the record label at the beginning of songs. Probably helped scholars and historians later to have that information right on the record.
The information can easily be found on any record sleeve and CD/tape jacket. Many streaming services also have an "about" or "more info" section with info like this.
@@joeshmoe562 was about to say the same thing lol "Yowza! Yowza! I'm Bix Biederbecke on the Cornet, backed by the man on the Bone, Ed King; King of the sliiiiiiiiiiide!!!" "Yo, yo, yo! This is Snoop Doggy Dogg, back by the man on the tables, Dr. Dre; Spin Doctor on the beeeeaats!!!!!!!!!" History repeats itself
either way i feel the new 2022 release was better sounding and or indent for the roll than the mp3/streamlining as the internet makes it sound weird/fake so 1940's media is still not in the public domain no way the guy's are dead by now and if they were alive after 50 years most people/younger generations wouldn't know or probably care to visit ect. and those people that do are kinda different like me/history nerd 🤓😉 😎 it's cool that you can buy repop's of older media as my car had a option for 8-track and LP/vinyl but finding the tape's and useable one's ( and in trying to keep 50 year old automotive parts working is another huddle but one i was considering so i could get the real vibe's on the weekends or at a car show ect. and daily different a digital system the rest of the time ) at that weren't easy ect. and my truck is cuhset/c-d and i figured the best idea was to dich it completely in the truck for digital media player/streaming now im wondering??
"Classic 1900s flex"? More like, classic Edison flex. The man was a great inventor, but also a brilliant marketer, promoter and businessman most of all.
Just a truly fun video from start to finish. These videos are filmed in such an intimate way that it truly feels like we're learning about tech together, rather than someone just regurgitating a Wikipedia article they read back to me.
As a Christmas gift to my grandpa last year, I cleaned up the cylinder player and record collection that belonged to _his_ grandpa. It was truly amazing to hear music recorded on blocks of wax produced more than a hundred years ago.
@@uncled39 well it depends upon the era you're talking about, these definitely have metal needles and so do all (most?)- [and there are also cactus needles fir quieter playback] -crank gramophones.. google it😇 Once you get into electric era though, of course youre right.
"I am the Edison phonograph!" I love that full-blown Mid-Atlantic accent and the exaggerated affect. It's become such an old-timey cliche, it's fun hearing the genuine article and remembering that performers actually did sound like that sometimes.
I think this was in part influenced by the low audio quality. Performers had to speak clearly to the point of exaggeration and make longer pauses to be understandable.
@mipmipmipmipmip These things are working after more than a century later! And they weren't particularly taken care of! Not so much of a "Planned Obsolescence" back then in my opinion. Now though, panned obsolescence is totally a thing.
Format incompatibility is always worse with new things and gets better over time when things become more standardised but sometimes a worse format becomes the standard or there was a format with some advantages that lost.
@mipmipmipmipmip which still does not mean anybody PLANNED on it. It just was a pioneering era of technology where the development is so rapid that if you want the newest and bestest thing you'd have to change every 2, 3 years into something new. You'd pay a premium for the higher quality, but you would GET better quality. There isn't a similar high speed technological development for media today. But just look at TVs... HD ready, Full HD, 4K, 5K, 8K, coming out with maybe 30 months between them, far faster than anybody would NEED a new television set... it's the same as with the phonographs of various sorts and builds...
UPDATE: Quite a number of people commented that the Standard machine has a separate control to set the speed - the lever is just used for on/off. Thanks for this info. As mentioned in the video - if you need to know more about these machines you should consult an expert in the subject…I’m not one of them.
yeah that makes more sense ...I never even seen or heard of cylinders before. wonder how many formats out there... Maybe you could also cover what live equipment was like back in the day...
I'd look at Techmoan's previous videos, he covers damn near every format imaginable from the normal (cassettes/vinyl) to the truly esoteric like VHD video player, Pioneer MUSE HD LaserDisc, and exotic music players like the Edison cylinder player, Reel to Reel, and Digital Compact Cassette. Maybe he is not an audio engineer, but you would be hard pressed to find ANY content creator who covers what Techmoan covers. Thank you always for the quality content and your frank manner of presentation!
Thought you'd like to know... I have what I call a "three box" stereo (I don't know the proper term, just your classic dual tape deck + 5-CD changer + tuner set), a record player from my mother's attic (and probably from my grandfather, before that, but I'm not quite sure) although I need to make sure it works, and at least two (and I think three) portable CD players :) I also have multiple anonymous "mini clip MP3 players" from eBay because they fascinate me, but then there's the pair of Rio 500s and the trio of SmartMedia cards to go with them... I should buy more of those cards sometime... Oh... and my TV has a DVD and VHS combo player under it. I don't bother with cable or satellite, or even an antenna. Nearly everything that's on is either bad news, worse politics, cartoons by people who can't draw, or stuff on the munitions-grade brainrot level that is "Survivor' clones and dumb sitcoms... and what very little actually good stuff there is out there just isn't worth the effort to find. I've a ChromeCast, a gift from a friend, but I've not yet hooked it up... same for the Blu-Ray player I got at the local thrift shop (I think in the UK you call those secondhand stores? Ours is specifically a PTA Thrift Shop here in town, profits go to support the local school system) as I've no actual Blu-Ray media yet! ...and, as I'm sure you've forgotten from the very few emails we exchanged on the subject: YOU are the reason I have a MiniDisc player :) it's quite nice!
Edison was the inventor of recorded sound and was the first to commercialize it with the stuff shown in this video. The oldest recordings in the world were cut on Edison machines. It was later supplanted by flat records. Everything else came after.
Also, when handling the cylinders, try not to touch the grooves of the wax ones (personally I do the two finger V sign method on the inside, it is the best way to handle them. They are super easy to scratch. The bakelite ones are fantastically durable (the Edison "Amberola" brand cylinders or Columbia's "Indestructible" brand records for example). I actually have rebuilt several of these old edison machines at the local museum where I volunteer, they are absolute marvels. Also, as for speed, don't worry about it :) even when these were commonplace, people would just play them at whatever speed sounded right.
"I can transport you to the realms of music" I always wondered where that sample had come from. It was used in a techno song in the early 90s. It's Edison if course! "Rhythmic Dance" by Scream Therapy
@@thesledgehammerblog 🤔 That's interesting territory..::: Thanks! back to the lab!!🙃 Sigur Ros playing rocks with decently accurate pitches... encoded into spider silk with wind power and rose thorns The kelp and molluscs based modular synth Steampunk hurdy-gurdy
When I was a history student I had a professor who was passionate about cylinder music preservation, and we would frequently talk about long obsolete and nowadays obscure formats like cylinders and the kinds of obscure record formats that have been covered on this channel. I lost touch with him years ago, but I kind of hope he sees this video because I think he'd get quite a kick out of this. Shoutout to Dr. Ken Marcus if he does happen to see this. You were an awesome prof, and I loved the song you wrote as an ode to your students at Leiden University.
I decided to look him up and found his email address. I've sent him a link to the video and explained that I read your comment, as well as what the video is about. Hopefully he sees it!
@@tdp2612 I doubt it. He was a visiting professor (Fullbright) in the Netherlands who ordinarily teaches at a university in California, so he was with us for only one semester (possibly two at most), and considering California history was very much a focus of his career (California cultural/music history in particular) I kind of doubt he'd make such a big move. But of course anything is possible. I also don't know if he has much of a collection he personally owns, or if it's more something that he has been involved in through his activities as a cultural historian (which can sometimes have perks like getting access to the collections of others ;)), but it sure made for fun classes and conversations. The man is kind of a savant when it comes to the history of music in Los Angeles in particular. He authored a book about it, called Musical Metropolis, that I kind of wish I'd asked him to sign in hindsight. If I remember correctly the CD that comes with the book even contains a number of cylinder recordings he helped preserve. Unfortunately I don't have a CD player anymore, so I can't listen to it, but I'm inclined to just borrow an external DVD drive now so I can have the tracks on my computer. You often hear people talking about that one professor whose class was life-changing to them. His class was mine in that regard. It came at a time where I was kind of lacking a sense of direction in my academic pursuits, and I definitely found that there. It was also the class that convinced me I wanted to teach history. Forever grateful to him, a really wonderful, passionate, and inspiring professor, and a very kind individual to boot. All the students loved him. He's still frequently talked about today among my cohort, and we were the class of 2014!
Okay. Considering the age of this format, I’m genuinely impressed by the audio quality. Seriously, in 2022, I’ve had cell phone calls over VoLTE and heard microphone recordings on computers with worse quality than these things.
At 27:08, this is not the speed control. This is a common thing about later Edison standards. That is just the on/off lever, the speed control is actually that knob to the left that has that curved piece of metal at the end of it. When you bring that out, it will increase the speed by bringing two felts out. This will cause the governor disc to expand out more due to the centripetal force from the weights. The on/off lever will not provide speed control as the governor disc will just push it back out to fully open. You’re lucky to have such a nice model H reproducer on the Edison standard that still has the original green coating over the reproducer. If you’d like, I could possibly send you some blank cylinders and a recorder to make your own home recordings. Also, there is no way to tell manufacture date, but I have access to when each machine left the factory. Your Edison gem (G199279) left the factory in November 1906. Judging the popularity of Gem Model B’s, it was most likely manufactured in October 1906.
@@mattgreen5351 Didn't he already do that, in a way? In that video about that educational plastic cup/cylinder player thing from Japan, I think. Was quite amusing, I would like him to try and do it on a proper cylinder as well
@@real_yanoosh6553 yeah, a look at how it should really work would be nice. That plastic cup thing was around the quality I'd expect from a museum gift shop.
Crazy to think that those old cylinders were recorded WITHOUT ELECTRICITY and you are able to play them back without electricity. Same goes for old phonograph records until around 1924-25 when the microphone became common. (Well, at least in theory - they might have used electricity for a more stable motor, but it all worked without current, too.)
The Aluminum used in the horn would cost about 20 times what it costs now, because it was manufactured using an electrical process. 50 years before this, aluminum was worth more than gold, because it could only be made chemically.
True! The mechanical, acoustic phonograph is actually an amazing feat of "low" tech. When the power goes out, Light the oil lamps, and crank up the Victrola! FUN FACT: These old record players can actually be fairly loud. Being non-electronic, they lack precise volume control. An old method of reducing the volume was to put a rag or a sock into the horn. This is where the phrase "Put a sock in it!" to mean "be quiet" comes from.
Hm, I suppose there's no reason someone in ancient Rome couldn't have developed some sort of wax cylinder phonograph, if they considered how sound vibrates things and thought to try building something like Edison's phonograph. But it seems no one did until the 19th century.
Piezo speakers/buzzers can easily be modified into surface-mount pickups to give an analog output that can connect to a stereo system (into a pre-amp first, of course). If you experimented with placement location on the reproducer horn or the needle's frame, I bet you'd be able to get some really good quality results that a horn just can't capture. It wouldn't be audiophile by any stretch, but still much better frequency response than a reproducer horn could ever achieve. I'm certain there's some low midrange and bass captured on those cylinders that isn't heard via the horn. Since this channel isn't about form-factor purism/snobbery, I think it would be a worthwhile experiment.
@@MushookieMan I don't think his record player can play MP3s. 🧐 Sarcasm aside, if this were a review of the music itself then I would agree with you. But since it is a review of the format (as a trendy resurgence), I think there's merit to be had in deeper exploration of the audio quality captured on those cylinder records that the tinny reproducer horns may be hiding.
You probably also could improve the regularity and timing of the spin (exact numbers of rotations instead of "best guess"/"sounds like a normal voice" attempts) by building a modern repro using electric motors directly on the cylinder instead of the belt drive. Maybe even mount the cylinder vertically for the looks if you do not use a horn but an digital readout for the reproducer-signal... just for the geekery or it, of course, but then people truly buy into the whole "vinyl just sounds better, man" nonsense and are going nuts over it... paying hundreds of dollars for collections they could get as MP3 for a tiny percentage...
I was also wondering how's the sound quality on the cylinder without the bad quality reproducer. Here's a video that I found of somebody modifying a vinyl stylus to pickup the sound from the cylinder. Sounds like the quality on the cylinder isn't that much better than through the horn. 😂 ruclips.net/video/Qpss20lSs7I/видео.html
Well, it would certainly be great to listen to Edison's voice with better sound quality! Interesting that in cylinder players & 78s, the frequency response was probably flatter than on LPs & 45s. These use RIAA equalisation to reduce the lower frequencies & boost the higher ones during recording, & do the opposite during playback.
Amazing to think that the basic concept of this thing, never really changed right up to the 1980's when CD's started to replace records. Right up to the 80's, the concept of a needle(stylus) wiggling in a groove to reproduce the sound never really changed at all from these cylinder things. Sure, better processes, stereo grooves, electro-magnetic pickups etc, but the concept was still the same - a wiggling needle in a groove to reproduce the sound. Possibly one of the oldest and most successful(in terms of longevity) recording mediums. I still have all my LP records from the 80's when I was a teenager. I never threw them out. I WOULD have also saved all my father's 78's had he not thrown them all out one day when none of us in the family knew he did it!
@@VauxhallViva1975 Yeah, even more so that there’s nothing wrong with the tech and unlike a lot of CD players or cassette players, the original materials still work. No disc rot or tape rot to worry about, or rubber parts melting into sticky black goo after decades. These things have lasted 80 years and could probably hold up for 80 more. It’s just impressive what we could come up with to make music more accessible.
Electronics is much more amazing, but since you can't see it, even if you understand how it works, you can't visualize it. Clockwork gear is visual, it's 3D and makes sense in a way that that other tech seems more "abstract".
@VaderxG I do think it's great that music is more accessible (payment to artists aside) but the transient nature of distribution is something that I feel is kind of sad. I assume there will be no one who can fix CD players in the future because no one will be making the laser assemblies, so at some point even if CDs are still around, there may be no way to easily retrieve the data. Streaming abstracts it a whole other level, where we're counting on corporations to keep copies for us and hope that licensing deals don't cause music to disappear into the ether. I don't fetishize physical media too much, but it just strikes me as something that someone should worry about. Even this video could disappear in the future, whether because RUclips is bought and shut down by some mega corporation in the future, or simply because some executive thinks its absurd for them to keep videos more than 20 years old online and decides to start culling old material. It's possible that at some point the only copy will be the one Techmoan has kept as part of the production process, assuming he even archives the videos after he uploads them. I don't really have a value judgement I guess, but it's just interesting to me that in 2122, it's more likely someone will be able to play a wax cylinder of that vaporwave song than they would an MP3 or CD of the same song.
@@God-yb2cg Maybe now I understand the appeal of Steampunk, because looking at the player I get the feeling that if I had to, I could build it. Meanwhile I'd have no idea how to even start with a PCB and soldering iron if someone told me to build a CD player.
I have to respect the dude you bought that machine off, I'm a die hard tape head with a rather nice stereo set up at home and my mates all think I'm absolutely mad. My hat goes off to this chap who only listens to tunes on tube pre war.
This video has brought back some great memories of mine. My late grandfather was an engineer at Westinghouse in the 1950s and 1960s and was an amateur radio buff, but his fascination was in music. Besides maintaining a meticulous collection of antique radios, he had numerous phonographs and other machines (like a nickelodeon orchestrion and a restored player piano he had rebuilt) and a massive collection of cylinders and rolls. Growing up and getting to see how these old machines worked was fascinating, and they still bring a smile to me even today. When we were forced to liquidate the estate and the collection, we honestly weren't sure what would happen in the future as far as preservation of these machines goes. Glad to see there are still companies making reproductions and that there is a small contingent of folks who are making new music on them. It's so eclectic, I love it!
One of the best videos you've ever made sir! Watching this makes me think - how magical was it for the people in 1905 to sit down and listen to pre-recorded music? We take it all for granted today, everything that technology has brought us. But back then it was like actual magic. Incredible when you sit down and think about it :)
Thomas Edison might’ve been a dick, but it’s hard not to get goosebumps reading the story of the day he first tested his phonograph. It’s said that he did so in front of his engineer the moment he got the machine made; he sung Mary Had a Little Lamb at the top of his lungs and then set it to play. They both were so taken aback by the machine actually singing it back to them that they just listened to it, and his first reaction was along the lines of “so THAT’S how I sound?!”
There was already digital music at the time, and quite large copyright issues, digital music was taxed at 2 cents per piece to try and provide funds to artists who had their IP stolen. It was magical, but still relatively common place, and big business.
@@yoymate6316 Another thing we take for granted but it's weird to think that in hundreds of thousands of years, no one had ever heard their actual voice.
My grandmother still has a cylinder player. It's a big wooden case, with the player in the top and a cabinet in the bottom to store the cylinders. We never really listened to anything on it. But we always liked opening it up and playing something when people would visit the house. I should take a look and go through the cylinders and see what's on all of them next time I visit.
38:33 I'd heard a sample of that phrase "...always hear the voices of your loved ones, even though they are far away." on a piece of electro/synth music, and wondered where it was from, assuming it to be from a film, as was often the case in that genre. Now, I know for sure.
"I can sing you tender songs of love. I can give you merry tales and joyous laughter. I can transport you to the realms of music." I'm 90% sure this was sampled in a Caravan Palace song.
My parents bought three different wind up record players in the late '60's: an Edison 2-minute cylinder, an Edison "thick" disc, and a big "modern" 78 player. Playing with those as a kid probably influenced my pursuing a career as a mechanical engineer. I'm not sure that I was impressing my friends as a teenager in the '80's, though, when I cranked up the antiques. All of those machines, along with plenty of media for them, are now here in my house. With their simplicity, they are more likely to play just fine after years of neglect than anything with old capacitors. Despite their presence here, the non-romantic reality is that I stream nearly 100% of my music, just like everyone else. There have been many clever formats along the way, and I encourage format-fans to relish their hobbies, however, the erosion of physical media is a reflection that the content has always actually been the point for most consumers. I thank Techmoan for so enthusiastically cataloging the history of physical media, great and small!
The "thick" phonograph records you are speaking of is a diamond disc player. The needle was mounted at a 90 degree angle to the record and floated in the producer. Mine is in a floor model fumed oak case.
Today I am claiming this gentleman to be the 'Guru" of sound formats. A wealth of knowledge and physical devices. I pray that years from now when all of the older generations of us have passed on, everything that he owns and has showcased will be preserved for generations to come. Salute.
I found the promotional cylinder played over your typical end credits to be fascinatingly haunting. The sound of technology over a century old, set against a showcase of formats that were yet to be.
Thank you for a most entertaining and interesting presentation. For the first 12 years of my life my family lived in a rural location with no electricity supply - a wind-up gramophone was an important part of the home entertaiinment! We moved in 1956 to a flat that had electricity and one of the first things that dad bought was a Regentone radiogram - we were in seventh heaven!
The trouble is, is that looking at the box he checked, the statement is false. There was no sponsorship, product placement or endorsement. RUclips is being very fuzzy with it's definitions and there is a contrast of what it says ("anything of value") and what it specifically asks. They really need a "product received for free" button because there is a huge difference between a review or commentary on an item received for free and someone being paid to promote a product. One, the person is free to say what they one, the other, they have a script they have to follow. That they both use the same "includes paid promotion" banner is really misleading.
I agree very much! There's a big difference between receiving a review copy and being free to share your viewpoints, which is common in in the tech industry, and actually promoting something. There's a channel I've watched, "Lon TV" -who does it really well, he always says something like 'full disclosure I have received free of charge from , however the opinions are my own, no one has paid for this review, and no one has reviewed or approved this video.' Edit: Had to remove the (.) between Lon and TV because RUclips was making it out to be a link when it's just his channel name.
@@Raletia Yeah, a lot of channels use that wording or similar, which I appreciate! Tells you what you need to know to properly assess the review, which the youtube provided button really doesn't.
Great video! There's something magical about hearing such old recordings, just knowing that there probably won't be anyone alive anymore that will have played those back in the day. Just like with very old photographs, these are some of the oldest bits of (literally) recorded history. And it is kind a cool that some artist keep making this stuff, even knowing that 99% of it will never be played. I realized myself a few years ago that physical media was going away when I wanted to buy a new audio system with CD-player, and I recently found out that both my 20+ year old DVD-player and somewhat more recent Bluray-player had died, and I have nothing anymore to play my 1000+ discs on. And sure, digital/streaming formats are more practical, but I nevertheless still like having a physical product. And it's not just about having a true product in your hands, my CD-collection represents over 3 decades of my life. A playlist just doesn't feel the same...
You could get a 4K Blu Ray player that should play most format from VCD to UHD, and also audio CD. My Sony UHD player plays virtually anything I throw at it including UHD video and music from a USB stick.
When I worked at the Beeb the Sound Archive library had a cylinder player built by BBC engineers so that their collection could be transferred to tape on demand. It had a modern Shure cartridge with various stylii for the best reproduction. In this case the cylinder pulled the cartridge along via a parallel tracking arm.
I feel like the quality should be higher, are some frequencies lost in the recording - given it was never intended for music but as a commercial dictation machine in the first instance !
edprogs1, I remember seeing that being designed and made around 1987. The parallel tracking system was a modified Revox one from one of their vinyl decks. The two channel coils in the Shure carridge were wired in what woujld normally be anti-phase to take account of the fact that the grove modulation is only vertical on the cylinder system. A bit of trivia: - The department head at that time became one of the founders and still present owner of PMC loudspeakers.
FYI, in this situation it’s not a worm gear (there’s no worm wheel being driven) it’s a lead screw, converting rotary motion to linear motion. Awesome video though, thanks for all you do!
"A worm drive is a gear arrangement in which a worm (which is a gear in the form of a screw) meshes with a worm wheel (which is similar in appearance to a spur gear). The two elements are also called the worm screw and worm gear. The terminology is often confused by imprecise use of the term worm gear to refer to the worm, the worm wheel, or the worm drive as a unit. The worm drive or "endless screw" was invented by either Archytas of Terentum, Apollonius of Perga, or Archimedes, the last one being the most probable author." I think that the name "endless screw" is also a very good description as you would instantly know that the mechanism from the video have nothing to do with "endless screw".
@@Bialy_1 I'm not sure how this quote helps matters. Using the terminology given, there is no worm wheel in Techmoan's setup. The lead screw drives a stationary "nut" to drive the nut linearly.
Not a fan of the DMOD community I suppose. Poor Matt. 😅 DMOD= Dead Malls of Discord. Recording the dying malls/dead malls and retailers for posterity's sake.
@@Stevie-J couldn’t that be said about every genre once it’s codified and commercially successful? Plus, it erases the experimentation and differentiation which is going on within vaporwave, which isn’t exactly regarded as a whole genre unto itself anymore but rather as an umbrella term, much like a rock enthusiast specifying exactly which flavour and era they like. But if your preference is for anti-meta genre-defying experimental stuff, then I’ve plenty of respect for you. Though I will add that if any of them still use music theory or common chord progressions, there’s generations of experimental composers who’d still refer to them as reusing safe ideas and not coming up with their own, no matter how interesting the instrumentation or rhythms are. There’s always layers upon layers, every artist has to choose which conventions they’ll stick to and which ones they’ll challenge.
@@Stevie-J It's not all sampling if that's not your thing. I would encourage you to check out dreampunk for something that preserves the same aesthetic but consists of original sound design. 2814 is a good place to start. Vektroid's most recent album, Seed and Synthetic Earth, is also a banger and it's a shame more people don't know about it.
I agree with physical music mainly being merchandise. I collect records because it's a cool way to listen to music while supporting artists in a much more direct way than streaming.
@@ShockingPikachu I had several songs disappear from my Amazon account and that was a good reminder that even if I bought them digital they are still not mine. Happy to have CDs of most of my music.
@@isegrim1978 and it’s not just songs it’s also very specific versions of songs. For example they choose remasters over original prints and a lot of the time the remasters muddy the mix and the quiet parts are too loud and just not great. Only way to get some of them is physical
Very few bands make money from album sales. Unless you're buying the vinyl from their personal website or a live show you're actually supporting them less directly than streaming.
Interestingly enough (to me at least!) it has recently been announced that the biggest selling "physical" music media is now no longer CDs, but Vinyl. Whether people listen to them or not is a different matter, but they are at least buying them!
The timeline for commercial consumer records: 2 minute 1896-1911. 4 minute 1908-1929. 4 minute disc record (12" 78) 1903-1955. record 9727 dates from early 1907. The Gem was introduced around 1899 and through model updates through 1911. The speed control is under the metal bed plate to the left. The switch lever is to switched fully on with the control underneath set to 160 RPM.
@@AaronSmart.online Agreed. I only referred to the Edison 2/4 minute cylinders against the shellac 12" disc as it was a reference as to what was immediately discussed.
@@AaronSmart.online Yep! The Edison "Diamond Discs" used vertical deflection of the stylus (as did the Edison cylinder format,BTW!) Every other 78 RPM disks used horizontal deflection. "Diamond Disks" can be damaged on non Edsion record players. Also, they are about twice as thick as normal 78s. Fun Fact: Modern stereo records use BOTH verticle and horizontal deflection.
@@tedrobinson372 You could add the Edison "Diamond Discs" to your time line, as it WAS a separate format. They are not compatible with regular 78s. They were 80 RPM and like the cylinder records, a gear, NOT the groove drove the tonearm. It's an interesting format.
@@jamesslick4790 I've played them on my KD-2070 that I modded to cover 78 rpm. The 3.0 mil 78 stylus is close enough to the 3.5 mil Diamond radius that it plays well. The cartridge needs to be stereo so that one side channel can be inverted. After that, the two channels are combined which reduces the surface noise somewhat. Audacity makes inversion and averaging pretty easy. Another thing that came up was that this pre-dates equalization and certainly RIAA eq. so a straight preamp without eq. is nice, allowing eq. entirely in Audacity. Finally, that signal is Massive! I needed attenuation ahead of the pre-amp. It's almost like running an old ceramic cartridge. For fun I should put my disk's contents up on RUclips to see what happens.
I love this idea, I recently bought a ZX81 game distributed on cassette from an independent publisher in the UK. I have nothing to play it on (they sent me the download link so I could play it on an emulator) but owning the physical media is quite magical, and I'm of an age were I bought these myself back when they were current. Not sure I'd go to the extreme of buying a phonograph!
There wasn't much magical about trying 20 times to get a game to load from tape on the Spectrum. Or when it did wait 3 minutes for it to finish loading. I have no nostalgia for that.
If you like DIY hobby computers, there are ZX81 clone kits you can buy and build now! I built a ZX80 kit a while ago, it's a lot of fun if you're into that.
@@Safetytrousers It's not much different these days when you take system boot time and all the splash screens into account. No idea where the trying 20 times to get a game to load comes from, either. Unless that was a Spectrum thing, my C64 and cousin's Amstrad always went first time unless the tape drive was dirty, which wasn't often.
I'm amazed by the deceptive simplicity of these machines, and also your presentation style and content is ever increasing in quality (including the mini-matt-the-editor at the corner!)
@@Simplebutsandy That's almost impossible and doesn't make much sense to do either. That printer will cost more than a record cutter and a normal printer together.
@@westelaudio943 actually it makes a lot of sense. You wouldn't get those just to cut records obviously. But a lot of places would have those anyway and for such small merch runs it would be easier and cheaper to just book printing time on those machines.
Up until about 4 years ago I still regularly bought all of my music and hadn't switched over to streaming. One thing that I found funny was that, rather than buying just a digital album from Amazon/iTunes/etc., it was often cheaper to buy the CD from Amazon which usually included a digital download of the music. So even fairly recently I ended up with a decent collection of CDs despite mostly listening to my music digitally.
If I remember correctly, iTunes actually sometimes offers higher than cd quality digital albums, which could have some extra value to people. I personally prefer to buy physical or digitally from band camp. It's amazing how many CDs you can buy for a pound in charity shops.
@@westelaudio943 They are, but I think they mean 320kbps MP3s vs CD quality, which is higher. I usually convert the CD to FLAC and then my streaming is via a higher end DAC, so the music sounds good everywhere.
I just prefer having something physical in my hand, and CDs are so cheap I just buy them up because I know the same fate as cassettes awaits them they'll soon disappear off store shelves. I still prefer cassette tapes, mostly due to me still driving cars so old they have tape decks in them.
Wow. I love recording technology, I have worked on many records over the years, but I never really was interested in Edison Cylinders. Listening to "Who Do You Love?" though, it felt like listening to a real piece of history. It was literally a bit of a transcendent experience, listening to the past, the precursor of everything I've done in my career and enjoyed in my life with music. Thank you, sometimes I learn something about myself when I watch this channel, as much as I learn about the technology.
For me, I always try to listen to music on Edison cylinder when possible - I find the sound much “warmer” than cold and soulless digital, tape, or vinyl recordings.
@@harveywallbanger3123 Better make sure it's Welsh slate though - you need that cool, wet, flinty sound that you just don't get from new-fangled foreign slate...
"If you are able to play a CD people might think you're a bit odd." I guess I should feel pretty odd indeed, since I picked up a 110-year-old Victrola record player from an antique shop, and now have about 12-15 shellac records...
your channel is part of why i still support youtube, your content is brilliant and well thought out. thanks for the history lesaon along with the novelty of something id love to indulge time, money and space into these items but i cant, thanks buddy, i wish you the best.
The first cylinder sounded a lot better than I thought it was going to sound. I actually did see someone on Tik-Tok the other day demonstrate a 2-speed Edison player.
Mat, I love your story telling. So detailed and explanatory. I too tell stories like this. You're a pleasure to listen to/watch. I really enjoy your videos
I expected him to play something modern like Rhiana but I know that would be impossible because of copyright strike, still would have been hilarious tho
Before this video the only time I’d heard sounds from an Edison cylinder is the song “I Can Hear You” by They Might Be Giants which they recorded with their full (acoustic) band at the Edison Laboratory in NJ. Of course I heard it on a CD so I’ve yet to hear how this actually sounds in person!
@@samuelfellows6923 While not the recording on the album, you can search RUclips for "They Might Be Giants - I Can Hear You (Live)" to see performance on the Daily Show recorded to wax cylinder to see the band and arrangement, likely near identical to the album version. TMBW has an article on the "Wax Cylinder Recordings" that has some additional info. "Singing directly into a huge horn (a precursor to the modern microphone), John Flansburgh lead the band through I Can Hear You. Next up, John Linnell sang James K. Polk. A strong tuba line punctuated the bottom end, highlighted by a tuba/vocal break in the middle. The band finished the session with a smooth version of The Edison Museum featuring vocals by "The Pride of the Oranges" (as John Flansburgh introduced him), WFMU's Nick Hill. After finishing each recording, the cylinder was taken over to a window ledge to cool. While waiting it to harden sufficiently for playback, the band, NPS staff and the audience enjoyed very informal question and answer sessions." They recorded 4 songs, only "I can Hear You" made it to the album Factory Showroom, but the other 3 were eventually released in other ways, such as part of their podcasts.
The message on the last cylinder is so poignant. 120 years later and technology is still making the same promises and can we truly say that it has delivered and does that truly matter or is it the experience that were after?
@@haweater1555 there was a episode of x files that had a similar plot but it was jesus bringing the Lazarus back from the dead and they used a fictional laser scanner to read it
One downside with streaming is that the version or the song you like may suddenly vanish due to copyright or other issues. The flash drive should serve to record some stuff. One thing I've allways wanted to do is record a piece on an authentic edison machine and at the same time on a high quality device. Digitise both then use a computer to create a 'correction' curve between them so that if that curve is applied to an old cylinder recording, it should bring it back to a normal range/sound.
If the bloke that sold that machine reads this, please consider letting techmoan film at your location with you telling the story about some of the items. If you want to remain anonymous I bet Techmoan will blur your face or omitt your likeness when filming. It would make a quite interesting video.
These old formats give me a really comfortable retro chill when watching. I really respect you for putting these together and I hope you'll keep them comming for quite some time. Thank you.
@@HUYI1 The early ones were made from actual wax which break when dropped (also the discs) before they went with vinyl and the like. So they were expensive, sounded awful, were very short duration and could easily break. And that's how it started...
Couple weeks ago I was reminded how amazing physical formats are. Tell me, on what streaming service you can get gems like my LP "The Old Bolsheviks' Recollections of Lenin"? Played maybe twice since 1971, mint sleeve with painting of V.I.Lenin, urging workers on. The best disc in my collection by far, even before you listen to the content on it, which is hysterical.
It's fun to collect vinyl oddities. Somehow I've found myself collecting LPs with the recordings made during NASA space missions. Just found one in Dutch, pretty sure it doesn't exist on any popular streaming service. Everyone thinks I'm nuts.
@@albanana683 78rpm (and various other speeds) make up a good portion of my collection. I love finding things that aren't available anywhere else, and then resharing them with the world.
I do get what you mean by cassettes and other outdated forms of media being merchandise and I'm probably guilty of collecting them as that (though I do play them often). I am genuinely happy when I purchase a new album on cassette, slot it into my Walkman, and find it was reproduced with care. The experience of listening to a cassette, while possibly much less precise than digital, is more fun for me and knowing that someone put work into improving my listening experience is heartwarming. Thanks for getting me into the format three or so years ago!
That fellow you were describing whom you bought the player from sounds like quite a character! I hope he one day speaks up about why he enjoys prewar tubes over everything else, or does a collection video, would love to see it!
I went so long not listening to cds, that I was blown away when I started listening to them again. Sound quality is so much better than pretty much any other format imo
Probably because it's not compressed. Most audio formats use lossy compression algorithms that toss out part of the data to save space, but lose some quality in the process. Now, you can compress data in such a way that you get back _exactly_ what you originally put in, but it won't compress as well. We're talking a difference of 5-10% vs 50-60% of the size of the original for lossy vs lossless. General data compression formats like ZIP, RAR and 7Z are all lossless. There's no way to know what kind of data the user might throw at it, so there's no room for throwing anything out. All you can do is find patterns in the data and store them more compactly. Images, audio and video, however, are well-defined domains that have been subject of extensive research into what can and can't be thrown out and still having acceptable results. Said extensive research has also uncovered methods for compressing images and audio losslessly better than you'd get from a general algorithm. PNG actually uses the same underlying algorithm as ZIP, but adds a few processing stages in front to turn general image data into something that's both easier to compress, and most importantly, _reversible,_ so a PNG decoder can reconstruct the original image data from the compressed file. FLAC, on the other hand, is wholly designed for audio. It finds a compact approximation of a chunk of the input and stores that along with a compact encoding of the difference between the approximation and the input. Combine the two, and you can reconstruct the original data.
This is so cool. I am fortunate enough to have heard one of these in person ages ago at a collector's house. It was really nice to hear about your experience. I can imagine how these things would have felt pretty magical back when they were new.
And surprisingly enough, I ran into some of these cylinders in a museum the same day after watching the video, so I understood What I was looking at with the 2 minute vs 4 minute versions.
I'm too young to have ever owned physical music, and my idea of ownership is getting a DRM-free flac file. But this channel endlessly fascinates me. Always well thought out glimpses into interesting technology.
You nailed it with the novelty aspect of physical releases. I love to buy colorful records and cassettes, and do play them for fun sometimes, but really listen to the .flac files that accompany them.
Same for me. I do occasionally play my records, I have a perfectly good turntable after all. But 99% of my purchases are simply to enjoy the large format physical artwork and to support the artists since streaming pays so poorly. But I spend all my time listening to mp3s/flac or streaming if I'm away from home. 😂
i have a friend who is a rockabilly artist. he has released some singles over the past couple of years in 78 r.p.m. format which is not a simple format to use with modern turntables. thanks for bringing this format to light.
Amazing video from start to finish. When you first played the cylinder, all I heard was the purest form of music. Amazing to see how far we’ve come in so little time.
Very interesting, I have a friend who has a few cylinder gramophones. Apart from the original cylinders of the time, he has made some molds and makes his own hard wax cylinders, shaves them and then engraves or cuts them with an engraving head with the songs he likes the most, he has achieved an extraordinary fidelity. He has recorded a 2-minute cylinder for me with the song "Yesterday" by The Beatles and it sounds extraordinarily good. A very entertaining video. Greetings.
Is this the oldest music format you've featured on your channel? I really enjoyed this one. I wish I could live long enough to see if any vcr, cassette player, etc. could be fixed up to play more than a hundred years after they were made. I seriously doubt it.
Well it's the oldest one I have - although you might remember I mentioned in a Patreon update video about an even older format playing Cuba Baion ruclips.net/video/aDg7Op5oWZ4/видео.html So I'm sort-of connected to that happy occurrence in a very minor way.
It's the oldest audio format in existence, so... :-D There were two formats released in 1888, the Graphophone format, which used wax on paper cylinders, and the 2-minute Phonograph cylinders. After a bit of fighting over patents a patent sharing deal was made, and the Graphophone format was abandoned. The ones Techmoan has are post 1900, so they are made of plastic, and not wax, but the format is the same otherwise, as far as I understand.
@@charlesachurch7265 Yeah, but that's not a format. It's just a theory that sound may have been recorded. Also, people who investigated how sounds worked in the 18th/19th century made trails on papers from sound, and they have been converted back to (very bad) sound. But it's not a format.
Really enjoyed this video! I have never heard the expression “takes the biscuit” ha but will immediately start working that into conversation. Congrats on 1.2m!! Oh and thank you for putting that mp3 of the song on for comparison.
Biscuit is a different thing here in the UK. Its more like what the Americans call Cookie. Actually the American word for Biscuit is correct- Bi-Scuit. Stale bread that's been double cooked - Bi cooked/cooked twice. Roman treat. The word cookie is Dutch.
Great video Matt, I've heard of these but it's a generally long forgotten technology and that made me think, these are well over a hundred years old now and still work. Imagine the state of todays tech in 2140. Pretty awesome thinking about it. Thanks for doing what you do 👊
This was absolutely fascinating! It's so cool learning about these types of things and watching you figure out how these things work and troubleshoot them. This was just... lovely, and i never knew such a type of record existed! Thank you, Matthew!
sir you are a genius and a scholar in comparison to half the folks on this platform who claim to know everything that there is to knno about whatever thier content represents/discusses. incredible channel, fantastic host.
Wonderful! I remember this machine and a Victrola on my Mom's older aunt living room when I was a small kid (circa 1974). Cute machines. Too bad those machines were out of order and I don't remember if some shellac or cylinder was played on them ever.
I knew as soon as you started talking about releasing music on obscure formats that it would be a vaporwave artist, lol. Vaporwave itself is essentially a ‘meme genre’ of music even if it’s grown considerably from its origins, so making an Edison cylinder or floppy disk release is just another meme :)
"I wonder if anyone's ever found anything interesting inside one of these" Didn't find it inside of an edison, but inside of an old columbia 78 player. I found some wartime newspapers and a shorthand school notebook
It’s amazing what I could learn from cylinders in under 40 minutes. My friend has an Edison player and some cylinders, but just watching this now I can say to him someday ”You are doing it wrong! Let me show, mate!”. Thanks :)
Wow! This was a timely RUclips post! I’ve been enjoying your videos for about two years now after someone gave me a Pioneer RT-909 and your appreciation of that deck encouraged me to restore it. I love it by the way! Well… just a couple of days ago I got my first cylinder player, an Amberola Model 30. I was wondering if anyone way currently releasing modern recordings on this medium and know I know they are! You’ve pointed me toward another rabbit hole! Cheers!
This was super enjoyable to watch. I barely knew these existed, and it was really cool to see something purely mechanical make sounds that sounded like... anything! Physical media definitely seems to be going the way of novelty, and I'm cool with that. I definitely grew up with CDs being the standard format (alongside cassettes for a while, then alongside mp3 players) and by the time I hit adulthood, they were well into their decline. As a teenager I had a 5 CD changer, a portable CD player, and multiple CD/DVD drives in my computer - and shelves packed full of CDs. Now, the only remaining optical disc drive left in my home is the Blu-ray drive in my Playstation 4 haha
29:30 I appreciate your integrity in not just ticking the 'Paid Promotion' tickbox, but also going into the reason you did. I agree with your assessment that they sent you the cylinder without explicit strings attached, although their message does read a little bit like the quiet part was "and we figure/hope you'll do a video about it, too". I also agree that there are an awful lot of RUclipsrs who don't seem to realize just how broad a territory is covered by the relevant legal terms. One thing I'm curious about, though, having no idea, is how this interacts with being merely *_loaned_* something to do a review of, which you don't get to keep afterwards, whether by a company, or a mate; does that still technically count as "accept[ing] anything of value from a third party"? (If I made content on RUclips, I'd probably lean towards ticking the box anyway in such a case, just to be safe.)
I think it depends on whether the loan is of value. Ask a stranger in the field to give you a pen so you can write something down? Probably fine. Getting to drive an expensive car for an hour? Probably "of value".
RUclipsrs have astonishingly few worries about legalities, the whole "fair use" subject is treated very casually and many people feeling 100% sure behind their FU wall are actually doing stuff that is wide open for civil processes.
Tom Scott's two videos about RUclips the platform, one on Copyright and one on Advertising, explain some of the legalities here. (Short version: RUclipsrs are held to a much higher standard than television studios are. The law is outdated and needs to change.)
Hi Matt. I am 45 now. Few years ago me and a friend of mine decided to resurrect our band from when we were 15 or 16. We recorded the songs and released an album 2 years ago on CD. We were so surprised how many of our friends asked for files or internet link instead of a CDs!
@@debranchelowtone Thanks :) Well, there's only two of us so that simplifies a lot of things. I do my own mixing and music production so that simplified things even more. :D
36:00 That's not always the case, since some youtubers seem to somehow enable copyright protection for everything old they upload on their channels, including cylinder recordings or even 19th century songs played on old music boxes.
Hey Techmoan don’t feel bad about the mistakes you’re making with your cylinder machines, I’m sure I made the same mistakes when I got my first few ones! Good video as always. 👍
@@victor9501 yes I did. When I got my amberola 30 in 2016, it was way out of adjustment and I only had one record at the time. I still have that wrecked record. “Sailing On The Chesapeake Bay”
I look at it from the point of view that I have seen too many people stung by streaming and network based services going unavailable, either temporarily due to a line or modem outage or permanently because a service was shut down due to the company going out of business or because it didn't make enough money. The Edison company stopped producing cylinders a very long time ago but if you have the machine and the cylinder that you want to play then you can still play them. That's one reason why DVDs, CDs, cassettes and even vinyl still persist, even if they no longer get produced in the numbers they once were.
If you want to go the modern way and don't rely on an usure service, just download files or rip CD to and hard disc drive. No need for vinyl or else, you can sell back the CD afterwards. As long as you copy the files to a new HDD before the old one breaks it can be safe.
I have seen many of these machines and have downloaded many mp3s of the cylinders because I was curious about the old recordings. I have never seen any of them actually used, thanks for the demonstration, very interesting!
UPDATE: Quite a number of people commented that the Standard machine has a separate control to set the speed - the lever is just used for on/off. Thanks for this info. As mentioned in the video - if you need to know more about these machines you should consult an expert in the subject…I’m not one of them.
Love the appearance of the tonie!! :)
For best results wind machine 35 revolutions of the crank when fully un wound
As a rule of thumb, anything which was recorded before the first commercially produced electrically recorded 78 rpm record is in the Public Domain, and can be played without needing to pay royalties. Therefore, the cutoff date is somewhere around mid-1926. This includes player piano roll arrangements, which you have not yet covered on this channel. I use some of those for the basis of music arrangements for the street organ which you can see in my avatar.
You do not need to be an expert, just a guy investigating odd finds and even rare finds sometimes. I live vicariously through your hobby. Thanks.
@@RWBHere 1923 is the current date, but most of the 1924 and early 1925 stuff is under the radar.
When cylinder records first came out, they didn't have the mold process figured out so as to be able to duplicate them, so they would set up, say, a dozen machines, bunch the horns all together, and have the band play to thus make a dozen "copies." Then, they would set it all up again and have the band/singer play again to make another batch, etc. So the early cylinders of a particular recording were all different.
wow that's incredible
Yes, and the band would sit in a semi-circle around the recording horns so all the instruments could be heard.
Imagine having the super rare collector recording that includes the sound of flatulence from a member of the musicians. 🤔😂
So if I attained all the records, I would have like 12.0 sound? O_O
@@RUclipsr-ly6tx Edison Atmos
I loved the way old cylinder singers shout out the record label at the beginning of songs. Probably helped scholars and historians later to have that information right on the record.
They still do this in rap music.
Agreed. Just think you wouldn't need a light on in the room to put a record on, just listen to the names and pick the one you want that way.
The information can easily be found on any record sleeve and CD/tape jacket. Many streaming services also have an "about" or "more info" section with info like this.
that audacious pun
@@joeshmoe562 was about to say the same thing lol
"Yowza! Yowza! I'm Bix Biederbecke on the Cornet, backed by the man on the Bone, Ed King; King of the sliiiiiiiiiiide!!!"
"Yo, yo, yo! This is Snoop Doggy Dogg, back by the man on the tables, Dr. Dre; Spin Doctor on the beeeeaats!!!!!!!!!"
History repeats itself
I love that the advertising record is literally just the machine bragging about itself. Classic 1900s flex.
Only 1890's kids will understand.
I'd imagine that is either a demo cylinder that a salesman would play for a potential buyer, or it came with the machine when you bought it.
either way i feel the new 2022 release was better sounding and or indent for the roll than the mp3/streamlining as the internet makes it sound weird/fake
so 1940's media is still not in the public domain no way the guy's are dead by now and if they were alive after 50 years most people/younger generations wouldn't know or probably care to visit ect. and those people that do are kinda different like me/history nerd 🤓😉
😎 it's cool that you can buy repop's of older media as my car had a option for 8-track and LP/vinyl but finding the tape's and useable one's ( and in trying to keep 50 year old automotive parts working is another huddle but one i was considering so i could get the real vibe's on the weekends or at a car show ect. and daily different a digital system the rest of the time ) at that weren't easy ect. and my truck is cuhset/c-d and i figured the best idea was to dich it completely in the truck for digital media player/streaming now im wondering??
"Classic 1900s flex"? More like, classic Edison flex. The man was a great inventor, but also a brilliant marketer, promoter and businessman most of all.
@@nob2243 more marketing than the brains as others seams to be the real inventors
Just a truly fun video from start to finish. These videos are filmed in such an intimate way that it truly feels like we're learning about tech together, rather than someone just regurgitating a Wikipedia article they read back to me.
Well, he was there when the old formats was current 😸 so he speaks from experience.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Techmoan! I have been a sub for a number of years and the content is always top notch.
If you want intimate watch Mat's dashcam reviews, you can go for a Sunday drive with him. Not too intimate though, no rear seats in his Smart car 😂
@@39zack Well, in this case, that would make him around 120 years old at the very least.
@@39zack Ouch!
I am absolutely fascinated with phonographs. The fact that it's completely mechanical gives it some sort of magic.
I'm sure it was back then. Seeing this being run on its own power was probably amazing then.
You should see his video on wind-up gramophones
And acoustic
The capstan amplifier is particularly mind-blowing in its sheer mechanical genius.
As a Christmas gift to my grandpa last year, I cleaned up the cylinder player and record collection that belonged to _his_ grandpa. It was truly amazing to hear music recorded on blocks of wax produced more than a hundred years ago.
Just to make sure, did you research on going about it without damaging the recordings?
@@h8GW a new needle for every record is the best bet push it to 2 if you want to take chances
Blocks of wax?
@MaxW-er1hm phonographs don't have metal needles, they have sapphire or diamond needles.
@@uncled39 well it depends upon the era you're talking about, these definitely have metal needles and so do all (most?)- [and there are also cactus needles fir quieter playback] -crank gramophones.. google it😇
Once you get into electric era though, of course youre right.
"I am the Edison phonograph!" I love that full-blown Mid-Atlantic accent and the exaggerated affect. It's become such an old-timey cliche, it's fun hearing the genuine article and remembering that performers actually did sound like that sometimes.
I think this was in part influenced by the low audio quality. Performers had to speak clearly to the point of exaggeration and make longer pauses to be understandable.
Also, alittle bit of language shift since then.
I love how we had format incompatibility problems over a hundred years ago
True, even cassette tapes had issues with getting chewed up lol
Oh yeah, format wars have always been a thing.
@mipmipmipmipmip These things are working after more than a century later! And they weren't particularly taken care of! Not so much of a "Planned Obsolescence" back then in my opinion. Now though, panned obsolescence is totally a thing.
Format incompatibility is always worse with new things and gets better over time when things become more standardised but sometimes a worse format becomes the standard or there was a format with some advantages that lost.
@mipmipmipmipmip which still does not mean anybody PLANNED on it. It just was a pioneering era of technology where the development is so rapid that if you want the newest and bestest thing you'd have to change every 2, 3 years into something new. You'd pay a premium for the higher quality, but you would GET better quality.
There isn't a similar high speed technological development for media today. But just look at TVs... HD ready, Full HD, 4K, 5K, 8K, coming out with maybe 30 months between them, far faster than anybody would NEED a new television set... it's the same as with the phonographs of various sorts and builds...
UPDATE: Quite a number of people commented that the Standard machine has a separate control to set the speed - the lever is just used for on/off. Thanks for this info. As mentioned in the video - if you need to know more about these machines you should consult an expert in the subject…I’m not one of them.
yeah that makes more sense ...I never even seen or heard of cylinders before. wonder how many formats out there... Maybe you could also cover what live equipment was like back in the day...
I'd look at Techmoan's previous videos, he covers damn near every format imaginable from the normal (cassettes/vinyl) to the truly esoteric like VHD video player, Pioneer MUSE HD LaserDisc, and exotic music players like the Edison cylinder player, Reel to Reel, and Digital Compact Cassette.
Maybe he is not an audio engineer, but you would be hard pressed to find ANY content creator who covers what Techmoan covers. Thank you always for the quality content and your frank manner of presentation!
Thought you'd like to know... I have what I call a "three box" stereo (I don't know the proper term, just your classic dual tape deck + 5-CD changer + tuner set), a record player from my mother's attic (and probably from my grandfather, before that, but I'm not quite sure) although I need to make sure it works, and at least two (and I think three) portable CD players :) I also have multiple anonymous "mini clip MP3 players" from eBay because they fascinate me, but then there's the pair of Rio 500s and the trio of SmartMedia cards to go with them... I should buy more of those cards sometime...
Oh... and my TV has a DVD and VHS combo player under it. I don't bother with cable or satellite, or even an antenna. Nearly everything that's on is either bad news, worse politics, cartoons by people who can't draw, or stuff on the munitions-grade brainrot level that is "Survivor' clones and dumb sitcoms... and what very little actually good stuff there is out there just isn't worth the effort to find. I've a ChromeCast, a gift from a friend, but I've not yet hooked it up... same for the Blu-Ray player I got at the local thrift shop (I think in the UK you call those secondhand stores? Ours is specifically a PTA Thrift Shop here in town, profits go to support the local school system) as I've no actual Blu-Ray media yet!
...and, as I'm sure you've forgotten from the very few emails we exchanged on the subject: YOU are the reason I have a MiniDisc player :) it's quite nice!
Edison was the inventor of recorded sound and was the first to commercialize it with the stuff shown in this video. The oldest recordings in the world were cut on Edison machines. It was later supplanted by flat records. Everything else came after.
Also, when handling the cylinders, try not to touch the grooves of the wax ones (personally I do the two finger V sign method on the inside, it is the best way to handle them. They are super easy to scratch. The bakelite ones are fantastically durable (the Edison "Amberola" brand cylinders or Columbia's "Indestructible" brand records for example). I actually have rebuilt several of these old edison machines at the local museum where I volunteer, they are absolute marvels. Also, as for speed, don't worry about it :) even when these were commonplace, people would just play them at whatever speed sounded right.
Strange how unique electronic music sounds out of this truly analog machine. Absolutely incredible.
"I can transport you to the realms of music" I always wondered where that sample had come from. It was used in a techno song in the early 90s.
It's Edison if course!
"Rhythmic Dance" by Scream Therapy
LOL… vaporwave on cylinder format. Yeah that sounds about right. TechMoan consistently delivers outstanding answers to questions I never knew I had.
Good luck getting any more lo-fi than that.
@@rubiconnn I'd totally pay to see minstrels. Just sayin...
@@thesledgehammerblog 🤔 That's interesting territory..::: Thanks! back to the lab!!🙃
Sigur Ros playing rocks with decently accurate pitches... encoded into spider silk with wind power and rose thorns
The kelp and molluscs based modular synth
Steampunk hurdy-gurdy
@@joshroolf1966 I guess music boxes would work, but I think Wintergatan already has that one covered.
Vapor wave is all about putting stuff on obsolete media.
When I was a history student I had a professor who was passionate about cylinder music preservation, and we would frequently talk about long obsolete and nowadays obscure formats like cylinders and the kinds of obscure record formats that have been covered on this channel. I lost touch with him years ago, but I kind of hope he sees this video because I think he'd get quite a kick out of this.
Shoutout to Dr. Ken Marcus if he does happen to see this. You were an awesome prof, and I loved the song you wrote as an ode to your students at Leiden University.
Hell, he could be the guy with the collection mentioned in the video, not impossible that he couldve moved from a Dutch uni to somewhere in England
I decided to look him up and found his email address. I've sent him a link to the video and explained that I read your comment, as well as what the video is about. Hopefully he sees it!
@@tdp2612 I doubt it. He was a visiting professor (Fullbright) in the Netherlands who ordinarily teaches at a university in California, so he was with us for only one semester (possibly two at most), and considering California history was very much a focus of his career (California cultural/music history in particular) I kind of doubt he'd make such a big move. But of course anything is possible.
I also don't know if he has much of a collection he personally owns, or if it's more something that he has been involved in through his activities as a cultural historian (which can sometimes have perks like getting access to the collections of others ;)), but it sure made for fun classes and conversations. The man is kind of a savant when it comes to the history of music in Los Angeles in particular. He authored a book about it, called Musical Metropolis, that I kind of wish I'd asked him to sign in hindsight. If I remember correctly the CD that comes with the book even contains a number of cylinder recordings he helped preserve. Unfortunately I don't have a CD player anymore, so I can't listen to it, but I'm inclined to just borrow an external DVD drive now so I can have the tracks on my computer.
You often hear people talking about that one professor whose class was life-changing to them. His class was mine in that regard. It came at a time where I was kind of lacking a sense of direction in my academic pursuits, and I definitely found that there. It was also the class that convinced me I wanted to teach history. Forever grateful to him, a really wonderful, passionate, and inspiring professor, and a very kind individual to boot. All the students loved him. He's still frequently talked about today among my cohort, and we were the class of 2014!
@@ayoitscat That's awesome! I hope he does!
Did you ever get back in touch with the professor?
Okay. Considering the age of this format, I’m genuinely impressed by the audio quality.
Seriously, in 2022, I’ve had cell phone calls over VoLTE and heard microphone recordings on computers with worse quality than these things.
They can be surprisingly good quality if you find a relatively unworn cylinder.
At 27:08, this is not the speed control. This is a common thing about later Edison standards. That is just the on/off lever, the speed control is actually that knob to the left that has that curved piece of metal at the end of it. When you bring that out, it will increase the speed by bringing two felts out. This will cause the governor disc to expand out more due to the centripetal force from the weights. The on/off lever will not provide speed control as the governor disc will just push it back out to fully open. You’re lucky to have such a nice model H reproducer on the Edison standard that still has the original green coating over the reproducer. If you’d like, I could possibly send you some blank cylinders and a recorder to make your own home recordings. Also, there is no way to tell manufacture date, but I have access to when each machine left the factory. Your Edison gem (G199279) left the factory in November 1906. Judging the popularity of Gem Model B’s, it was most likely manufactured in October 1906.
Oh yes, we need to see Mat recording onto a cylinder! Great idea
@@mattgreen5351 Didn't he already do that, in a way? In that video about that educational plastic cup/cylinder player thing from Japan, I think. Was quite amusing, I would like him to try and do it on a proper cylinder as well
@@real_yanoosh6553 yeah, a look at how it should really work would be nice. That plastic cup thing was around the quality I'd expect from a museum gift shop.
@@Milamberinx on my channel I have many videos of me recording music and speech onto a blank cylinder and playing it back
was going to say this exact thing about the speed controller
Crazy to think that those old cylinders were recorded WITHOUT ELECTRICITY and you are able to play them back without electricity. Same goes for old phonograph records until around 1924-25 when the microphone became common. (Well, at least in theory - they might have used electricity for a more stable motor, but it all worked without current, too.)
Not really
Electricity is quite new to us
The Aluminum used in the horn would cost about 20 times what it costs now, because it was manufactured using an electrical process.
50 years before this, aluminum was worth more than gold, because it could only be made chemically.
True! The mechanical, acoustic phonograph is actually an amazing feat of "low" tech. When the power goes out, Light the oil lamps, and crank up the Victrola! FUN FACT: These old record players can actually be fairly loud. Being non-electronic, they lack precise volume control. An old method of reducing the volume was to put a rag or a sock into the horn. This is where the phrase "Put a sock in it!" to mean "be quiet" comes from.
Hm, I suppose there's no reason someone in ancient Rome couldn't have developed some sort of wax cylinder phonograph, if they considered how sound vibrates things and thought to try building something like Edison's phonograph. But it seems no one did until the 19th century.
Piezo speakers/buzzers can easily be modified into surface-mount pickups to give an analog output that can connect to a stereo system (into a pre-amp first, of course).
If you experimented with placement location on the reproducer horn or the needle's frame, I bet you'd be able to get some really good quality results that a horn just can't capture. It wouldn't be audiophile by any stretch, but still much better frequency response than a reproducer horn could ever achieve. I'm certain there's some low midrange and bass captured on those cylinders that isn't heard via the horn.
Since this channel isn't about form-factor purism/snobbery, I think it would be a worthwhile experiment.
Or he could play the mp3
@@MushookieMan I don't think his record player can play MP3s. 🧐
Sarcasm aside, if this were a review of the music itself then I would agree with you.
But since it is a review of the format (as a trendy resurgence), I think there's merit to be had in deeper exploration of the audio quality captured on those cylinder records that the tinny reproducer horns may be hiding.
You probably also could improve the regularity and timing of the spin (exact numbers of rotations instead of "best guess"/"sounds like a normal voice" attempts) by building a modern repro using electric motors directly on the cylinder instead of the belt drive. Maybe even mount the cylinder vertically for the looks if you do not use a horn but an digital readout for the reproducer-signal... just for the geekery or it, of course, but then people truly buy into the whole "vinyl just sounds better, man" nonsense and are going nuts over it... paying hundreds of dollars for collections they could get as MP3 for a tiny percentage...
I was also wondering how's the sound quality on the cylinder without the bad quality reproducer. Here's a video that I found of somebody modifying a vinyl stylus to pickup the sound from the cylinder. Sounds like the quality on the cylinder isn't that much better than through the horn. 😂
ruclips.net/video/Qpss20lSs7I/видео.html
Well, it would certainly be great to listen to Edison's voice with better sound quality! Interesting that in cylinder players & 78s, the frequency response was probably flatter than on LPs & 45s. These use RIAA equalisation to reduce the lower frequencies & boost the higher ones during recording, & do the opposite during playback.
I don’t know why but this technology just seems so impressive. Just seeing the gears and governors is amazing.
Amazing to think that the basic concept of this thing, never really changed right up to the 1980's when CD's started to replace records. Right up to the 80's, the concept of a needle(stylus) wiggling in a groove to reproduce the sound never really changed at all from these cylinder things. Sure, better processes, stereo grooves, electro-magnetic pickups etc, but the concept was still the same - a wiggling needle in a groove to reproduce the sound. Possibly one of the oldest and most successful(in terms of longevity) recording mediums. I still have all my LP records from the 80's when I was a teenager. I never threw them out. I WOULD have also saved all my father's 78's had he not thrown them all out one day when none of us in the family knew he did it!
@@VauxhallViva1975 Yeah, even more so that there’s nothing wrong with the tech and unlike a lot of CD players or cassette players, the original materials still work. No disc rot or tape rot to worry about, or rubber parts melting into sticky black goo after decades. These things have lasted 80 years and could probably hold up for 80 more. It’s just impressive what we could come up with to make music more accessible.
Electronics is much more amazing, but since you can't see it, even if you understand how it works, you can't visualize it.
Clockwork gear is visual, it's 3D and makes sense in a way that that other tech seems more "abstract".
@VaderxG I do think it's great that music is more accessible (payment to artists aside) but the transient nature of distribution is something that I feel is kind of sad. I assume there will be no one who can fix CD players in the future because no one will be making the laser assemblies, so at some point even if CDs are still around, there may be no way to easily retrieve the data. Streaming abstracts it a whole other level, where we're counting on corporations to keep copies for us and hope that licensing deals don't cause music to disappear into the ether.
I don't fetishize physical media too much, but it just strikes me as something that someone should worry about. Even this video could disappear in the future, whether because RUclips is bought and shut down by some mega corporation in the future, or simply because some executive thinks its absurd for them to keep videos more than 20 years old online and decides to start culling old material. It's possible that at some point the only copy will be the one Techmoan has kept as part of the production process, assuming he even archives the videos after he uploads them.
I don't really have a value judgement I guess, but it's just interesting to me that in 2122, it's more likely someone will be able to play a wax cylinder of that vaporwave song than they would an MP3 or CD of the same song.
@@God-yb2cg Maybe now I understand the appeal of Steampunk, because looking at the player I get the feeling that if I had to, I could build it. Meanwhile I'd have no idea how to even start with a PCB and soldering iron if someone told me to build a CD player.
I have to respect the dude you bought that machine off, I'm a die hard tape head with a rather nice stereo set up at home and my mates all think I'm absolutely mad. My hat goes off to this chap who only listens to tunes on tube pre war.
This video has brought back some great memories of mine. My late grandfather was an engineer at Westinghouse in the 1950s and 1960s and was an amateur radio buff, but his fascination was in music. Besides maintaining a meticulous collection of antique radios, he had numerous phonographs and other machines (like a nickelodeon orchestrion and a restored player piano he had rebuilt) and a massive collection of cylinders and rolls. Growing up and getting to see how these old machines worked was fascinating, and they still bring a smile to me even today. When we were forced to liquidate the estate and the collection, we honestly weren't sure what would happen in the future as far as preservation of these machines goes. Glad to see there are still companies making reproductions and that there is a small contingent of folks who are making new music on them. It's so eclectic, I love it!
One of the best videos you've ever made sir!
Watching this makes me think - how magical was it for the people in 1905 to sit down and listen to pre-recorded music? We take it all for granted today, everything that technology has brought us. But back then it was like actual magic. Incredible when you sit down and think about it :)
Exactly, really fascinating to see and hear from this amazing technology. So long ago yet modern at the same time.
Thomas Edison might’ve been a dick, but it’s hard not to get goosebumps reading the story of the day he first tested his phonograph. It’s said that he did so in front of his engineer the moment he got the machine made; he sung Mary Had a Little Lamb at the top of his lungs and then set it to play. They both were so taken aback by the machine actually singing it back to them that they just listened to it, and his first reaction was along the lines of “so THAT’S how I sound?!”
There was already digital music at the time, and quite large copyright issues, digital music was taxed at 2 cents per piece to try and provide funds to artists who had their IP stolen.
It was magical, but still relatively common place, and big business.
@@coast2coast00 are you referring to the player piano reel copyright controversy?
@@yoymate6316 Another thing we take for granted but it's weird to think that in hundreds of thousands of years, no one had ever heard their actual voice.
My grandmother still has a cylinder player. It's a big wooden case, with the player in the top and a cabinet in the bottom to store the cylinders. We never really listened to anything on it. But we always liked opening it up and playing something when people would visit the house. I should take a look and go through the cylinders and see what's on all of them next time I visit.
Goodness, how old is grandma?
I think my Grandma may have one too. Although, never tried using it. I think it sits in her closet.
I'm guessing she got it from her parents or grandparents?
Is it an Edison? sounds like an Amberola of some sort: if it's a 1A or 1B, that's fantastic.😃
Your grandma's name is Elizabeth? )
Wow, that is impressive. The ancient player actually gives the music completely different tonal timbre. Most fascinating.
38:33 I'd heard a sample of that phrase "...always hear the voices of your loved ones, even though they are far away." on a piece of electro/synth music, and wondered where it was from, assuming it to be from a film, as was often the case in that genre. Now, I know for sure.
Sounds like it would be on a Pogo song
"I can sing you tender songs of love. I can give you merry tales and joyous laughter. I can transport you to the realms of music."
I'm 90% sure this was sampled in a Caravan Palace song.
Can someone link the song?
My parents bought three different wind up record players in the late '60's: an Edison 2-minute cylinder, an Edison "thick" disc, and a big "modern" 78 player. Playing with those as a kid probably influenced my pursuing a career as a mechanical engineer. I'm not sure that I was impressing my friends as a teenager in the '80's, though, when I cranked up the antiques. All of those machines, along with plenty of media for them, are now here in my house. With their simplicity, they are more likely to play just fine after years of neglect than anything with old capacitors. Despite their presence here, the non-romantic reality is that I stream nearly 100% of my music, just like everyone else. There have been many clever formats along the way, and I encourage format-fans to relish their hobbies, however, the erosion of physical media is a reflection that the content has always actually been the point for most consumers. I thank Techmoan for so enthusiastically cataloging the history of physical media, great and small!
The "thick" phonograph records you are speaking of is a diamond disc player. The needle was mounted at a 90 degree angle to the record and floated in the producer. Mine is in a floor model fumed oak case.
60s, not 60's. 80s, not 80's.
Sixties, not Sixtie's. Eighties, not Eightie's.
Today I am claiming this gentleman to be the 'Guru" of sound formats. A wealth of knowledge and physical devices.
I pray that years from now when all of the older generations of us have passed on, everything that he owns and has showcased will be preserved for generations to come. Salute.
Wow I absolutely love this video, the history with the cylinder player and the fact bands try and release these old formats
I love the fact there are enthusiasts that will produce stuff like this. And people like you who appreciate it.
I found the promotional cylinder played over your typical end credits to be fascinatingly haunting. The sound of technology over a century old, set against a showcase of formats that were yet to be.
Thank you for a most entertaining and interesting presentation. For the first 12 years of my life my family lived in a rural location with no electricity supply - a wind-up gramophone was an important part of the home entertaiinment! We moved in 1956 to a flat that had electricity and one of the first things that dad bought was a Regentone radiogram - we were in seventh heaven!
I appreciate that you put "paid promotion" on the video. It's what everyone who gets free stuff should do. Keep it up!! Thanks Mat, excellent video.
He is required per UK law
The trouble is, is that looking at the box he checked, the statement is false. There was no sponsorship, product placement or endorsement. RUclips is being very fuzzy with it's definitions and there is a contrast of what it says ("anything of value") and what it specifically asks. They really need a "product received for free" button because there is a huge difference between a review or commentary on an item received for free and someone being paid to promote a product. One, the person is free to say what they one, the other, they have a script they have to follow. That they both use the same "includes paid promotion" banner is really misleading.
I agree very much! There's a big difference between receiving a review copy and being free to share your viewpoints, which is common in in the tech industry, and actually promoting something. There's a channel I've watched, "Lon TV" -who does it really well, he always says something like 'full disclosure I have received free of charge from , however the opinions are my own, no one has paid for this review, and no one has reviewed or approved this video.'
Edit: Had to remove the (.) between Lon and TV because RUclips was making it out to be a link when it's just his channel name.
@@Raletia Yeah, a lot of channels use that wording or similar, which I appreciate! Tells you what you need to know to properly assess the review, which the youtube provided button really doesn't.
This is taking lofi to another level. Super impressive!
Great video! There's something magical about hearing such old recordings, just knowing that there probably won't be anyone alive anymore that will have played those back in the day. Just like with very old photographs, these are some of the oldest bits of (literally) recorded history.
And it is kind a cool that some artist keep making this stuff, even knowing that 99% of it will never be played. I realized myself a few years ago that physical media was going away when I wanted to buy a new audio system with CD-player, and I recently found out that both my 20+ year old DVD-player and somewhat more recent Bluray-player had died, and I have nothing anymore to play my 1000+ discs on. And sure, digital/streaming formats are more practical, but I nevertheless still like having a physical product. And it's not just about having a true product in your hands, my CD-collection represents over 3 decades of my life. A playlist just doesn't feel the same...
You could get a 4K Blu Ray player that should play most format from VCD to UHD, and also audio CD. My Sony UHD player plays virtually anything I throw at it including UHD video and music from a USB stick.
When I worked at the Beeb the Sound Archive library had a cylinder player built by BBC engineers so that their collection could be transferred to tape on demand. It had a modern Shure cartridge with various stylii for the best reproduction. In this case the cylinder pulled the cartridge along via a parallel tracking arm.
I feel like the quality should be higher, are some frequencies lost in the recording - given it was never intended for music but as a commercial dictation machine in the first instance !
Seen that too on a visit to Perivale !
Got a photo of it somewhere ....
edprogs1, I remember seeing that being designed and made around 1987. The parallel tracking system was a modified Revox one from one of their vinyl decks. The two channel coils in the Shure carridge were wired in what woujld normally be anti-phase to take account of the fact that the grove modulation is only vertical on the cylinder system. A bit of trivia: - The department head at that time became one of the founders and still present owner of PMC loudspeakers.
@@johnr6168 fascinating. And much more reliable and high fidelity than sticking a mic in the horn I presume!
Yes, the quality was surprisingly good, and if you used the Cedar noise reduction system most of the crackles could be eliminated.
FYI, in this situation it’s not a worm gear (there’s no worm wheel being driven) it’s a lead screw, converting rotary motion to linear motion.
Awesome video though, thanks for all you do!
"A worm drive is a gear arrangement in which a worm (which is a gear in the form of a screw) meshes with a worm wheel (which is similar in appearance to a spur gear). The two elements are also called the worm screw and worm gear. The terminology is often confused by imprecise use of the term worm gear to refer to the worm, the worm wheel, or the worm drive as a unit.
The worm drive or "endless screw" was invented by either Archytas of Terentum, Apollonius of Perga, or Archimedes, the last one being the most probable author."
I think that the name "endless screw" is also a very good description as you would instantly know that the mechanism from the video have nothing to do with "endless screw".
@@Bialy_1 I'm not sure how this quote helps matters. Using the terminology given, there is no worm wheel in Techmoan's setup. The lead screw drives a stationary "nut" to drive the nut linearly.
As a fan of the genre, Matt saying "v a p o r w a v e" just made my day.
Not a fan of the DMOD community I suppose. Poor Matt. 😅 DMOD= Dead Malls of Discord. Recording the dying malls/dead malls and retailers for posterity's sake.
@@Stevie-J couldn’t that be said about every genre once it’s codified and commercially successful?
Plus, it erases the experimentation and differentiation which is going on within vaporwave, which isn’t exactly regarded as a whole genre unto itself anymore but rather as an umbrella term, much like a rock enthusiast specifying exactly which flavour and era they like.
But if your preference is for anti-meta genre-defying experimental stuff, then I’ve plenty of respect for you.
Though I will add that if any of them still use music theory or common chord progressions, there’s generations of experimental composers who’d still refer to them as reusing safe ideas and not coming up with their own, no matter how interesting the instrumentation or rhythms are.
There’s always layers upon layers, every artist has to choose which conventions they’ll stick to and which ones they’ll challenge.
@@Stevie-J It's not all sampling if that's not your thing. I would encourage you to check out dreampunk for something that preserves the same aesthetic but consists of original sound design. 2814 is a good place to start.
Vektroid's most recent album, Seed and Synthetic Earth, is also a banger and it's a shame more people don't know about it.
I agree with physical music mainly being merchandise. I collect records because it's a cool way to listen to music while supporting artists in a much more direct way than streaming.
I still buy CDs after so many songs I like being removed from streaming services and put on others…
@@ShockingPikachu I had several songs disappear from my Amazon account and that was a good reminder that even if I bought them digital they are still not mine.
Happy to have CDs of most of my music.
@@isegrim1978 and it’s not just songs it’s also very specific versions of songs. For example they choose remasters over original prints and a lot of the time the remasters muddy the mix and the quiet parts are too loud and just not great. Only way to get some of them is physical
Very few bands make money from album sales. Unless you're buying the vinyl from their personal website or a live show you're actually supporting them less directly than streaming.
I just pirate my music. Easy and free.
Interestingly enough (to me at least!) it has recently been announced that the biggest selling "physical" music media is now no longer CDs, but Vinyl. Whether people listen to them or not is a different matter, but they are at least buying them!
The timeline for commercial consumer records: 2 minute 1896-1911. 4 minute 1908-1929.
4 minute disc record (12" 78) 1903-1955.
record 9727 dates from early 1907.
The Gem was introduced around 1899 and through model updates through 1911.
The speed control is under the metal bed plate to the left. The switch lever is to switched fully on with the control underneath set to 160 RPM.
There were also Edison Disc Records from 1912 to 1929. They functioned quite differently to 78s
@@AaronSmart.online Agreed. I only referred to the Edison 2/4 minute cylinders against the shellac 12" disc as it was a reference as to what was immediately discussed.
@@AaronSmart.online Yep! The Edison "Diamond Discs" used vertical deflection of the stylus (as did the Edison cylinder format,BTW!) Every other 78 RPM disks used horizontal deflection. "Diamond Disks" can be damaged on non Edsion record players. Also, they are about twice as thick as normal 78s. Fun Fact: Modern stereo records use BOTH verticle and horizontal deflection.
@@tedrobinson372 You could add the Edison "Diamond Discs" to your time line, as it WAS a separate format. They are not compatible with regular 78s. They were 80 RPM and like the cylinder records, a gear, NOT the groove drove the tonearm. It's an interesting format.
@@jamesslick4790 I've played them on my KD-2070 that I modded to cover 78 rpm. The 3.0 mil 78 stylus is close enough to the 3.5 mil Diamond radius that it plays well. The cartridge needs to be stereo so that one side channel can be inverted. After that, the two channels are combined which reduces the surface noise somewhat. Audacity makes inversion and averaging pretty easy. Another thing that came up was that this pre-dates equalization and certainly RIAA eq. so a straight preamp without eq. is nice, allowing eq. entirely in Audacity. Finally, that signal is Massive! I needed attenuation ahead of the pre-amp. It's almost like running an old ceramic cartridge.
For fun I should put my disk's contents up on RUclips to see what happens.
I love this idea, I recently bought a ZX81 game distributed on cassette from an independent publisher in the UK. I have nothing to play it on (they sent me the download link so I could play it on an emulator) but owning the physical media is quite magical, and I'm of an age were I bought these myself back when they were current. Not sure I'd go to the extreme of buying a phonograph!
What game was that I still have my zx81, vic20, Commodores c128 which i added a BBC b and BBC master too.
There wasn't much magical about trying 20 times to get a game to load from tape on the Spectrum. Or when it did wait 3 minutes for it to finish loading. I have no nostalgia for that.
If you like DIY hobby computers, there are ZX81 clone kits you can buy and build now! I built a ZX80 kit a while ago, it's a lot of fun if you're into that.
@@Safetytrousers It's not much different these days when you take system boot time and all the splash screens into account.
No idea where the trying 20 times to get a game to load comes from, either. Unless that was a Spectrum thing, my C64 and cousin's Amstrad always went first time unless the tape drive was dirty, which wasn't often.
Was that Planet X2 from the 8 Bit guy? I bought the same thing, likewise I have nothing to play it on.
I'm amazed by the deceptive simplicity of these machines, and also your presentation style and content is ever increasing in quality (including the mini-matt-the-editor at the corner!)
The first thing I wonder.... Where on earth are the band getting these manufactured? It's a great effort to get them done!
It might be www.vulcanrecords.com (but I'm just guessing).
One day we'll probably reach a point where the resolution of 3D printing is high enough to manufacture cylinders and records.
@@Simplebutsandy And maybe the player 😯
@@Simplebutsandy
That's almost impossible and doesn't make much sense to do either. That printer will cost more than a record cutter and a normal printer together.
@@westelaudio943 actually it makes a lot of sense. You wouldn't get those just to cut records obviously. But a lot of places would have those anyway and for such small merch runs it would be easier and cheaper to just book printing time on those machines.
Up until about 4 years ago I still regularly bought all of my music and hadn't switched over to streaming. One thing that I found funny was that, rather than buying just a digital album from Amazon/iTunes/etc., it was often cheaper to buy the CD from Amazon which usually included a digital download of the music. So even fairly recently I ended up with a decent collection of CDs despite mostly listening to my music digitally.
CDs are digital.
I still always prefer cd's but the convenience of streaming music now is hard to bypass and the quality is surprisingly good!
If I remember correctly, iTunes actually sometimes offers higher than cd quality digital albums, which could have some extra value to people. I personally prefer to buy physical or digitally from band camp. It's amazing how many CDs you can buy for a pound in charity shops.
@@westelaudio943 They are, but I think they mean 320kbps MP3s vs CD quality, which is higher. I usually convert the CD to FLAC and then my streaming is via a higher end DAC, so the music sounds good everywhere.
I just prefer having something physical in my hand, and CDs are so cheap I just buy them up because I know the same fate as cassettes awaits them they'll soon disappear off store shelves. I still prefer cassette tapes, mostly due to me still driving cars so old they have tape decks in them.
Wow. I love recording technology, I have worked on many records over the years, but I never really was interested in Edison Cylinders. Listening to "Who Do You Love?" though, it felt like listening to a real piece of history. It was literally a bit of a transcendent experience, listening to the past, the precursor of everything I've done in my career and enjoyed in my life with music. Thank you, sometimes I learn something about myself when I watch this channel, as much as I learn about the technology.
For me, I always try to listen to music on Edison cylinder when possible - I find the sound much “warmer” than cold and soulless digital, tape, or vinyl recordings.
Too new-wave and hissy. I only listen to my stuff on hand-chiseled granite tablets.
If you're looking to get into it, slate is a cheaper way to start.
I listen music in sauna.
I dig down deep in the earth and listen to the rumbles.
@@harveywallbanger3123 Better make sure it's Welsh slate though - you need that cool, wet, flinty sound that you just don't get from new-fangled foreign slate...
@A J What? you don't have an orchestra?
"If you are able to play a CD people might think you're a bit odd." I guess I should feel pretty odd indeed, since I picked up a 110-year-old Victrola record player from an antique shop, and now have about 12-15 shellac records...
your channel is part of why i still support youtube, your content is brilliant and well thought out. thanks for the history lesaon along with the novelty of something id love to indulge time, money and space into these items but i cant, thanks buddy, i wish you the best.
The first cylinder sounded a lot better than I thought it was going to sound. I actually did see someone on Tik-Tok the other day demonstrate a 2-speed Edison player.
Mat, I love your story telling. So detailed and explanatory. I too tell stories like this. You're a pleasure to listen to/watch. I really enjoy your videos
This is my favourite channel on RUclips. Thank you for what you do mate
I really, really would love to hear "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" on a cylinder player.
Bird is the word?
I expected him to play something modern like Rhiana but I know that would be impossible because of copyright strike, still would have been hilarious tho
Darude - Sandstorm
@@-Tris- Honestly I wonder how fast that would wear down the reproducer.
@@HUYI1 i was hoping to see the call for heIp clip
Before this video the only time I’d heard sounds from an Edison cylinder is the song “I Can Hear You” by They Might Be Giants which they recorded with their full (acoustic) band at the Edison Laboratory in NJ. Of course I heard it on a CD so I’ve yet to hear how this actually sounds in person!
@@samuelfellows6923 While not the recording on the album, you can search RUclips for "They Might Be Giants - I Can Hear You (Live)" to see performance on the Daily Show recorded to wax cylinder to see the band and arrangement, likely near identical to the album version.
TMBW has an article on the "Wax Cylinder Recordings" that has some additional info. "Singing directly into a huge horn (a precursor to the modern microphone), John Flansburgh lead the band through I Can Hear You. Next up, John Linnell sang James K. Polk. A strong tuba line punctuated the bottom end, highlighted by a tuba/vocal break in the middle. The band finished the session with a smooth version of The Edison Museum featuring vocals by "The Pride of the Oranges" (as John Flansburgh introduced him), WFMU's Nick Hill. After finishing each recording, the cylinder was taken over to a window ledge to cool. While waiting it to harden sufficiently for playback, the band, NPS staff and the audience enjoyed very informal question and answer sessions."
They recorded 4 songs, only "I can Hear You" made it to the album Factory Showroom, but the other 3 were eventually released in other ways, such as part of their podcasts.
This car is protected by viper!
ruclips.net/video/YiB5QC3UOGk/видео.html here they are using a reproducer to do it live
Guess where I am? I'm calling from the plane! I'll call you when I get there.
what's your order? I can supersize that. please bring your car around
The message on the last cylinder is so poignant.
120 years later and technology is still making the same promises and can we truly say that it has delivered and does that truly matter or is it the experience that were after?
These videos are probably my favorite part of Saturday morning. Thank you for the interesting and entertaining content!
I swear Mat is getting to the stage where he will end up being the guy to contact if you want to transcribe anything from an unusual music format
I'm waiting for a point where he does a video on some music format that an archeologist found that reads stone etchings. 🤣
He'll definitely say he doesn't want to go into that line of work but honestly he might be your best chance for something like that!
Flippin' 'eck!
@@haweater1555 there was a episode of x files that had a similar plot but it was jesus bringing the Lazarus back from the dead and they used a fictional laser scanner to read it
@@haweater1555 CSI might have based that episode against some experiments being made on clay pots from archaeological excavations.
One downside with streaming is that the version or the song you like may suddenly vanish due to copyright or other issues. The flash drive should serve to record some stuff. One thing I've allways wanted to do is record a piece on an authentic edison machine and at the same time on a high quality device. Digitise both then use a computer to create a 'correction' curve between them so that if that curve is applied to an old cylinder recording, it should bring it back to a normal range/sound.
The recording on the outro really sets off the tinnitus in one of my ears, marvellous stuff!
If the bloke that sold that machine reads this, please consider letting techmoan film at your location with you telling the story about some of the items. If you want to remain anonymous I bet Techmoan will blur your face or omitt your likeness when filming. It would make a quite interesting video.
These old formats give me a really comfortable retro chill when watching. I really respect you for putting these together and I hope you'll keep them comming for quite some time. Thank you.
I've seen so many weird formats I never heard of before on this channel, it was hard to believe we didn't already have a video on those.
I've never heard of this device before, I've seen the old record player with the gold cylinder on them but not this format so it's intriguing for me
@@HUYI1 The early ones were made from actual wax which break when dropped (also the discs) before they went with vinyl and the like. So they were expensive, sounded awful, were very short duration and could easily break. And that's how it started...
Couple weeks ago I was reminded how amazing physical formats are. Tell me, on what streaming service you can get gems like my LP "The Old Bolsheviks' Recollections of Lenin"? Played maybe twice since 1971, mint sleeve with painting of V.I.Lenin, urging workers on. The best disc in my collection by far, even before you listen to the content on it, which is hysterical.
It's fun to collect vinyl oddities. Somehow I've found myself collecting LPs with the recordings made during NASA space missions. Just found one in Dutch, pretty sure it doesn't exist on any popular streaming service. Everyone thinks I'm nuts.
@@albanana683 78rpm (and various other speeds) make up a good portion of my collection. I love finding things that aren't available anywhere else, and then resharing them with the world.
I do get what you mean by cassettes and other outdated forms of media being merchandise and I'm probably guilty of collecting them as that (though I do play them often). I am genuinely happy when I purchase a new album on cassette, slot it into my Walkman, and find it was reproduced with care. The experience of listening to a cassette, while possibly much less precise than digital, is more fun for me and knowing that someone put work into improving my listening experience is heartwarming. Thanks for getting me into the format three or so years ago!
I’ve known about wax cylinders for some time. I had no idea they were tapered to prevent slipping. I’ve learnt something!👍
That fellow you were describing whom you bought the player from sounds like quite a character! I hope he one day speaks up about why he enjoys prewar tubes over everything else, or does a collection video, would love to see it!
I went so long not listening to cds, that I was blown away when I started listening to them again. Sound quality is so much better than pretty much any other format imo
Probably because it's not compressed. Most audio formats use lossy compression algorithms that toss out part of the data to save space, but lose some quality in the process. Now, you can compress data in such a way that you get back _exactly_ what you originally put in, but it won't compress as well. We're talking a difference of 5-10% vs 50-60% of the size of the original for lossy vs lossless.
General data compression formats like ZIP, RAR and 7Z are all lossless. There's no way to know what kind of data the user might throw at it, so there's no room for throwing anything out. All you can do is find patterns in the data and store them more compactly.
Images, audio and video, however, are well-defined domains that have been subject of extensive research into what can and can't be thrown out and still having acceptable results. Said extensive research has also uncovered methods for compressing images and audio losslessly better than you'd get from a general algorithm.
PNG actually uses the same underlying algorithm as ZIP, but adds a few processing stages in front to turn general image data into something that's both easier to compress, and most importantly, _reversible,_ so a PNG decoder can reconstruct the original image data from the compressed file. FLAC, on the other hand, is wholly designed for audio. It finds a compact approximation of a chunk of the input and stores that along with a compact encoding of the difference between the approximation and the input. Combine the two, and you can reconstruct the original data.
This is so cool. I am fortunate enough to have heard one of these in person ages ago at a collector's house. It was really nice to hear about your experience. I can imagine how these things would have felt pretty magical back when they were new.
And surprisingly enough, I ran into some of these cylinders in a museum the same day after watching the video, so I understood What I was looking at with the 2 minute vs 4 minute versions.
I really love how you take us on the journey with you with these sorts of videos.
I'm too young to have ever owned physical music, and my idea of ownership is getting a DRM-free flac file. But this channel endlessly fascinates me. Always well thought out glimpses into interesting technology.
My idea of ownership is burning that flav file on cd and playing it on my Blu-ray player.
And now we wait for the retro tech channels to try loading Ultima onto a C64 from an Edison cylinder.
That would be another level of self-inflicted pain. And hilarious. :-)
You nailed it with the novelty aspect of physical releases. I love to buy colorful records and cassettes, and do play them for fun sometimes, but really listen to the .flac files that accompany them.
Same for me. I do occasionally play my records, I have a perfectly good turntable after all. But 99% of my purchases are simply to enjoy the large format physical artwork and to support the artists since streaming pays so poorly.
But I spend all my time listening to mp3s/flac or streaming if I'm away from home. 😂
i have a friend who is a rockabilly artist. he has released some singles over the past couple of years in 78 r.p.m. format which is not a simple format to use with modern turntables. thanks for bringing this format to light.
Amazing video from start to finish. When you first played the cylinder, all I heard was the purest form of music. Amazing to see how far we’ve come in so little time.
This video was extremely enjoyable to watch! Thanks Mat! Also congrats for being #17 on trending!
Very interesting, I have a friend who has a few cylinder gramophones. Apart from the original cylinders of the time, he has made some molds and makes his own hard wax cylinders, shaves them and then engraves or cuts them with an engraving head with the songs he likes the most, he has achieved an extraordinary fidelity. He has recorded a 2-minute cylinder for me with the song "Yesterday" by The Beatles and it sounds extraordinarily good. A very entertaining video. Greetings.
Cylinder phonograph not gramophone.Gramophone refers to a machine that plays flat disc records!
Is this the oldest music format you've featured on your channel? I really enjoyed this one. I wish I could live long enough to see if any vcr, cassette player, etc. could be fixed up to play more than a hundred years after they were made. I seriously doubt it.
Well it's the oldest one I have - although you might remember I mentioned in a Patreon update video about an even older format playing Cuba Baion ruclips.net/video/aDg7Op5oWZ4/видео.html
So I'm sort-of connected to that happy occurrence in a very minor way.
It's the oldest audio format in existence, so... :-D There were two formats released in 1888, the Graphophone format, which used wax on paper cylinders, and the 2-minute Phonograph cylinders. After a bit of fighting over patents a patent sharing deal was made, and the Graphophone format was abandoned.
The ones Techmoan has are post 1900, so they are made of plastic, and not wax, but the format is the same otherwise, as far as I understand.
@@charlesachurch7265 Yeah, but that's not a format. It's just a theory that sound may have been recorded. Also, people who investigated how sounds worked in the 18th/19th century made trails on papers from sound, and they have been converted back to (very bad) sound. But it's not a format.
Next up, player piano!
@@Techmoan Hello, maybe the Phonautographe, but it's a recording only device.
There is just something that is fun to watch with these videos, I can't explain it, but I can feel it.
Vintage technology. When people actually had to work with a physical medium, as opposed to just sending you some 1s and 0s over the Internet.
22:30 Techmoan straight up making Eccojams with an Edison Machine. funny that the video centres around a vaporwave track too
Really enjoyed this video! I have never heard the expression “takes the biscuit” ha but will immediately start working that into conversation. Congrats on 1.2m!! Oh and thank you for putting that mp3 of the song on for comparison.
Biscuit is a different thing here in the UK. Its more like what the Americans call Cookie.
Actually the American word for Biscuit is correct- Bi-Scuit. Stale bread that's been double cooked - Bi cooked/cooked twice. Roman treat.
The word cookie is Dutch.
@@tonyjones9442 very interesting and good to know thank you!
Great video Matt, I've heard of these but it's a generally long forgotten technology and that made me think, these are well over a hundred years old now and still work. Imagine the state of todays tech in 2140. Pretty awesome thinking about it. Thanks for doing what you do 👊
Most of todays music collections will be unplayable in 5-10 years (when the company streaming it goes bust) let alone 100....
This was absolutely fascinating! It's so cool learning about these types of things and watching you figure out how these things work and troubleshoot them. This was just... lovely, and i never knew such a type of record existed! Thank you, Matthew!
Fascinating, what a great video! I'd love more of the really old formats on your channel (please).
This is a stunning vid! All the effort you put in is well appreciated.
sir you are a genius and a scholar in comparison to half the folks on this platform who claim to know everything that there is to knno about whatever thier content represents/discusses.
incredible channel, fantastic host.
Wonderful! I remember this machine and a Victrola on my Mom's older aunt living room when I was a small kid (circa 1974). Cute machines. Too bad those machines were out of order and I don't remember if some shellac or cylinder was played on them ever.
Victrolas are for shellac 78s.
Love the Cylinder records. I’ve got a few. I have to say that hearing new music on a cylinder record…priceless.
I knew as soon as you started talking about releasing music on obscure formats that it would be a vaporwave artist, lol. Vaporwave itself is essentially a ‘meme genre’ of music even if it’s grown considerably from its origins, so making an Edison cylinder or floppy disk release is just another meme :)
"I wonder if anyone's ever found anything interesting inside one of these"
Didn't find it inside of an edison, but inside of an old columbia 78 player. I found some wartime newspapers and a shorthand school notebook
I've heard of people finding (old!) cash and even a wedding ring. Most common is old needles, records in the larger machines and grease/oil.
I love watching your channel. It’s like my favourite programme as a kid. Tomorrow’s World, but in reverse.
Including the things that go wrong.
Yesterdays World 😀
It seems not so long ago - but it probably was - that Edison cylinder machines were common in antique shops. Thanks Techmoan for this fun video.
It’s amazing what I could learn from cylinders in under 40 minutes. My friend has an Edison player and some cylinders, but just watching this now I can say to him someday ”You are doing it wrong! Let me show, mate!”. Thanks :)
Wow! This was a timely RUclips post! I’ve been enjoying your videos for about two years now after someone gave me a Pioneer RT-909 and your appreciation of that deck encouraged me to restore it. I love it by the way! Well… just a couple of days ago I got my first cylinder player, an Amberola Model 30. I was wondering if anyone way currently releasing modern recordings on this medium and know I know they are! You’ve pointed me toward another rabbit hole! Cheers!
This was super enjoyable to watch. I barely knew these existed, and it was really cool to see something purely mechanical make sounds that sounded like... anything! Physical media definitely seems to be going the way of novelty, and I'm cool with that. I definitely grew up with CDs being the standard format (alongside cassettes for a while, then alongside mp3 players) and by the time I hit adulthood, they were well into their decline. As a teenager I had a 5 CD changer, a portable CD player, and multiple CD/DVD drives in my computer - and shelves packed full of CDs. Now, the only remaining optical disc drive left in my home is the Blu-ray drive in my Playstation 4 haha
29:30 I appreciate your integrity in not just ticking the 'Paid Promotion' tickbox, but also going into the reason you did. I agree with your assessment that they sent you the cylinder without explicit strings attached, although their message does read a little bit like the quiet part was "and we figure/hope you'll do a video about it, too". I also agree that there are an awful lot of RUclipsrs who don't seem to realize just how broad a territory is covered by the relevant legal terms. One thing I'm curious about, though, having no idea, is how this interacts with being merely *_loaned_* something to do a review of, which you don't get to keep afterwards, whether by a company, or a mate; does that still technically count as "accept[ing] anything of value from a third party"? (If I made content on RUclips, I'd probably lean towards ticking the box anyway in such a case, just to be safe.)
I think it depends on whether the loan is of value. Ask a stranger in the field to give you a pen so you can write something down? Probably fine. Getting to drive an expensive car for an hour? Probably "of value".
RUclipsrs have astonishingly few worries about legalities, the whole "fair use" subject is treated very casually and many people feeling 100% sure behind their FU wall are actually doing stuff that is wide open for civil processes.
Tom Scott's two videos about RUclips the platform, one on Copyright and one on Advertising, explain some of the legalities here. (Short version: RUclipsrs are held to a much higher standard than television studios are. The law is outdated and needs to change.)
Hi Matt. I am 45 now. Few years ago me and a friend of mine decided to resurrect our band from when we were 15 or 16.
We recorded the songs and released an album 2 years ago on CD. We were so surprised how many of our friends asked for files or internet link instead of a CDs!
I would say why don't they just put the cd in their computer to make it into mp3s. But many new computers don't have a optical drive anymore.
@@killerbee2562 I was going to say. Most people use laptops now and how many new laptops have CD/DVD drives nowadays?
Wow it is some kind of my dream too to resurect my old band, but i don't know it was actually possible for someone to do this ! Congratulations !
@@debranchelowtone Thanks :)
Well, there's only two of us so that simplifies a lot of things. I do my own mixing and music production so that simplified things even more. :D
@@RudalPL I'm gonna need a Necromancer.. I'm game to have a go if anybody knows one.. I'm the only living member since our drummer died in 2019
36:00 That's not always the case, since some youtubers seem to somehow enable copyright protection for everything old they upload on their channels, including cylinder recordings or even 19th century songs played on old music boxes.
Hey Techmoan don’t feel bad about the mistakes you’re making with your cylinder machines, I’m sure I made the same mistakes when I got my first few ones! Good video as always. 👍
All the people i know are commenting on this lmao
@@BensPhonographs07 I actually RUINED the first cylinder I tried to play because I had no idea what I was doing back then. (2016)
@@oldradiosnphonographs Did you use too much tracking force?
@@victor9501 yes I did. When I got my amberola 30 in 2016, it was way out of adjustment and I only had one record at the time. I still have that wrecked record. “Sailing On The Chesapeake Bay”
I look at it from the point of view that I have seen too many people stung by streaming and network based services going unavailable, either temporarily due to a line or modem outage or permanently because a service was shut down due to the company going out of business or because it didn't make enough money.
The Edison company stopped producing cylinders a very long time ago but if you have the machine and the cylinder that you want to play then you can still play them. That's one reason why DVDs, CDs, cassettes and even vinyl still persist, even if they no longer get produced in the numbers they once were.
If you want to go the modern way and don't rely on an usure service, just download files or rip CD to and hard disc drive. No need for vinyl or else, you can sell back the CD afterwards. As long as you copy the files to a new HDD before the old one breaks it can be safe.
@@debranchelowtone You can build a media server with redundant hard drives if you want to be extra safe.
@@CarrotConsumer Ah true, like RAID ?
I have seen many of these machines and have downloaded many mp3s of the cylinders because I was curious about the old recordings. I have never seen any of them actually used, thanks for the demonstration, very interesting!
Hearing the voice of dead people, what an incredible machine!