Inside an Edison Phonograph
If you think of records as platters, you are of a certain age. If you don’t remember records at all, you are even younger. But there was a time when …read more Continue reading Inside an Edison Phonograph
Category Archives: Phonograph
Reproducing Vinyl Records in Resin
While most are just plain, vinyl records can be found in a variety of colors, shapes, and some even glow in the dark. [Evan and Katelyn] decided to spruce up …read more Continue reading Reproducing Vinyl Records in Resin
Wooden You Like to Hear a CNC-Cut Phonograph Record?
Say what you will about [Thomas Edison], but it’s hard to deny the genius of his self-proclaimed personal favorite invention: the phonograph. Capturing sound as physical patterns on a malleable …read more Continue reading Wooden You Like to Hear a CNC-Cut Phonograph Record?
Piezo Pickup Makes Wax Records Easy to Digitize
Sound recording and playback have come a long way in the last century or so, but it’s fair to say there’s still a lot of interesting stuff locked away on …read more Continue reading Piezo Pickup Makes Wax Records Easy to Digitize
Reproducing a Reproducer: Servicing a Cylinder Phonograph in the Year 2021
[Jan Derogee] pulled out his phonograph the other day to hear the 100+ year old wax cylinder warble of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”, but couldn’t locate the reproducer …read more Continue reading Reproducing a Reproducer: Servicing a Cylinder Phonograph in the Year 2021
Tunes You Can Eat
This week retro-gadget collector and video blogger [Techmoan] featured perhaps the most delicious audio recording format that we know of — a chocolate gramophone record. Compared to his typical media format explorations, the chocolate record is of quite recent vintage. He first heard of them back in 2015 when Tasmanian …read more
Talking Clock? That’s Nothing New
Do you talk to your alarm clock? I do. I was recently in a hotel room, woke up in the middle of the night and said, “Computer. What time is it?” Since my Amazon Echo (which responds to the name Computer) was at home, I was greeted with silence. Isn’t the future great?
Of course, there have been a variety of talking clocks over the years. You used to be able to call a phone number and a voice would tell you the time. But how old do you think the talking clock really is? Would you guess that this …read more
Who Made the First Human Audio Recordings? Edison? Not so Fast!
You probably learned in school that Thomas Edison was the first human voice recorded, reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb. As it turns out though, that’s not strictly true. Edison might have been the first person to play his voice back, but he wasn’t the first to deliberately record. That honor goes to a French inventor named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. He wanted to study sound and created the phonautograph — a device which visualized sound on soot-covered paper. They were not made to be played back, but the information is there. These recordings were made around 1860. There’s a …read more
Continue reading Who Made the First Human Audio Recordings? Edison? Not so Fast!
Listen to the Eerie Warbles of the Oldest Sound Recording in History
The French sound recording pioneer Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville never expected his samples to be played back, but scientists found a way. Continue reading Listen to the Eerie Warbles of the Oldest Sound Recording in History
Retrotechtacular: Stereo Records
The 20th century saw some amazing technological developments. We went from airplanes to the moon. We went from slide rules to digital computers. Crank telephones to cell phones. But two of the most amazing feats of that era were ones that non-technical people probably hardly think about. The transformation of radio and TV from mono and black and white, to stereo and color. What was interesting about both of these is that engineers managed to find a way to push the new better result into the same form as the old version and — this is the amazing part — …read more
