Digitizing Cylinder Records

[CDBPDX]

Just got a microphone for recording cylinder records and here are my first recordings:

http://78records.cdbpdx.com/CYL/

These were all recorded from an Amberola 30, connecting the mic to the output of the reproducer. You can see it in action on YouTube at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHPBqpMGzQU

Notice the horn is disconnected and the mic and wire are at the back of the reproducer.

Now I need a few more thousand cylinders!

CDB

[VintageTechnologies]

That looks handy. Who sells those microphones?

[CDBPDX]

I found this on YouTube with numerous demo vids by THEVICTROLAGUY. Each of the demo vids has an email address to contact him - [email protected]

Here is one of his demo videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlScQjYiVv4

CDB

[RefSeries]

That sounds great, and the device works well. I have posted my amateur efforts before, using a Home or Standard phonograph as a base and using a home built tone arm.



I have now prepared some drawings of these contraptions, which can be found at http://sdrv.ms/18nSKPR as 'Phonograph carriage'. Feel free to have a go, and please let me know of any improvements!

Good luck!

Keith

[phonojim]

RefSeries: That is a beautiful piece of work! It's something I have always wanted to do but have never been able to get to it. Could you please post more pictures of it? I would like to see a complete view. What do you use for a cartridge and styli?

Jim

[WDC]

That Edison attachment is indeed a beautiful piece of craftsmanship, well done! And with the electrified topworks yours is also free from spring motor speed flaws. I wonder what type of motor do you use, mine is a small DC Maxon motor with separate control unit, but it would certainly not strong enough to drive a heavy carriage. I also use the Stanton 500 cartridge in my updated player and couldn't imagine any better one. I'd love to have a confocal cylinder scanner in my home one day.

[Wolfe]

You are both real smooth operators. Nicely done!

That brown wax cylinder is sitting there knowing it's contents are gently treated and (hopefully) going on for the ages.

[RefSeries]

Jim,

Could you please post more pictures of it? I would like to see a complete view. What do you use for a cartridge and styli?

There are more pictures of the carriages on the drawings paper, and on http://sdrv.ms/18nSKPR or if you like please send me a private message and I will send a set to your email. I use a Shure 44 on the Home carriage, and a Stanton 500 on the Standard. 2 and 4 minute styli come from Expert Stylus Co, who are excellent.

I wonder what type of motor do you use, mine is a small DC Maxon motor with separate control unit, but it would certainly not strong enough to drive a heavy carriage.

I use a simple and cheap DC motor, using two alloy base plates with rubber mounts. The motor is audible, but the rubber bushing seems to remove all mechanical noise from any recordings. I use separate power supplies for the preamplifier/amplifier and the motor speed control, to avoid electrial noise, which also seems to work. The speed control gives me 80-180rpm through a cheap model board, and a suitably sized O ring drives the mandrel. The pulley came from a model shop.



As you can see all of this is very amateur, and nowhere near as sophisticated as your set up, but does the job well and is more or less flutter free as far as I can see from running a 1KHz test tone cylinder through it and looking at this on an oscilloscope. If I was looking at improvements using Edison bedplates as the starting point I would go for some form of brushless motor with a servo or even a 0.9 degree stepper motor, in order to reduce audible noise and get more precise speed control. However if I was to go that far it would be good to be able to record six inch cylinders, Pathé Salons and Concert sized records, which would mean building something which looks like an Archaeophone. Number 143 on my list of priority jobs...

Keith