The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

Definitely have to make a trip there. I'm glad to see the place restored.

Paul

Fascinating. If I had been there they'd have been calling security to get my hands off that diamond disc cutter lathe in the second pic. "SIR! Step away from the lathe..."
I was at the lab in the late 70's and in those days it really was the land that time forgot: the pressing plant was still standing and the compound looked much as it does in the pictures from the late twenties. You couldn't actually SEE much of the lab, though. I sweet talked the guide and managed to see a bit more of it than was officially allowed. I was trying to wangle my way up to the recording room on the top floor but even though I played my "young fresh-face innocent record collecting Edison-besotted Canadian card" it didn't work.

Jim

JohnM wrote:Also worth noting is the Amberola IV on the upper level right of the last photo. There are only about 3 or 4 of those known to exist. I used to have one that I eventually sold to Mike Khanchalian. It's pictured in one of the Fabrizio/Paul books.

I've seen a pic of a Buffalo NY store, with an Amberola IV on display ... I keep hoping to find it at a local estate or garage sale

I'd love to see and hear them restore the electrical cutting equipment and record someone today with it! And do both a DD and a lateral cut with it all....

Unlike the situation with earlier acoustic recording, electric recording of this period was done on a fairly soft wax material. This recording medium was not intended for playback with the typical pickups of the day - the recording was a master intended to be electroformed, with the resultant metal matrix parts used to press records. So to do a recording on this equipment with the appropriate wax master blanks would require that the master be processed and used to make pressed records - an inconvenient way of demonstrating the technology to a visiting public audience. Unless one day's audience was satisfied with hearing records pressed from masters cut several days earlier. Western Electric was able to design a very low tracking force capacitance pickup (similar technology to their capacitance microphones of the day) that allowed the recording engineers to make test cuts on the regular master wax blanks in order to tweak the process prior to committing to making the actual recording. But even these pickups inflicted some damage to the wax and the actual master wax recording was not played prior to its being plated for later record pressing. A similar discipline has been maintained by professional record cutters even with the use of the harder nitrocellulose lacquer mastering material which came into common use later. These lacquers can be played with good low-force cartridges with little damage, and test cuts and "reference" recordings are usually made for this purpose, but the actual master lacquer is almost never played prior to its being plated for record manufacturing.

phonophan79 wrote:So, after I went to the Wayne parking lot meet, I made my way over to the Edison Lab Museum re-opening.

These are from the "phonograph room". Unfortunately, all these pictures were taken from behind glass. It's phono-heaven.

Shall we play identify the machines?

that even bigger wall-sized monster is Edison's Gothic phonograph (too bad it's blurry)

I visited the labs this morning and it was great. Also visited Glenmont. I took tons of pics, some of which I will post after I get back to Europe. The one criticism I would have is that the "crown jewels" are all sort of stacked behind glass, as you see in Phonophan79's pics, and many not easy to see. Seems like they have alot of space there they could have used to display these much better,but still in a manner that keeps them secure. Still great to see it all though.