Thoughts on shaving moldy brown wax cylinders

[Chuck]

Phonogal,

Yes, eartubes are a good way to be able to hear
more detail in quiet old recordings.

In fact, if you look back far enough to a time
before horns were commonly used, rather low level
recordings and eartubes were the norm.

This can be clearly demonstrated by making a recording
using an automatic recorder. Those have a fairly light
weight, and they tend to cut a rather shallow insignificant groove.
The sound tends to be a bit low,
but with a recorder that's in decent shape the
articulation is very sharp and crisp. Listening to
one of those recordings with eartubes assures that
anything spoken into the recorder is heard very
clearly and understood well.

....There was a time, way way back when,....several
years before horns were used for listening, when
subtle, soft recordings were played through ear tubes.

Chuck