Cylinder Records VS. Disc Records

[Inigo]

Marc, your phonograph set works fine, as many do. But I've seen many yt videos of playing phonographs where flutter and wow are very present, and impair the reproduction and enjoyment. That's true.. although there are also many gramophones that are filmed in yt with issues....

[epigramophone]

Three more drawbacks to cylinders and their players: –

1. Noisy motors, largely because of the high speed of rotation and (in most machines) the need for extra gearing to drive the feed-screw. (Possibly this aspect was improved in the Amberola period; I have had no experience of these later machines, which are in short supply east of the Atlantic.)

2. Lack of a flywheel (corresponding to the turntable of a gramophone). In the absence of this, small irregularities in the finish and balance of the moving parts result in variations of pitch that are painful to many ears, especially in slower music. Only in Edison's Opera and a few Amberola models of 1909–14 (the I, II and V, I think) was a half-hearted attempt made to correct this deficiency.

3. Unimaginative internal-horn design. Edison never responded to the innovations made by gramophone manufacturers in their sound-conduits from 1925 onwards; his designs had practically become static ten years earlier, the horn being a simple flattened cone. There was never a cylinder machine acoustically equivalent to a good table gramophone of the late 1920s, not to mention an E.M.G. or an H.M.V. 31 or 163.

Oliver Mundy.

Look at the shape of the EMG horn. It could be said to have been inspired by Edison :

[hbick2]

Some Edison machines do have a flywheel, namely the Opera, Early Amberolas and the Amberola V. I listen to most of my cylinders on an Opera.

Personally, I find the experience of listening to cylinders much more rewarding than listening to discs. Maybe it is because I grew up when 78s were still being played, but I simply prefer to listen to cylinders. I find there is a presence to the music that I don't find with most disc records. I particularly like them played through a wooden horn. For both cylinders and discs, I always prefer the acoustically recorded ones. My wife and I have a pretty extensive collection of Christmas records and, with few exceptions, we prefer to listen to the cylinders.

I have played old-time, string band music for nearly 50 years. A whole lot of it was learned from actual 78's or recordings of them. Many of them were in poor condition. Consequently, I have learned to ignore hiss, scratches and flutter and simply enjoy the music. A friend, and bandmate of mine, was a lifelong music professor. We were listening to a recording one time of someone from the mountains singing a traditional ballad. Their voice was pretty poor by modern standards. My friend said he could hardly listen to it because he couldn't get past the quality of the voice. I told him to ignore the quality of the voice or the recording and simply listen to the beauty of the music itself. He did, and he later said it really changed his attitude towards the music.