The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

KCW wrote: Fri Mar 25, 2022 1:03 pm This is great! I love when they shout “Happy New Year!”. It seems like they cycle through a few different songs. I like the chatty parts in between, but I can’t tell what they are saying. A wonderful slice of time, otherwise forgotten. What a treasure.

Is there any way to contact the seller and get a little more information in the machine history and perhaps the folks on the cylinder? What a magnificent piece of American history. Thank you for sharing!

I’m glad that you liked it. I found it interesting as well. I was in hope that someone that is more of a sound engineer type could improve the quality with editing.

One of the other brown wax cylinders was either whistling or a Penney Whistle performing American patriotic songs. It was a bit more clear than the New Years recording, (there was probably less alcohol present).

Regarding the family, I spent more than a half hour with her. All that she knew was that it had been in the family and that her mother had passed it down to her. I love the horn and the machine is interesting with the speed indicator and period upgrades. It displays and already plays well. It is in the middle of the room and it will be my demonstration cylinder machine and I may add it to the featured phonographs after I clean and service the machine.

If any forum member has a similar horn, please post some pictures. I can’t find any images of this type of horn.

I stripped off the audio from your video, converted it to an mp3 file. Then tried my luck at using Audacity and Sound Forge to clean up the quality. It worked somewhat, but signal to noise ratio is really poor so hard to understand the voices. I'm pretty sure that English is not their first language, sounds a little like German. Can figure out what they are singing by the "music/tune". I did have to reduce the speed by about 16% to get a somewhat intelligible voice.

I gave a copy to a friend who does a lot of disc transfers of his record collection, he might have better luck then me if he does I'll post it.

Chuck

ChuckA wrote: Sat Mar 26, 2022 5:40 pm I stripped off the audio from your video, converted it to an mp3 file. Then tried my luck at using Audacity and Sound Forge to clean up the quality. It worked somewhat, but signal to noise ratio is really poor so hard to understand the voices. I'm pretty sure that English is not their first language, sounds a little like German. Can figure out what they are singing by the "music/tune". I did have to reduce the speed by about 16% to get a somewhat intelligible voice.

I gave a copy to a friend who does a lot of disc transfers of his record collection, he might have better luck then me if he does I'll post it.

Chuck

If you would, please post the edited mp3 file. I hope that your friend has some success. Thank you for taking an interest in this. The woman that I purchased it from was named Beth Stoltz, so German may have been their heritage or even first language.

Here is the rough cleanup that I did of your cylinder
I did notice that the last few seconds of the recording appear to be recorded at a slower speed.

Chuck