The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

Hi!

I'm planning on making a small graph of the weight of a song over time. One piece of information that I have not been able to find is roughly how much a cylinder for an Edison phonograph weights. I thought that plenty on this forum should have a clue

I'm grateful for an answer!

/Rasmus

rasmus.baath wrote:Hi!

I'm planning on making a small graph of the weight of a song over time. One piece of information that I have not been able to find is roughly how much a cylinder for an Edison phonograph weights. I thought that plenty on this forum should have a clue

I'm grateful for an answer!

/Rasmus

I weighed 3 of each of the following types and got the weight ranges shown:

Indestructible 68.7-71.6 gm
Edison Gold Moulded 64-84 gm (the 84 gm one had no inside ribs)
Wax Amberols 74.9-77.1 gm
Blue Amberols 73.1-76.2 gm
5 inch brown wax concert cylinder 329 gm (I only had one of these)

Thanks for your well researched reply! I rounded up your numbers and went with a weight of 80 g.

Attached is a draft of the graph, I plan to make it more pretty later. The title of the graph is "The weight of a two minute song". For a cylinder that would then be 80 g, as you would be able to fit one song on it. For a CD it would be 15 g / 36 = 0.42 g as you could fit roughly 36 two minute songs on a 15 g CD.

Music sure have gotten lighter...

What about streaming audio? zero grams.

Hmmm... Since I'm using a logarithmic scale on my graph zero grams is (literally) out of the picture as zero is infinitely small... But for fun I added the weight of a two minute song as played by a three man band (Each bandmember weighting 67 kg, and the whole band being able to play 20 songs before taking a break)

Sorry if this seems off topic, but I thought it might be fun for the audience of the forum to see the amazing strides of the technological development. Which all started with the phonograph!

I would bet the tuba player would come in at more like 100kg. Ooompah!

Thinking more about it, the 3 man band would potentially be able to "store" many hundreds, possibly thousands, of songs per their given mass. Since you're looking at unit of mass per stored songs, i.e. grams/song, their total mass per collective stored songs may be the most impressive figure of all.

Yes, I know you're looking at weight/2 min. song but you're measuring "apples to oranges" if you divide the weight of the CD by 36 and give similar weight "discounts" to other data storage sources but not to the 3 man band. It would be like assuming they only know one song.

O.K., I see you give the band credit for 20 songs before fatigue. I would still argue that since fatigue, (or phono windings), plays no roll in the other forms of playback, it should be neglected in analyzing the band. You're not stipulating that each data storage format actually have to play back as part of their analysis, you're just looking at their respective weight per song storage. They don't know any less songs just because they're tired.

JerryVan wrote:O.K., I see you give the band credit for 20 songs before fatigue. I would still argue that since fatigue, (or phono windings), plays no roll in the other forms of playback, it should be neglected in analyzing the band. You're not stipulating that each data storage format actually have to play back as part of their analysis, you're just looking at their respective weight per song storage. They don't know any less songs just because they're tired.

Ok, I added that mostly for fun The "real" graph is the one at the top. Though I could imagine a scenario where you have trio that have the mental capacity of remembering roughly 20 songs and then the graph holds, sort of...

/Rasmus

I really took it too far didn't I?