If you haven’t heard, this week’s Authentic Records’s Ear Snack, it is a wax cylinder recording of Templeton Rye recorded by Jason with the help of Martin Fisher on a vintage Thomas Edison wax cylinder recording machine at the Folk Alliance Conference in Memphis, TN last February. Below is a description from Martin as to how it was made:

All of the equipment in the record chain is original and was available to the consumer in it’s day.  The recording machine is an “Edison Triumph Model B” from around the 1906 era with a rebuilt New Edison “floating diaphragm” Recorder head from 1902 or later.  I’ve not tried to identify or date the recording horn yet but it is original although repainted by a former owner.  The recorder head has been refurbished with the addition of a few personal modifications that seem to have improved the quality of the recording considerably.

The cylinders were transferred using a Stanton 500 AL cartridge with a self modified stylus assembly attached to a self built four foot tone arm.  The signal was fed through a flat “unequalized” preamplifier directly into a Delta 44 recording interface on my PC.  The signal was sampled at 96 khz/24 bit into Sound Forge software.  Two duplicate files were rendered.  One was left alone and the other was declicked by isolating the problem spots and utilizing the  declick software bundled with Sound Forge &/or manual redrawing of the waveform.  Both files were then converted to 44.1 khz/16 bit and the pitch and overall volume was adjusted with fades added at the head and tail.  No equalization or sonic filtering was applied to any of the files at any time.  With the exception of declicking on the quieter cylinder file, what you hear is what’s on the cylinder.

And here’s a photo of what the machine looked like:

It’s only available for FREE through tomorrow, May 12 so go get it while you can and enjoy!

- The Nadas