Lab Saves Audio Cylinders for the Record
Fingers of light are being used to lift the sound from audio cylinders so old and fragile they could be classified as artifacts.
The 2-year-old Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive at Syracuse University is the first building in the world designed to preserve and restore sound recordings. It is the only place where cylinders--an early form of recording supplanted in this century by phonodiscs, or “records”--are played back using laser beams and fiber optics, says William Storm, director of the lab.
A laser is a high-intensity light beam; fiber optics refers to the transmission of light along a glass fiber, sometimes with impulses generated by a laser.
In either case, their use in sound restoration involves casting a pinpoint of light into the recording groove, capturing the signal and taping it for indefinite storage and replays.
Laser experimentation in other laboratories has been confined to discs, and Storm says no one else in the field was using fiber optics.
“Playing the cylinders with a normal needle literally wears away the record,” he says. “It would be like exposing a great painting like the Mona Lisa to harsh light.”
Some of the cylinders are almost a century old--their mass-production began in 1888--and their brittle surfaces cannot stand the weight of phonograph needles, which reproduce sound from mechanical energy, or friction.
Early cylinders were wax over cardboard and played for two minutes. The more advanced “blue amberol” series discontinued in the 1920s featured a celluloid material over a plaster-of-Paris core and played for four minutes. But they too are now showing their age.
More than a decade ago, Syracuse alumnus Owen Lewis worked on a solution: Scan the grooves with light. Lewis, now a consultant for the federal government, and a Latham, N.Y., firm known as Mechanical Technologies Inc., have contributed expertise and equipment in experiments with lasers and fiber optics respectively, Storm says.
He says the archive also has two other ways to replay recordings in better condition--the original equipment, if it does not damage the grooves, and magnetic cartridges.
The 22-year-old archive is a branch of the university’s library system, with more than 250,000 phonodiscs, 7,000 cylindrical recordings and about 10,000 tapes.
The center maintains a museum for groups that are shown machines such as an 1877 tin foil phonograph, graphophones and phonographs from the 1880s and a 1906 Victrola. The groups hear tapes of restored cylinders and discs--turn-of-the-century music, speeches, readings and instructional lectures.
In a 1912 speech off a cylinder, President Theodore Roosevelt thunders: “We need leaders of inspired idealism, leaders who are granted great visions, leaders who dream greatly and strive to make their dreams come true.”
Other titles grouped under political speeches are “Labor Questions” by William Jennings Bryan and “Rights and Progress of the Negro” by former President William H. Taft.
John Phillip Sousa and Victor Herbert contributed to the collection of marches, while other tastes in popular music ran to vocals such as “You Ain’t the Man I Thought You Was” by Ada Jones, the Olivia Newton-John of the 1900s, and “The Violin My Great-Granddaddy Made” by George Ballard, a Syracuse native.
Humor and vaudeville sketches make up another category of cylinders.
Most cylindrical recordings were not produced in large quantities, and most in the archive’s possession are rare, Storm says. But because there is no worldwide index of sound, it is impossible to determine whether any of the cylinders is one of a kind.
Last year the sound archives of the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and Stanford, Yale and Syracuse universities completed a two-year project to index more than 650,000, 78-rpm commercial discs cut between 1894 and the 1950s. Computer-keyed, the records may now be located through a six-category cataloguing system.
Storm says the same institutions want to index their 45-rpm and 33-rpm records issued between 1948 and 1972.
The $1-million archive, a branch of the Syracuse University Libraries, has been tucked away in a hillside on the campus since November, 1982. Before that, the university’s fledgling interests in sound restoration were confined to a basement room in the Continental Can Co. building a dozen blocks away.
“One of the greatest incentives to completing this building was to be in the old building,” jokes Storm, looking fondly at his headquarters, which includes a sound room where acoustical-foam baffles jut from a wall and ceiling-like miniature tank traps and hardwood paneling line the opposite wall to bounce sonic waves around.
The center on the outside resembles a World War II bunker.
