Christian Pillet

Can we still record cylinders?

by Christian Pillet, 2000

 

The question is important and well worth a few moments' consideration. Being, like all collectors, a bit of a conservationist, a few months ago I owned some cylinders that were covered with mould, thus unlistenable, thus of no interest... But it was out of the question to throw them away, because you will never know ... and with the candour of many collectors I thought that maybe one day some genius of a chemist would find a way to get rid of the damned fungi! I have tried out a few dozen hot or cold products, concentrated or diluted, single or mixed, harmless or dangerous, with the final result often being the destruction of the cylinder. Even if it is not the subject of this article, I here give you the results of my research in the field: you get the best result doing nothing except covering the cylinder with a film of silicone sold in spray cans and intended for polishing furniture, trying to play the cylinder with a stereo cartridge and then process the signal obtained. I had noticed that the fungi actually ate away the wax of the cylinder, and with it the sound recorded, but that it tends to fill the hole it makes with its own substance. One may therefore, with a lot of luck, fins a small piece of the original sound. But I think there are better things to do with unlistenable cylinders: to make them listenable. No, it's not a joke, to the contrary I'm most serious and I am surprised that very few people have taken an interest in this problem. Recording cylinders The principle is simple: you carefully shave the cylinder to remove the mould and obtain a beautiful cylinder, all new and shining. Then - and this is the hard part - you record some new music on the cylinder with a specially constructed device which I will try to describe with an eye on the problems that occur and, above all the results intended. I started by using the mechanism of a conventional phonograph, the Pathé Coquet, driven by an Akai turntable motor, modifying one of the steps for the drive belt on the motor shaft to give the cylinder a speed close to the 160 rpm of the Pathé cylinders. Very soon, driven by the fear of ruining my Pathé I decided to build a phonograph solely intended for recording cylinders. After many attempts, setbacks and questions without answer sent out on the Internet, the recorder has stabilized step by step, and I can now describe it, giving some esential rules on which success depends. The basic structure As the cylinder has to turn evenly and above all without slowing down when the cutter cuts out the groove, I chose as the basic structure a Grundig TK 46 tape recorder liberated of everything that is not useful for recording a cylinder. The motor is fairly powerful and drives the tape recorder's flywheel by a belt. From there the movement is relayed via a system of pinions and pulleys to the mandrel of a Pathé N° 1, my only concession to the past but indipensable to hold the cylinder firmly. The rewind mechanism of the tape recorder has also been kept. Its new role is to assure the even rotation of the feedscrew which permits, as we will see, the arm holding the recording head to move along the cylinder. The recorder This is certainly the principal part of the device. As sound is the result of vibration, I thought the loudspeaker, the ultimate "vibrational tool" would be a very convenient way to produce the vibrations destined to be fixed in wax. So that is what transforms the electrical signal to mechanical vibrations which, passed on to a cutter, will make the impression on the cylinder. The sound source to be recorded is read by any player, let's say a cassette player. The sound is sent to a loudspeaker that vibrates and moves the long end of the bar of an old phonograph reproducer. The short end then moves with a smaller amplitude but greater force and with it moves the cutter, mounted in place of the stylus, and cuts into the cylinder before it. The bar is simply glued to the loudspeaker's membrane (which comes from an old headphone). One of the many advantages of the loudspeaker is that the sound volume can be regulated voth the amplifier's volume control. This advantage will be decisive when changing the parameter "strength" of the sound during experiments. At the same time the head on its arm move at constant speed in parallel to the cylinder axis, thanks to the feedscrew mentioned above. The engraving is a spiral that runs the length of the cylinder. As we see, this is nothing very new, for we find the same device on all advanced phonographs at the beginning of the last century. The cutter It is the key to sucess - or failure. One must proceed by steps and leave room for imagination, reflection and observation. You make a try - you listen to it. Normally, you will hear nothing but a terrible noise in no way resembling the sound you wished to record. Then one day, for no apparent reason, you hear something very faint that you go on refining step by step. It takes long, very long, but what joy when you finally record a whole minute of audible and - almost - harmonious sound! Here are a few elements that appear to be stable and can guide the makeup of this essential part of the device. The characteristics of the cutter depend very much on those of the stylus that will be used to read the result of the recording. The cutter is more or less cylindical in shape. It should be made of a hard material, not necessarily glass, and it should be inexpensive, in view of the number of tests to be made. Positioned to record, the cutter is not at right angles to the tangent at the point of contact with the cylinder. It differs from this right angle by 30 to 60 degrees. The cutter should be very hard and incicive. The cutting edge, too, is at a precise angle to the normal of the tangent point. We note that if the cutter is of a more or less cylindrical shape, then its intersectiuon with the plane of the cutting edge is an ellipse, which is no bad thing, knowing that the groove will get this shape. The cylinder Without a cylinder, no recording... So let's keep the cylinders so despised because they were full of mould. (Author's note: I'll buy them from you if you offer me a reasonable price). Even though mouldy, the cylinders should be in good health. Cracked cylinders will not resist the treatment they will be given - they will literally explode! The preparation of the cylinder is an important phase of the process, because it determines the quality of the recording, especially the surface noise. From an electric drill fixed to a support I have made a rudimentaly lathe that spins at a decent speed, which permits me to shave (by hand and without support) the cylinders intended for recording. That's where the hand work and know-how comes in, acquired by making cylinders explode: if the pressure is too weak, the old grooves and fungi will not disappear totally. If it is too hard: explosion! The few adventurers who have tried to record cylinders are unanimous: cylinders are not what they used to be, they have grown old and hard. This makes recording more difficult in the measure that the groove and the modulation of the sound drawn by the cutter is accompanied by small outbursts that produce a heavy surface noise. To overcome this difficulty I have tried to warm the cylinder to soften its surfase. But careful! This must be done very slowly to avoid splitting the cylinder, for it can not stand rapid changes in temperature. I prefer softening the cylinder, once shaved, by covering it with turpentine oil, which has the awesome capacity of dissolving the wax of the cylinders (at least the Pathé cylinders), and then to wait for about an hour before proceeding to record. The results At the moment the results are rather disappointing, for two essential reasons, it seems. As I said above, the cylinders have aged and are no longer as tender as they were originally, and so we have surface noise. The cutter surely does not have the shape or inclinaion needed to successfully carry out its task. Nevertheless I have managed to record two or three cylinders, audible both on an old phonograph (which is the real test) and by playing with a magnetic pickup and computer processing the sound (which is easier). Among the successes we may hear: Help! by The Beatles ; La vie en rose, by Edith Piaf ; Connais-tu le pays... , transfer of a 78 rpm disc recorded by my mother. Reflections on ethics The results I have obtained are not great and there can be no doubt as to the origin on the cylinders. Nevertheless, I limit my work to record only pieces that could not have existed at the time of the cylinders (like The Beatles) in order to remove any uncertainty from the operation. One may even imagine that, as quality and know-how improve, that one might be tempted to "restore" rare items rerecording them after shaving the original recording that has become inaudible. It is in order to avoid this misunderstanding, highly improbable but nevertheless possible, that I limit my work to record only recent titles or interpreters. It is always a pleasure to me to surprise my friends by letting them hear a cylinder with The Platters singing Only You...

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