[78-L] I have an Edison Diamoond Disc player too!!!

[Mark Bardenwerper]

On 4/15/2012 9:40 PM, DAVID BURNHAM wrote:
>
> I have an Edison floor model, (Canadians will recognize it as the model that Dr. Ogden has on "Murdoch Mysteries" although it's a mystery how she obtained a 1917 model phonograph in 1895).  I first saw this machine when I was an usher in a wedding in 1973;  it belonged to the bride's mother and I asked them to let me know if they ever planned to part with it.  Well about 7 years ago the lady passed away and the family passed it on to mel  It came with the lower record compartment full of records and it works very well.  I had the Gramophone Doctor, (Bob Nix of Sarnia), check it out and he found that it was working fine and that the stylus was as good as new.  One advantage of these machines, (which, although it's a disc player is properly called a "Phonograph"), is that the diamond stylus doesn't wear because the vertically cut grooves don't exert the same stresses on it as laterally cut grooves would.  Although Edison didn't have an ear for good
>   music, (most of his records were hymn tunes, "coon songs", marches and minor classical excerpts), he produced a product which was sonically superior to lateral recordings of the day.  I believe that so many Edison records met their demise because people tried to play them on normal players and decided to trash them because they were so worn out that you can barely hear them, (on a normal player they produce little more than surface noise).

I think you have hit upon 2 of the primary reasons they have not 
survived. They were also proprietary to the player and once the player 
was worn out or gone, the disks had no value. The first disks to see the 
bin were Edisons.
Furthermore, they were not compatible with water at all. Labels fell off 
making them hard to ID. And they weren't that plentiful to start with.

-- 
Mark L. Bardenwerper, Sr.

Technology...thoughtfully, responsibly.

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