cylinder record player, electric and home made.
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- čas přidán 24. 04. 2020
- Hi there! I like tinkering around with simple mechanical & electrical things. I got this interest from my grandfather, & it's never gone away. In this video, we attempt to describe a fairly simple home made phonograph cylinder player. Eventually, the video disintegrates into simple fun. Not quite what I intended - but one can never tell! Hoping in any case, that it might give you a few ideas if ever you need to make a cylinder player. You never know! But above all, in April 2020 : keep strong; don't go out too much, &c., &c. Take care of yourselves. Best regards from a er... 'middle-aged' man in Birmingham, England! Cheers, Norman. (Born 1944.)
Check out Rod Elliotts' site in Australia: sound-au.com/ for many, many audio projects, for which Rod has not only designed the circuitry, but also has made available top quality PCBs, so that you can make your own super quality audio modules at really low cost! - Hudba
Great to see you again, Norman! As always, wonderfully entertaining and witty. Let's hope all of us geezers manage the avoid the reaper on this go round.
Hi Karl and nice to meet you again. During 'lockdown' an trying to catch up with everything. Things are OK here, as I hope it is with you yoo. All the best for now, Norman
@@bixanorak is my comments showing up? Never got an answer
I've seen a few of these home made cylinder players on yt and they play very well. Edison must have had some great recording equipment to keep the speeds running constant on his recorders. Even so you can hear some little waivers now and again, but cylinders have never sounded so good.
What a great player. You should take orders, you'd make a fortune.
Amazing machine. Every home should have one !! keep safe.
Thanks, Robert! I just emailed you a couple of hours ago about the Chantal. Of course under lockdown it's getting slightly tedious now, but we're stuck with it, aren't we? I've never cut the grass so often for years, and even cleaned some windows the other day... 8^) Take care, Norman.
@@bixanorak Hi Norman!!Im Marcelo from Argentina, you are awesome man!! congrat, very long life for you!! I got a question about cutting heads, Im making my own lathe, and I wanna make a Presto 1D cutterhead similar model, but do you think possible replace the old U shape magnet for actual neodimium magnets?or Do you have some schematic of diy cutterhead? Thank you so Much!!
There is a very clear sound in the speaker (without any creak ) in your mashine! It`s a very difficult but nice work!
Thanks a lot, & very glad you like the video. Best regards, Norman.
Absolutely fantastic Norman. Way more sophisticated than the one I put together (on my channel). Its great to know someone in such near proximity (I am in Wolverhampton) who shares a passion and knowledge on 78s and cylinders. Fantastic machine
Thaks for writing Matthew - I just got back from looking at your video & left a comment for you! Cheers, Norman.
Sound quality is astonishing!
What a fantastic man You are! Instructive video about a perfect & quite simple machine connecting old recordings with modern equipment and bringing ancient sound to life. Go on, it is great fun!
Great machine! Sounds as if this recording was 50 years newer than it is!Very interesting thank you!
At last!!! Your back. I'm very impressed with the audio quality of your player puts my 1910 or so edison standard phonograph to shame. Your Mandrel design is very good idea as it will make playing 4m amberols that have a tendency to swell inside and need reaming..lovely word. Thanks again...really enjoy your videos. Stay safe.
Very nice.😀
Welcome back Mr. F! Great to see you again with another brilliant video🍻
Thank you Mr. Field! As always, it's great to learn from you. Best to you and yours.
I'd totally buy this!
It was nice hearing the music! Surprised at the sound quality. Us predigital folk know how to tune out the pops and hisses and just hear the music.
I am always delighted to see a new video from you. I have been following your web page and CZcams channel for quite some time. I have also been tinkering around with recording some of my cylinders recently but the quality from your machine far surpasses my feeble effort. Keep well during these trying times. Regards from South Africa
Hi Enriko, & thanks for writing. Glad you liked the videos. As regards cylinders, the secret is not profound; but they should be in top condition. The best cylinders are the Amberols, both wax & Blue, the latter before they were dubbed from disc. There's a window of about 1908 - 1914. Also, the Blues must be cylindrical & not out of shape, or the 'wow' will be severe. A modern moving magnet cartridge like the Shure M44 or SC35, or the ever-popular Stanton 500 is fine. There should be a stylus of say .0035" - conical is best, but all mine are elliptical. You can record the vertical cut cylinder & process the sound in computer software, but what I have done is to make a phono pre-amplifier which has a flat frequency response (or use a microphone input on your sound card - they're flat); also, put a 'buffer amplifier' of zero gain in just one channel (a single 'ordinary' transistor , like a 2N3904 will do) & it will make that channel 180° out of phase with the other. When these two channels are combined to mono., the sound is rendered much more 'solid'. I think I should make a short video on this topic... Wishing you all the best, and hoping you and yours are all OK - it's pretty well OK here, but my son-in-law's mother is in a care home & we're a bit worried about her. Anyway, we'll get through all this stuff one way or another. Cheers, Norman.
Kef Coda III My first speakers! I used to sell Stanton stuff from Wilmex in New Malden. Great video Norman.
Good to see you are still tinkering Norman 👌🏻
so good to see you are well during this oddness. I enjoy your videos keep well !!
Another amazing machine, Well done Norman, We like
Bravo, Norman! You got an amazing machine! I also sometimes have fun with the construction of homemade products from various parts from different devices, but you have created a finished product that is functionally complete and easy to use. Waiting for your new videos! Yes, I forgot to say that the music is wonderful, not requiring a license :))
Love it Norman, just getting to see your channel now which is very interesting indeed.
Norman made a book!!! i love everyday i learn something from u thanks from argentina
That's an amazing piece of engineering. Great job on putting that together. Hope you're looking after yourself during these terrible times.
Hi there. Thanks for writing. We've made another device that records on wax discs, but it needs a little more work. Keep safe - yes, my daughter lives very close & does some shopping for me, & I can walk up to a local co-op which opens early & there's not many people about then. Hope you're keeping OK too. Cheers, Norman.
@@bixanorak Absolutely early morning seems to be the best time to pop out for essential supplies. Can't wait to see the latest wax disc recorder in a video soon. It's these kinds of videos that keeps me sane whilst we're not allowed out. All the best.
It is amazing! The record sound very good electronically reproduced. Gary
Glad to see you are back!
Audio quality is quite good considering the age and that it's an acoustic recording. The flutter and wow are no doubt from the recording lathe, or is it! Bravo, very nice machine.
Or that it is being driven by stepper motors!
Amazing! Very nice, even sound. Well done sir!
Beautiful job Norman. I expect to see this on the cover of next month's Hi Fi News.....
Brilliant work. Can't believe the fidelity you're getting out of a black amberol!
Very kind of you to write - thanks! Edison recording on the 4 minute Amberols is extremely good (before they were dubbed from discs), and as long as the cylinder is in good shape (both metaphorically and literally!), given half a chancem, they will play very well indeed. What you heard in the video had been converted in the phono pre-amplifier by having one channel inverted) so that helped a lot. Apart from that, nothing at all was done to the sound, so some clicks and scratches remain. But they can easily be got rid of with software. Best regards, Norman.
@@bixanorak completely agree, I think blue amberols sound better than contemporary 78s in my opinion! Just most of the black ones I got have been rather poor, so assumed that applied to black amberols in general. In any case, beautiful device you have there and you've certainly got me thinking of trying to put something like it together to digitise cylinders :)
@@GoodOldTunes Hi there. When you say 'black Amberols' - is that the first, black wax 4-minute cylinders? They were indeed the first, and if you can find them in really good condition, then they sound really good. They also remain cylindrical far better than the later Blue Amberols. (Of course, nobody at Edison expected enhthusiasts 110 years in the future, to still be playing their cylinders!) However, black wax Amberols have a bad habit of developing micro-cracks, which produce terrible crackle. Also, they are very fragile, and after 110 years, are still more brittle; if one falls over onto its side, it usually shatters into many fragments. We are 'audio archaeologists', are't we; we are interested in documeting & preserrving this material for the future. I wish you all good fortune in your work. Best regards, Norman. PS: Again you are correct; some speech recordings on Amberol have a frequency response of well over 3000 Hz, so the sound 'shh' can clearly be heard. Few (if any) discs of 1910-1914 could possibly be as good as that!
Great !!! Lile the comments say it sounds really good !
Wonderful!
Very strangecto hear one that clean
Great Sound! A future challenge however would to play 1890's brown wax cylinders. These vary in speed as a standard RPM had not yet been established. I've experimented with electrical playback which sometimes works well but at other times sounds awfull. Sometimes, acoustical playback with a reproducer with a large diameter diaphram works best. It sometimes takes a lot of experimentation to get the best results. check out this challenge with Stinchcomb, brown wax cylinder records or Dr. Bruce's curiosities on U-tube. cheers!
Great work!
Cool
Many thanks for writing... Cheers, Norman.
Its great build and very inspiring. I have managed to build something similar to your initial lashup - with 3D printed parts and now experimenting with different types of stylus (what I used successfully for an indestructible cylinder unfortunately was not healthy for the wax ones I have😪 ). Thanks for the excellent channel and content - always a pleasure to watch! 😀
Thanks for writing & glad you liked it! Best of luck with your own players. 3D printing sound very, very interesting - must look at some videos. Recently have been trying to make a simple replica of an 1860s Philipp Reis telephone - which is a gloriously simple piece of kit (or rather two pieces - transmitter & receiver), but very hard to make work. Which is what he found, too - and indeed, that has largely denied him the credit for inventing the telephone. Still, the one thing they can't take away from Reis, is that AFAIK, he was the first to convert sound into an electrical signal. The implications of that, of course, were staggering! There's tons of stuff on-line about Reis, but you'll know about that already. Well, here we are - January 2nd 2020, and the pandemic is worse that ever! At last here in the U.K. Hope it's not as bad where your are? All the best for now, and 'stay safe'! Cheers, Norman.
@@bixanorak Very interesting project. I wasn't familiar with that type of telephone, though remember as a child unsuccessfully building a telephone from an electrics hobby kit. I'm in the UK too, and its tier 4 for me so I am not going anywhere soon. I did get a lot of projects done over the last year though. Most recently has been the cylinder phonograph, for which I have made a few videos working through the problems. I also spent a few months doing a series of testing and comparing different materials for soundbox diaphragms. This was for my 3D printed soundbox which I made, and in the end worked surprisingly well. 3D printers are much cheaper and reliable than only a few years ago, and whilst some things are still better done on a lathe, once you get the hang of it, its surprising how quickly parts can be made on the 3D printer. Thanks again for the great channel. I have some 78 electrical pickups so I know I will be back to watch all your videos on those again! 😀 👍
That's really interesting, thanks! Yes, I really will check up on 3D printers. I'm waiting for some large rubber balloons to arrive (daft isn't it?), as I think the Reis microphone works best with a ~4 inch very flexible diaphragm. Balloon rubber needs to be tried. Reis's microphone had a 'make & break' contact, rather than a variable resistance characteristic. That's one of the reasons his work found little favour. It worked best with singing & music - his mike, inevitably, produced a square wave - 'on-off-on-off' - OK for playing a tune, but not so good for speech. Am hoping to make some trials, to see how 'bad' (or good?) speech can be on a make & break mike. For more on Philipp Reis, see Project Gutenberg - www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/56542 - which is a book by Silvanus P Thompson, defending Reis as the inventor of the telephone. Cheers, Norman.
@@bixanorak Looking forward to seeing (and hearing) the results of the experiments 😀 . Thanks also for the ebook link. Just the sort of stuff I read. Here is another little book from the same site I found interesting, if you have not seen it before:
www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30112
Thanks again and good luck with your project 👍 😀
tbh im massively impressed by the quality of reproduction, its very clear! out of curiosity have you ever thought of trying one of the vinyl cleaning gel products on the market on a cylinder (you brush it on, let it dry and peel it off with all the dirt stuck to it) i've had great results with vintage 78rpms.
That may ruin the delicate wax grooves
@@atariboy77 yeah that's a fair point, my thinking was if its a common cylinder with a lot of dirt/mold build up if the gel does cause any harm its not going to come out much worse than when it went in.
@@SparksNZeros that's fair
Hi Norman, nice to see a new video from you. Hope you and your family are oké.
We my wife and I are oké but the lockdown is disastrous for the economy...
Beautiful machine that you have building and it works great!
Are we going to hear more of these roles from you now?
Stay safe and healthy, regards Ben PA2OLD.
Love it Norman, was just thinking the other day, about time you posted another video!! Just a thought, do you know why they chose the speed? Was it simply the play time? Also did I hear you correctly that discs were recorded with a flat frequency response? with no kind of correction at all? As the response was largely just mid range, correction would be kinda pointless.
Good morning! thank you for this great video.
Can you explain to me how you configured your stepper motors with your arduino? All the information I have found says that we cannot program it's motors at a precise rpm.
Thank you!!
Simon
Hi There. Thanks for writing. I'm bad at Arduino, as I said. All I did, was to connect a 10 kilohm potentiometer to Arduino as described in File/ Examples/Analog/AnalogInOut signal. This will give you a value between zero and 1023, depending on where you have set the potentiometer. I chose 1023 as 'full speed'. I multiplied this constant a certain number of times, then used it as a 'Tone Command'. It outputs a square wave, but a microstep controller seems to interpret that as a series of individual pulses, which causes the stepper motor to rotate at your desired speed. I was NOT able to start the stepper motor at the high speed I required; I could not master the code. So I have to speed up the motor by starting from zero & turning the pot. 🙂 Hope this helps.
Are cylinder records have fixed track spacing unlike vinyl records that has wide groove in the low freq. and narrow grooves in the highs?
Hi there. Yes, cylinder records - at least most of them after about 1900 - have standard groove pitches. 100 grooves per inch (2.54cm) playing for around 2 minutes at 160 rpm are the earlier ones. Later, Edison made wax cylinders with 200 grooves per inch, so doubling the playing time. They were very fragile (or al least the ones you find today are!😀), so he then made them from a blue celluloid type of material - the blue one in the video is one of those, and it does play for a long time! They were much more robust than the wax 4-minute cylinders. Best wishes to you and your family, Norman.
Your pot for speed control allows for 120 rpm as well, right? That's perfect for older brown wax. And then there are home recordings which could be, and often were at odd speeds.
That was wonderful. Any reason to not use a regular parallel tracker? I also guessed you bought your KEFs in 1980...
May I ask what is the thread pitch on your feed screw?
What about running the cylinder in a bath of oil maybe kerosene that should get rid of the surface noise be interesting to see hear. Might help with the wow and Flutter or is that in the recording. That can be ironed out in post production how do you you judge the speed is there any micro adjustment like a laser. Would it have been better off with an AC motor no coging effect. As I say the bath oil the thickness of the oil give you a better control and better dampening as well, having the arm pivot point below the Drum would be better as well for pitch control
Glad you're well haven't seen you for awhile, don't forget to take plenty of vitamin D3 3000 iu daily.
Sounds good amazing how much detail how much post production did you do to achieve this
Would it be possible to purchase one of these? I have some old cylinders I want to try to play
Is it just me or is a stepper motor the single worst way to power one of these electrically?
You're correct; stepper motors are notoriously noisy, but not a great deal of it gets into the .wav file. Still, I have experimented with the motor brackets mounted on two or three layers of Depron, with some success. The virtue of the stepper motor to me, is the extreme accuracy of rotation. Take care in these uncertain times & let us hope they will soon be over! Cheers, Norman.
tinkerings fun. dont give it up. i belive it to be called bodging on your side of the pond .:)