Meanwhile back in the Southern Hemisphere..

[Jack Williams]

The beer bottle phonograph.

[Kirbstone]

Fascinating innovation. I bet if they managed to produce a run of these machines they'd sell out in no time. I'd be interested to know how they treated the glass to accept some layer that could be cut into like Edison did with his cylinders.

T.

[crfriend]

OK, that's interesting. Is the bottle full or empty? Inquiring Thirsty minds want to know.

I notice the display says "Speed = 376". Three hundred and seventy-six what? RPM? That's make for a short recording indeed.

To address Mr. Kirbstone's query, things have come quite a long way from the technology involved in Edison's time. Today, for instance, we don't have to impress record at real-time speeds -- we can etch at less than real-time and properly get the proper geometry to produce a reasonable audio replica when reproduced in real-time. I imagine either a hyper-fine etching point attached to a servo output doing the thing in one go or repeatedly going over the same track in the glass and gouging out progressively-deeper grooves over time (recall that the original Edison process was based on the depth of the grooves not in the lateral motion of them. In an original Edison cylinder the grooves appear almost perfectly parallel with very little variance.

[Jack Williams]

That's right, Edison used the "hill and dale" system, rather than lateral as modern mono recordings.
Modern stereo uses a 45 degree tilted combination of both. Very ingenious actually, as the channels are recorded out of phase, so most of the info (the sum) is horizontal, only the difference is vertical. This means the recording is not destroyed on a mono player with little vertical movement.

I'll definitely be finding out more about this. I get the impression they will make more, but they'll have to create more players too. Sound's like a new Kiwi industry in the making!
As an audio joker, I certainly will be getting one!

They got a three minute song on it, so that's all you need.

[crfriend]

That's right, Edison used the "hill and dale" system, rather than lateral as modern mono recordings.

It was simpler based on the technology then available. Recall that Edison was a "get it done quick and commercialise it" bloke and not a proper engineer. This is why his lasting legacy is vastly less than stellar, propaganda aside.

Modern stereo uses a 45 degree tilted combination of both. Very ingenious actually, as the channels are recorded out of phase, so most of the info (the sum) is horizontal, only the difference is vertical. This means the recording is not destroyed on a mono player with little vertical movement.

Yes, it's quite ingenious, but if you want a real tour de force take a look at the design for NTSC colour television. In the late 1930s and early '40s they were already looking at human-perception issues and what might get thrown away as unnecessary to produce a coherent visual image -- AND they made it compatible with an already-large installed-base of monochrome receivers! That's engineering!

As an audio joker, I certainly will be getting one!

When you do, please post the relevant specifications. As a bit of an audio "head" who loves his music I'd like to know how it stacks up against turntables, tape-decks, and CDs (that's Compact Disc, just to disambiguate it!).

I recall the occasional 45-RPM bit included in magazines -- and a few were recordings of MODEM-transmissions so they could be decoded for computers in the late 1970s to load programs.

[Jack Williams]

Here's how it sounds!
https://www.prote.in/en/feed/2013/06/be ... son-bottle
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10 ... =3&theater

[crfriend]

Bummer. No audio, a few warnings about insecure content, and cookie-problems.

And here I was hop(p)ing to get in a few Beer-Hunter cracks about the sound....

[Jack Williams]

That's strange, I have just been listening to it on my system..
Sound's pretty good in fact.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10 ... =3&theater
http://theartofsound.net/forum/showthre ... Amp/page27

[skirtyscot]

if you want a real tour de force take a look at the design for NTSC colour television. In the late 1930s and early '40s they were already looking at human-perception issues and what might get thrown away as unnecessary to produce a coherent visual image

My father was a TV transmitter engineer. At his work they joked that NTSC stood for "never twice the same colour". Clearly they thought your TV techies threw away a bit too much!

[Kilted_John]

We usually call it Never The Same Color here in the states. Re: the beer bottle phonograph, the video worked for me (Dell laptop, running XP and Firefox)...

-J

[crfriend]

"Never The Same Color" and "Never Twice the Same Colour" are pretty much one and the same -- and it's a viable gripe about the format. However, the format was still a technological triumph for the time as it didn't obsolete millions of receivers the way that ATV (Advanced TeleVision -- the new "digital" variety) did. At least analogue television degraded gracefully; digital TV goes from mediocre (mainly due to compression artifacts which can be very annoying if somebody's turned the knob up too high), to blank with very little middle ground.

Another problem with it was that it was the first one, and everybody else got to witness things and try to get it right the next time 'round. Witness SECAM (Systeme Essentially Contradictory to American Methodology) which the Russians adopted because it was more obscure than NTSC (which Japan used, but with a 50Hz vertical field-rate) and PAL (which dominated in Europe, save for the French).

Of course the new digital standard has so many bloody modes to it that it's mind-boggling and the manufacturers that build receivers always try to upscale things and usually get it wrong so the aspect-ratio gets distorted. In an NTSC receiver, if what you know positively is a circle appears oblong your deflection circuitry is out of whack; nowadays, it's down to an incorrectly-selected upscaling algorithm (not invented by Al Gore) that botches the output image.

I still haven't tried the beer-bottle-phonograph video again yet, and it's always possible that site demands an advertising cookie from advert sites I blackhole at the DNS layer. I'll try looking at it from work next week.

[Sarongman]

How about the oldest phonograph. This one is a pot from about 2000 years ago which had some grooves that had a definite pattern to them. Just for fun, an archaeologist, with some technical knowhow, rigged up a stylus and pickup and, on rotating at a certain speed was able to discern a human voice, but too corrupted to make out any syntax. I remember reading this in a scientific periodical some years ago and, no it didn't come out on the 1st of April.

[Jack Williams]

Mentioning television, here we have changed to a digital format called HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface). Has 1920x1440 pixels, which is as high as my screen does, and is the standard. Not that I ever watch TV!

PS: Links to photograghy:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/44894889@N02/
http://www.facebook.com/murray.dick.52?ref=tn_tnmn

Photos of my "real" camera.

[Jack Williams]

With a previous Leica (stolen from me overseas) I had a self timer.
I have just bid on an NOS leica one. Not sure if it will work with this camera as it does not have the thread on the shutter release as the other camera had, as this camera is older, but I'm sure I can attach it with a piece of tubing or something.
Then I can take a photo of meself with the Canon digital in hand!
The zoom lens I have for the Leica is actually a Canon one. Hooray for them making one with the Leica thread!
Note that I have a "Nipon Kogaku" zoom rangefinder in place, which I actually got with the Leica (in Darwin) some years ago.
Somewhere I also have a 35mm wide angle lens but have somehow mislaid it, when it should have been with the other lenses..

[Jack Williams]

Back to the Edison cylindar phonograph: He actually made it as a dictaphone for office use, where you could speak a message down the tube cutting it into the wax coating. Then you could calve off that layer and cut another message. A few messages could thus be got with each cylindar before another one had to be put on. Only later came the idea to make recordings for sale. Each copy had to be made one at a time, and as purely mechanical, the singer had to sing each one. A huge horn was suspended above the performer. If it was a popular recording, the singer would be getting a bit hoarse after a number of cuts.
The revolutionary flat record got over that, because then one could press copies!
Electrical recording came about ten years before the mechanical playback was phased out.