Restored Wax Cylinder Recording of Edison Speaking on WWI

October 25, 2005

Both clips are 1 & 1/2 minutes in length, 160wma files. Don't expect miracles, the sound file is from around 1915 back when there was only a tiny amount of midrange frequencies in wax cylinder recordings. They were all a little harsh sounding in those days. And there's not a whole lot of signal to add or subtract from. I think this is as good as its gonna get. Incidentally, I removed the pops and clicks the hard way, by zooming in on them and deleted them if they were in a space where no one was speaking or, if they were during the speaking I would just bring down the level using the clip restore function of Audition. I've got my own hiss reduction settings as well as EQ settings that I've come up with for working with wax cylinders. I'll be restoring a bunch of them soon. After that comes old wire recordings. By the way, there's a certain order you have to do things in. I could tell you but then... well, you know. :D

Edison Original

Edison Restored

Edited October 25, 2005 by Charlie Seper

Dickson Sorensen · October 25, 2005

Very good job! I have a 1968 Dylan bootleg The Great White Wonder that I will restore in a simal manner though it will not be as difficult, I hope. Is it necessary to zoom in on each pop to remove or can I run the filter over the whole file to extricate the noises? I assume that you eliminate all the erratic garbage first then run eq. Is that right?

October 25, 2005

Thanks,

You'd think that removing the pops and crackles is something you'd do first but, I've found that after EQing that the boosting of frequencies (in the 2.5khz range) exaggerated some pops that were beforehand to small to have worried about, and so I would end up removing them anyway. So I've learned to EQ before anything else, then noise reduction, then pull out the pops and crackles.

You can use something like Auditions automated feature for removing those pops but it never gets them all, and I'm always afraid it'll remove something I don't want removed. Actually it does a pretty fair job most of the time. If a file was extremely lengthy then that's what I'd do, but if the file is only a couple of minutes then I'd sooner do it the safest/best way--manually. It only takes an hour or so to manually remove all the junk in a 2-minute file.

I heard somewhere that there's a lost wax cylinder that Edison himself made of Mark Twain speaking. Can you imagine what that would be worth? Probably more than a lost Beatles recording.

Dickson Sorensen · October 25, 2005

Thanks,

I heard somewhere that there's a lost wax cylinder that Edison himself made of Mark Twain speaking. Can you imagine what that would be worth? Probably more than a lost Beatles recording.

Yes and it would be great to know if Hal Holbrook got it right.