May 25th, 2008
Welcome to another edition of my late night ramblings...
So what has happened to the Edisonshop - biz as well as website? Due
to some family medical issues we had to suspend work on our electric cylinder
reproducers. There has been precious little spare time over the past year
and a half - there hasn't even been time to properly update this website.
We still owe a couple people styli and reproducers. Rest assured that we
are working on getting those orders taken care of. For those who don't
realize it, the edisonshop has always been a hobby.
Currently we do not have plans to continue offering the Edisonia & ACT2
reproducer directly - the great length of time that has passed with several
orders still not having been filled I'm sure have eroded confidence in our
ability to fill orders. We have negotiated with a prominent vintage record
& equipment retailer to purchase the balance of reproducers we have in the
works. As soon as we have delivered them all we will make public where you
can still buy one.
While going through an old hard drive I had stored away I found a copy of the first 'edition' of the edisonshop website. How far web technology has come since we first went online back on June 10, 1996! HTML was very basic, MP3 had just started to come out (with no free tools to create MP3's I might add. There was one really good encoder that relied on some stolen code from the Frauenhofer group that was only available for a brief period). RealAudio was the only practical way to stream audio. We were the 3rd site online that offered any vintage audio, and the first to present Thomas Edison reciting MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB, Aaron Cramer's 1878 Lambert Lead Cylinder Recording, Edison's LET US NOT FORGET, Edison's 1888 cylinder recording and robust 2 MEG archive of cylinder recordings. Boy - 2 meg seemed like a lot back then - and it cost me $20.00/month to host.
Only one of the links from our original pages still work - that being an early version of the nipperhead page (http://members.aol.com/peter63/nipperhead.htm). Most of the remaining sites are gone for good. A few have simply moved up from personal sites to their own domains.
Over the years we've provided articles on how to modify 'modern' turntables to play 78's, how to make new wax blanks using the original formula's, how to properly adjust your vintage phonograph for optimum performance, early on we provided an in depth article entitled 'buyer beware' - a list of the hack mechanic 'fixes' I had became aware of from intimate dealings with many of the prominent dealers at time. We experimented with animating a cylinder record box - we only had it up for a few weeks but the graphic quickly started appearing on other sites. It's still up on the late Trevor Hill's website.
Our proudest contribution has been the electric cylinder reproducer we developed in conjunction with Peter Liebert of Nipperhead fame. From a humble beginning of 6 reproducers (one for each of us and 4 to sell to cover the expense of making the batch) to making them in lots of 60 and rarely being in a position of having them available for immediate sale. In 12 years no one ever took us up on our offer to buy reproducers back, and only 1 reproducer ever required repair. My prototype is still in use and works as well as the most recent production unit.
Higher costs for materials as well as the passing of several of our friends who had provided their services at cost have driven the retail price of our reproducer with preamp from $85 back in 1998 to the current price of $325.00.
The loss of Bill Ptacek put the future of several other of our projects on hold - we were working on a production model of an electric cylinder recorder I designed, as well as better molds that would have made it practical for us to offer blanks as well as pre-recorded cylinders at a competitive price. I'm thankful that I didn't sell the Bergmann Tinfoil reproduction that he gave me.
And before I forget to mention it - the website still hasn't been updated. Please DO NOT try to order reproducers.