Becom A Contributor
Would you like to write for OldPhono? Do you have special knowledge to contribute?
We always welcome articles and information that contribute information and/or entertainment to the general phono collecting community! If you would like to contribute, simply contact us with your content and we can post it.
If you would like to advertise a product or service in a related field, contact us with your information for review.
The Old Phono Blog
How and why the great invention has disapointed its backers. The failure due to defects that are real enough, but may be overcome. The instrument virtually a toy yet, but with a tremendous future.
Collecting records might be a notoriously expensive endeavour, but right now hundreds of thousands of records are waiting to be played for free at awe-inspiring listening stations around the world. These library sound archives have records ranging from oratorial opera vocal tubes created in 1901, to comprehensive catalogues of original Motown pressings and field recordings of Polynesian tribes from the 1950s.
Here are five of the most extensive – and eclectic – record libraries across the globe, with architecture credentials that match their collections.
More than forty-five thousand talking machines are in use in the United States alone, and the demand for them is so great that the factories are working night and day. The phonograph is constantly being put to new and unique uses.
A century ago, a recording of the startlingly novel “Livery Stable Blues” helped launch a new genre of music unknown to most of the rest of the United States.
Only the most prestigious pupils could enroll in The Philadelphia Phonograph School of Languages for Parrots, which in 1903 was said to be “the only institution of its kind in the world.” It boasted over 100 feathered graduates that “could pronounce all kinds of sentences and phrases” and speak three different languages (English, French, and German).
- Victrola trademark bought by Long Island Company
- Sounds from Shanghai
- Bix Beiderbecke Museum and Archive Opens
- Thomas Edison and the Eclipse of 1878
- Free Discography Downloads
- Edison invented recordings – but it was the phonography studios of Spain that popularised them
- Forget the vinyl comeback. See a house stuffed with antique phonographs.
- Restoring a vintage 1920s recording system for 'American Epic'
- 30,000 78rpm Records Are Now In a Digital Archive