In his office, Bergh has replicas of almost every type of early sound recording machine—from Edison’s first tinfoil phonograph to Bell’s later phonograph-graphophone (an admittedly unwieldy name), which played wax cylinders. “The main reason why I have all this old stuff is, at least in my experience, it kind of takes fully understanding how the recordings are made to properly extract the best sound quality from them,” says Bergh. While developing his Endpoint machine, Bergh would use his replicas to make experimental recordings to help understand the flaws of the original machines. Only then could he work out ways to correct them, like using a laser to smooth out the ever-present “wow-y sound,” as Bergh puts it, of the original recordings caused by the rotation of the cylinder. In addition to capturing the original sound of these wax cylinders, Bergh’s machine clarifies that sound, removing the imperfections often found in wax cylinder recordings.
Today Bergh’s innovations are bringing to life the sounds of the early 20th-century. The New York Public Library has already digitized some cylinders from its collection, including the Mapleson collection. But the process, which utilized the now-outdated Archeophone cylinder phonograph, was a time-intensive one that took days to turn around a finished digitized recording. With Bergh’s Endpoint machine, library audio engineers will be able to digitize five to six cylinders a day.
For many of the cylinders in the collection, librarians like Jessica Wood only know what’s been preserved on them based on notes written on the cylinders’ sleeves and boxes. Wood knows there’s a collection of about eight cylinders from Portugal, which may be some of the oldest recordings ever made in the country. There are also five Argentinian cylinders that have preserved the sound of century-old tango music. A couple of cylinders contain the music of the police band of Mexico City “that I’ve heard are probably beautiful based on historical sources from the time,” says Wood.
But hundreds of the library’s cylinders don’t have any notes whatsoever about what may be recorded on them. Some might be family home recordings of a birthday or holiday. Others might contain unreleased musical recordings or vaudeville comedy routines. No one knows. “I’ve just been staring at the containers and imagining what they might contain based on the labels,” says Wood.