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Scientists Play World's Oldest Commercial Recording
sciencehabit writes "The scratchy, 12-second audio clip of a woman reciting the first verse of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star doesn't sound like much. But the faint, 123-year-old recording—etched into a warped metal cylinder and brought back to life after decades of silence by a three-dimensional (3D) optical scanning technique—appears to belong to the first record intended for sale to the public. Made for a talking doll briefly sold by phonograph inventor Thomas Edison, the early record is the oldest known American recording of a woman's voice and may be the oldest known record produced at Edison's laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey."
Forget MP3s, I wish it were possible to recover all the Microsoft ADPCM WAV music stuck on my inaccessible zip disks!
It's exactly like playing the recording, don't be stupid. It's NOT playing the cylinder; which is different.
Why would anyone go through the pointless effort of rebuilding a player? It's not like it's technically new, challenging, or interesting.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Restricting the phrase "play [the] recording" to some arbitrary subset of playback devices is not very helpful, correct, or interesting. Why is this modded up?