[Vintage column] Wilson Home review part I

Product name: Wilson Home Phonograph
Manufacturer: Wilson Materials - USA
Cost: $1,700 plus shipping (Currency conversion)
Reviewer: David Hoehl - TNT-Audio USA
Reviewed: April, 2024

We've had the vinyl revival. We've had the cassette tape revival. We've had the open reel revival. We've even seen a few twitches of life in my beloved 78 RPM format. So I'm going on, uh, record right now: the time has come for a cylinder revival! Cylinder lovers, rise up! Take your appointed place in the stars!

“Are you out of your freakin' mind?!?!?” I hear someone exclaim. “Cylinders??? Nobody has offered a cylinder player to John Q. Public since that Edison guy you keep writing about folded up shop in 1929!”

“Oh, you mean John Levin's CPS1, or the Archeophone, or Nicholas Bergh's Endpoint player? Those aren't production machines, and they cost anywhere between 20 and 50 Grand. Great for deep-pocketed archives and institutions -- Endpoint's clients include Walt Disney and Sony and Twentieth Century Fox; an Archeophone is at Syracuse University's Belfer Audio Laboratory -- but a bit much for a guy who just wants to hear his granny's copy of 'Dill Pickles' played by Vess Ossman on the banjo, don't you think?”

Well, yes, I'll agree. For mere mortals interested in cylinder records, until recently the practical choices have been as follows: (1) buy an old spring phonograph, find somebody to service it, and play the records acoustically, by the diaphragm-and-horn method, the same way they would have been played a century ago, or (2) buy an old spring phonograph, find somebody to service it, and in place of the acoustic reproducer stick on some sort of electric playback adapter, either home brew or niche commercial production, the ACT/2 being an example of the latter.

Enter Don Wilson of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, doing business as Wilson Materials.

Don reasoned there would be a place for a cylinder player more modern than, say, an Edison Triumph but priced within reach of an average hobbyist. He further reasoned that he could produce one by creatively adapting off-the-shelf elements not necessarily intended for audio and supplementing them with custom-designed parts 3D-printed to cut costs and faciltate something like serial production. Two years of intensive work later -- and with advice from various experts on the subject, including some associated with the high-end machines just mentioned -- Don's reasoning bore fruit: an electric cylinder player, designed to sell below two thousand US dollars. In a nod to one of Thomas Edison's successful phonograph models and in recognition of the new machine's intended market of private collectors rather than institutions, he named it the Wilson Home Phonograph.

The Wilson Home Phonograph is a unique device. It bears little resemblance to anything most of our readers are likely to find familiar -- unless they happen to be machinists, but that's a matter for later on. The records it plays likewise are in a format alien to most of us today. Accordingly, I've found that explaining what it does and how it does it is no brief undertaking. The review, then, will break down into three parts. This, the first, surveys the demands of the format to which the player is dedicated. The second will lay out how the machine is designed to meet those demands and delve into some associated gear you will need or may want to put a Wilson Home into service. The third and last will examine the Wilson Home in operation, describing how it performs and offering audio and video examples from which you can draw your own conclusions. A bit of a journey, then. Let's get underway!

I got in on the ground floor, but in the short time since then the Wilson Home has gone through considerable evolution. As a long-time cylinder collector, and recognizing that such niche devices tend to have a blink-and-you'll-miss-it shelf life, I put down a deposit to get on the waiting list at the project's first announcement and hastened to complete my order as soon as the machines went on sale. In July 2022 I took delivery of a shiny, new Wilson Home, serial number 5 (see photo, right), personally delivered by Don Wilson. More recently, after a string of adventures, I exchanged it for an updated, greatly refined machine, no. 16 (see the article's header photo), as I will recount in due course. To differentiate the two, this review will refer to them by the serial numbers, but if you buy a Wilson Home today, it will be like no. 16. Note that since I bought no. 5 Don has released a “Studio Edition,” more elaborate than the current standard Wilson Home model and bearing a closer resemblance to the earlier generation design, for approximately double the price. Details of how the two differ are available at the website linked in the article header. I have no experience with the Studio, but the standard Wilson Home's feature set strikes me as better aligning with the actual bread-'n'-butter needs of the typical private collector, and given the price differential I expect most would choose it rather than the Studio. Accordingly, this review is limited to the standard Wilson Home.

Any cylinder player must account for certain characteristics of the cylinder format, and the Wilson Home is no exception. As with pre-LP disk records, there's more to it than might at first meet the eye. Note that I write from the perspective of cylinders in the United States; aside from some examples by Pathe and Edison's foreign offices, I have no experience with cylinders from makers elsewhere. Still, although specific manufacturers I mention may be limited to the local market, the issues and characteristics identified are more universal.

Commercial cylinder recordings were on the market from the late 1880s until 1929, when Edison's phonograph business ceased operation, although their presence sharply declined beginning in the early 19-teens as disks progressively won that period's format war. At first and for many years, cylinders were made of a material popularly known as wax, actually a metallic soap. It is fragile, easily broken and prone to wear, characteristics that governed how cylinder players developed. First, to prevent undue wear, machines for playing cylinders all had jeweled styli ground to fit the grooves; steel needles were a disk phenomenon. Second, rather than relying on the groove to propel the stylus across the record surface, as in a disk player, most cylinder machines incorporated a mechanical feed system synchronized with a standard fixed groove pitch specified for the records. Only the very cheapest bottom-end models, more toys than functional players, made the groove do the work. For the modern machine designer, these considerations are no less compelling than they were when cylinders were new; it is still necessary to provide synchronized mechanical feed and appropriately sized styli to avoid damage to fragile wax cylinders, and there are other implications as well, as we shall see.

The earliest cylinders were brown in color. Some brown wax cylinders actually are home recordings, not commercial issues; any of the open horn Edison machines above the most basic, if equipped with the appropriate attachment, could act as a recording machine, and recording blanks were made of the same soft brown wax as the earliest cylinders.^[1] Brown wax commercial cylinders were all either “originals” or duplicated pantographically one-at-a-time from fast-wearing originals, as no mass production system had been developed. Mass producing cylinders was a difficult problem, because they could not simply be stamped out, like disks, but rather required creation in a single-piece, seamless mold. Brown wax records are the most fragile cylinders, and they tend to be faint recordings. On original machines, they can be played only with certain reproducers designed for them, which have light tracking force; those designed for later formulations will quickly wear or destroy them.

In 1902, Edison solved the problem of casting commercial records in a mold and began issuing “gold moulded” cylinders in a harder black wax. They were more durable and generally louder than their brown predecessors and were played with somewhat heavier-tracking reproducers. Nonetheless, black wax was still fragile. The variant initially employed for Edison's succeeding line of Amberol four-minute cylinders was even more so, being a brittle, quick-wearing formulation that would easily shatter. Ultimately, all manufacturers abandoned wax in favor of celluloid, a hard, durable material that held up well to repeat playings and domestic handling. Some makers issued two-minute celluloid cylinders, but, aside from an obscure series for the Mexican market, Edison's two-minute cylinders were all wax, as were the first four-minute issues. Edison finally adopted celluloid with the subsequent Blue Amberol cylinders, readily identified by their plaster cores supporting the blue celluloid playing surface. A premium priced “Royal Purple” celebrity series, intended to compete with Victor's Red Seal disks, were, as you'd expect, dyed purple rather than blue, but structurally they were identical to their more mundane counterparts. (See the photo at the head of this article for an example.) For enhanced volume, reproducers for these cylinders tracked far more heavily and substituted diamond styli for the earlier models' sapphires. No wax cylinder can withstand playback with one of them, but they cause little or no wear to the sturdier celluloid.

Unlike in the anything-goes world of disk records, cylinders broadly, albeit not universally, adhered to certain standards. The normal cylinder record would be a little more than two inches in diameter and four inches long, roughly the size of a modern Campbell's Soup can. The hollow interior actually was not cylindrical but tapered slightly, by standardized dimensions, to seize onto the mandrel (the cylinder machine equivalent of a turntable platter), which incorporated a matching taper. Early brown wax records generally were recorded at around 120 to 140 RPM. With the introduction of molded, mass-produced black wax cylinders, the industry settled on a standard 160 RPM. Groove pitch at first was 100 threads to the inch, yielding a playing time of about two minutes. In the years that followed, disk records, which initially were 7 inches in diameter and also played for about two minutes, began to be issued in progressively larger diameters with correspondingly longer playing time, eventually reaching 12 inches (larger diameters, with the limited exception of Pathe's 14 inch discs, were mostly unsuccessful for home use). In response, cylinders began to be issued with double the groove density, again as noted above, 200 threads to the inch, at 4 minutes roughly matching the playing time of the 12" discs. Thus, if it is to play all the common types of cylinder, a modern machine, like its antique counterparts, must have a mandrel of precisely the correct taper and provision to adjust the feed mechanism for both two- and four-minute groove pitches.

Cylinders, especially those for home consumption, overwhelmingly conformed to the standard dimensions, but there were exceptions. Columbia ventured into a unique format when, taking a leaf from the disk manufacturers' book, it attempted to increase playing time by extending the length of a standard diameter cylinder to six inches from the standard four. These so-called “Twentieth Century” cylinders added a minute's duration at the standard 100 groove pitch, but they were not a commercial success and are rarities today. Years later, Edison sold a series of six-inch-long Blue Amberol-style training cylinders for the Ediphone business dictation machines. Other cylinders, aimed at public performance, were larger in diameter, as the resultant higher surface speed yielded greater volume. The largest cylinders from Edison and Columbia were the so-called “concert” size, five inches in diameter, recorded on brown wax with the same 100 groove pitch and four-inch length as their smaller domestic counterparts. (They should not be confused with Edison's later “concert series” semi-celebrity issues in standard size.) Pathe issued similar cylinders as “stentor,” but, ever the odd man out, issued at least two other non-conforming sizes. One, the so-called “salon” or “inter” size, was between the standard and concert sizes, around 3-and-a-half inches in diameter, about the same as a Progresso Soup can. These are uncommon but do turn up sometimes today, although very seldom in the United States; I have five. The larger size, called “celeste,” is immense, the same 5" diameter as a concert size but twice as long, the largest ever commercially issued. These are vanishingly rare; I've never seen one, and you almost certainly won't either. Here's a two-minute video (not mine, in French) showing one and the equally rare machine that Pathe made to play these things. Note that the man who appears on the title screen is holding a Concert cyinder; the Celeste is much larger.

Various smaller manufacturers had proprietary formats, although their records are seldom encountered. Here's the consequence for our present purposes: unlike disks, which for the most part can be plopped onto the same turntable regardless of diameter, each of these non-conforming sizes would require a corresponding different sized mandrel. That's as true today as it was 100 years ago. In those days, some machines, particularly for the concert cylinders, were built with permanent mandrels for a particular non-conforming size. The Pathe Celeste player in the video is an example. Another approach, which Pathe sometimes adopted for the salon sized cylinders, was to offer slip-on sleeves to adapt standard mandrels to them. Naturally, this approach worked only if the underlying machine's design allowed enough clearance. Modern players variously accept similar adapters or provide for interchangeable mandrels.

The cylinder format has certain inherent weaknesses, some of them more audible with electric reproduction than on a spring-driven acoustic machine. The most salient is speed stability. When in perfect round, cylinders, by virtue of their geometry, have constant surface speed throughout play and hence are immune to disks' inner groove distortion issues, and they also track linearly, avoiding tracking error issues inherent in pivoted tonearms. It was for these characteristics that Thomas Edison preferred cylinders to disks and chose them as the original record format. In practice, however, cylinder surfaces often are not perfectly formed, or they have distorted with age. Where disks suffer from wow when pressed off center or out of round, any eccentricity of a cylinder, with its high rotational speed, can and usually will result in flutter. Long held notes can sound warbly and wavery; as usual, the worst offenders are high strings, particularly violins, and pianos. Clarinets also tend to show up flutter, and the orchestrations on acoustic records like cylinders often are heavy on clarinets. Unfortunately, the problem is quite common, particularly with celluloid cylinders. At least some of the high-end electric cylinder machines make provision to correct for such things, but the Wilson Home is a basic player and reproduces flutter as it stands.

Wax cylinders are prone to other depredations of time. The most common is “mold”: white patches often appear on brown wax cylinders, brown on the black ones. Brown or white, affected areas have suffered physical damage to the grooves, leaving the records noisy, sometimes unbearably so; it's particularly annoying if only part of each revolution is affected, meaning 160 times per minute you'll get anything from a scratchy burst of noise as the music plays to a loud, staticy blast obliterating it. In the adjacent photo, the cylinder on the left is clean. The one on the right has an extensive but moderate, somewhat patchy case of mold and is still playable, but only with extreme surface noise. Neither mechanical nor electric reproduction, regardless of a machine's price, can salvage such records. I put “mold” in quotation marks because recent research involving none other than Don Wilson, developer of the Wilson Home under review, together with John Levin, mentioned at the beginning of this article, has revealed that in many if not most cases, it is actually not a biological phenomenon but apparently chemical, deterioration of the record material through some unknown mechanism. More information is available in a video presentation here.

One problem for black wax cylinders that definitely is biological: mice seem to find them tasty. More than once I've encountered two-minute wax cylinders heavily nibbled at one end. (For an example, see photo, right.) Moreover, all wax cylinders wear with each play on the old machines, and Great Aunt Alice's favorite sentimental ballad, which she played and played on her Edison Standard, is likely to be noisy, blasty, and harsh on peaks by this point. Black wax four-minute cylinders wear especially poorly, and they are brittle and fragile, requiring diligent care in handling; if much played on antique machines, they get noisy and start to suffer from cut grooves that skip or hang. Here is a major advantage of electric playback, as on the Wilson Home: it can reproduce black wax four-minute cylinders safely, without damaging or wearing them.

The record industry's solution to these problems was substituting celluloid for wax. Unfortunately, celluloid poses its own issues for a couple of reasons: first, as the material was relatively expensive, most manufacturers layered it over some sort of potentially problematic supporting core rather than making solid celluloid records, and, second, the material itself has proved not to be dimensionally stable over time.

The issues with cores vary by maker. The most common celluloid cylinders are Edison's Blue Amberols, which have a plaster core. Of those not made by Edison, the most frequently found were made by the Indestructible Record Co., sold under its own name and rebadged by Columbia and mail order giant Sears, Roebuck and Co. These records have a cardboard core with metal reinforcing rings at either end. Trailing Indestructible are cylinders made by the U.S. Phonograph Co., sold as U.S. Everlasting and, again rebadged, by Sears competitor Montgomery Ward. They have a solid core of some sort of waxy material. Most uncommon of the standard sized celluloid cylinders are those made by the originator of such, the Lambert Company. They actually were solid celluloid and had cores only for some of its last production. Edison's plaster cores are notorious for swelling with time to the point they prevent a cylinder from fitting fully on a standard mandrel, and Indestructable's cardboard cores occasionally do likewise, although not as often. This problem can be addressed with a specialized reaming tool (in effect, a dummy mandrel to which sandpaper has been affixed). If an Edison plaster core swells enough, it can even cause the thin record surface to split, destroying it, although harmless end splits not into the grooves are common and no cause for worry in themselves. If pieces of the plaster core have been broken out, as not infrequently has happened, the unsupported area of the celluloid surface will deform, causing tracking issues, unstable pitch, and rumbly thumps 160 times per minute. US Everlasting cores seem to be more stable than those of either of its competitors; I have too few of these records to have a good handle on their issues, if any, but on the whole I have observed none. I have no personal experience with Lambert cylinders.

As with cores, dimensional stability issues vary by maker. The celluloid formulations chosen for cylinders tend to shrink over time. Some makers' products have shrunken by enough that their groove pitch no longer sufficiently corresponds to the pitch of phonograph feedscrews, leaving them prone to skip or repeat. Indestructible's cardboard cores evidently provide insufficient support to combat this tendency, and those records are particularly prone to this issue and to physical distortions that cause flutter. Edison's plaster cores better maintain the cylinder's length, but when they swell they can distort surfaces, leading to rumble and flutter. Once again, U.S. Everlasting appears least prone to trouble on this score, but Lambert's solid celluloid cylinders reportedly can have shrunk by enough that they no longer will fit on a standard mandrel or even have sufficient diameter to engage the stylus of an antique machine's reproducer. As a consequence of these deformations over time, celluloid cylinders, two- or four-minute, in general seem more prone to flutter, rumble, and thumps than their wax counterparts and are more likely to have tracking issues on antique machines. If it is to play the universe of cylinders typically in collections today, an electric player like the Wilson Home must account for celluloid cylinders with such surface distortions, and taking steps to suppress low frequency noise is desirable, although nothing can be done for a cylinder with a surface ruined by mold or split by plaster swelling. On the other hand, an electric playback machine can contend with diminished diameter that would defeat a spring-driven antique.

I'll close this segment of the review with a pedantic aside. In the popular press, when the sort of writers who like to lump all disk records together as “vinyls” mention cylinders at all -- invariably as a way to dismiss something as “quaint” -- you can bet your bottom dollar they'll call them generically “wax cylinders” or sometimes “Edison cylinders.” Having read this far, you know better now, don't you? By no means all cylinders were made of wax, and by no means all were made by Edison. Far from it, in fact. From now on, you'll get it right: just “cylinders” or “cylinder records.” The world will be a better place, and you can hold your head up high, nose firmly in the air.

Whereupon, failing to see that banana peel on the sidewalk, you'll do an abrupt flop, much to the amusement of all around.

That's it for now. In the next part, we'll take a look at how the Wilson Home Phonograph is designed to account for the format's idiosyncratic demands.

[1] - This recording ability is actually important; as disc machines were for playback only, cylinders and their associated acoustic, spring-driven machines were the only way to make recordings outside a studio for many years, and much historically and ethnologically irreplaceable material was captured on them. For example, folklorist Alan Lomax relied on an Edison cylinder phonograph and wax cylinders up into the 1930s as he made his celebrated field recordings of folksongs. Cylinder field recordings also preserve such material as otherwise long-lost languages, music, and rituals of native peoples. In the opera world, Met librarian Lionel Mapleson set up a cylinder machine offstage, either in the prompter's box or in the flies over the stage, at the dawn of the 20th century and captured -- faintly! -- important singers in actual performance who never made commercial recordings. (His recording experiments came to an end when the machine fell from the flies to the stage during a performance one day!) You are unlikely to encounter anything that significant on a home recording, but even somebody's Great Aunt Susie singing a then-familiar song or the kids sending spoken greetings to their grandpa is a bit of domestic history, preserving a slice of home life from long ago..

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On an Overgrown Pathé

Home, Sweet Home

A Review of the Wilson Home Phonograph

Part I -- Lay of the Land