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On an Overgrown Pathé

Home, Sweet Home

A Review of the Wilson Home Phonograph

Part III - The Wilson Home in Action

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

This is the third and last part of a three-part review. In Part I, we discussed the basics of the cylinder format. Part II focused on how Don Wilson designed the Wilson Home Phonograph, an electric cylinder player priced for the individual hobbyist, to meet them, and it surveyed some necessary or desirable ancillary gear. Now let's turn our attention to how the Wilson Home works when actually playing cylinders.

To begin, anyone who has played cylinders on antique equipment will immediately notice that the Wilson Home loads and plays backwards - the cylinder slides onto its mandrel from the left end, and the carriage moves from right to left, exactly opposite how an antique machine loads and plays. This arrangement is not arbitrary.

Those of us of a certain age may remember a kiddy phonograph called the “Close-n-Play.” It was in a clamshell case, and to play a record on its turntable all a kid needed to do was close the lid, which mounted all the delicate parts, including the cartridge and any related equipment, out of sight and, perhaps more importantly, inaccessible to the user's prying little fingers. An Edison cylinder machine is not dissimilar: everything for playing the cylinder is mounted in a carrier eye, and to play the record one need only lower the carrier, thereby setting the stylus on the record and engaging the mechanical feed but never directly handling the stylus or related equipment, which is out of view. What therefore is not evident in this process is that the stylus mounting effectively works like a tonearm but with the pivot end, not the cartridge end, toward the user. There's no problem handling it, however, because the machine is designed to do that work automatically.

Now consider the Wilson Home. True, like an Edison machine, it has a mechanical feed to carry the stylus across the record, but its cartridge is mounted on a conventional, albeit much shortened, tonearm arrangement for manual placement by the user. If it traveled left to right, as in an Edison machine, the user would address the cartridge from the arm's pivot end, and setting the stylus on the record would become a serious challenge. By flipping everything around, the tonearm is arranged in the customary fashion, with the cartridge directly accessible at the user's end, where it is easy to manipulate. Hence, the “backwards” arrangement of the Wilson Home's mandrel and motor assembly.

Among my first concerns in assessing no. 16, which has no flywheel, was how its speed stability would stack up against that of the flywheel-equipped no. 5. To test it, I set up a handheld digital tachometer to read the mandrel rotations of no. 16 while playing an Edison Blue Amberol cylinder carefully chosen the same way I choose a shirt each day: “it was on top.” You can see a 55-second sample - of the tachometer output, not my shirt! - in the video embedded below. The machine was steady for lengthy stretches, but off and on it did vary +/- a tenth of an RPM. Note that when a cylinder is spinning at 160 RPM, .1 RPM is a variation of only six one-hundredths (to be precise, .0625) of a per cent. That result was good enough; I didn't need to do a similar test for no. 5, because I already knew its digital displays varied by more. That said, I'll confess I'm not sure I entirely trust the Hall effect sensors controlling them; my own attempts to build a DIY Hall effect digital speed readout for my Fons turntable never did yield reliable results. Rejoice! You'll therefore be spared reading an article from me on the subject.

Anyhow, I don't have hard data, but I would be surprised if the speed stability of even the best antique cylinders themselves were better than +/- .0625%. My ears tell me that most Blue Amberols, including the one in this test, fall well short of that standard. Bear in mind that the speed readout is the point of this video. The audio is what emerged from my stereo speakers across the room, picked up by the camera's so-so built-in microphone pointing away from them, and is not really representative of what the Wilson Home produces. For a better idea on that subject, I refer you to the video at the end of the review, which presents a variety of cylinders played on no. 16 with audio recorded as a line feed, not through a microphone.

I also was curious how the speed stability of no. 16 would compare to that of original cylinder phonographs. I first checked my Edison Triumph player, ca. 1906 but subsequently retrofitted with add-on gearing to play four-minute cylinders, and then an Edison Amberola 75, a modest floor model machine made about ten years later that can play only the celluloid Blue Amberol cylinders. I'm sure many of you would expect that we'd see no contest. In fact, although no. 16 does better the old machines, it's not by nearly as much as you might think. The Triumph, which I hadn't run in a while, took maybe 15 seconds to settle down to a steady speed, but once it did, aside from a couple of transitory .5 RPM or so dips, variation for most of its run was within about the same +/- .1 RPM variance as we saw with no. 16. Where the Triumph fell short was consistency: no. 16 held steady at 160 without change for long stretches, whereas the Edison tended to wobble up and down regularly. I'm guessing that could be a function of wear on the gears, but whatever the reason the changes were mostly about the same size, just more frequent, if not cyclical. The Amberola also took a bit to settle down, but then it actually matched the Wilson Home part of the time. It had some long stretches of unvaried speed, and the variance again was, for the most part, +/- .1 RPM, but occasionally it was a little more.

I suppose this is as good a point as any to discuss how the audio from electric playback on the Wilson Home compares to that from an antique machine. The Triumph was the top of Edison's regular line of phonographs for the home, and mine is fitted with an Edison Model O reproducer, which has two- and four-minute styli selectable via a turnover knob, rather in the manner of a ceramic cartridge, with “78” and “LP” styli, on a cheap stereo turntable. Nothing about the Model O has ever been cheap, however, when it was new or today. The Edison machine also has a large oak cygnet horn. Taken together, they offer cylinder playback about as good as it gets for a spring-driven machine. I've recorded the same cylinder played and captured two ways: from the Triumph via the built-in microphones of a Zoom H1n hand-held digital recorder and from the Wilson Home's line level output via my Edirol USB audio interface. The video below presents both. The selection is “Dill Pickles,” played on the banjo by Vess Ossman and issued by Indestructible in 1908. “Hey, wait a minute!” I hear someone interject. “Isn't 'Dill Pickles' played by Vess Ossman the cylinder that was mentioned sarcastically back at the beginning of Part I?” Why, yes, now that you mention it, it is. Funny how things worked out that way, huh?

How about the Wilson Home's own noise level? As a repurposed machine tool, is it really quiet enough for audio? My answer, without having resorted to laboratory measurements, is that my ear detects no issues on that count. The mandrel and feedscrew are isolated from their motors by elastic, noise-dampening silicone couplings, which have an interleaved design in no. 5 and are dual hemispheres in no. 16. The instructions for no. 5 caution against manually turning the mandrel, as doing so can damage the coupling, but according to Don Wilson no such stricture applies to no. 16's revised design. In addition, the motors are mounted with isolators that keep their noise from passing through the frame of the machine. I heard no noise from the cartridge that I could attribute to the motors, although when running with no music playing they are faintly audible through the air at close range.

A final issue worth exploring is how well the Wilson Home, fitted with a modern stereo cartridge intended for disks running well below 100 RPM, tracks the very different format of cylinder records turning at 160 RPM. I'd guess I've played upwards of 200 cylinders on no. 16 by now, and in the course of doing so it tracked nearly all properly. Nearly, but admittedly not all. Here are the exceptions:

• I can think of one Edison two-minute wax record that played with poor sound relative to how it plays on the Edison Triumph; I'm guessing that's a function of a mismatch of stylus and groove, nothing to do with the Wilson Home itself, and that if I had an array of stylus sizes, as I do for my disk records, I might have obtained better results.

• A few Blue Amberols had surface distortions beyond what the Wilson Home's tonearm could track with my cartridges, which I've found to be good trackers but which admittedly are budget models. Not all those distortions were obvious. The most noteworthy example was an extra copy of the Selma Kurz cylinder that I will discuss and play below; it had a little ripple in the celluloid at the end, barely visible, that caused the stylus to hang. On the other hand, the Wilson Home handled some pretty violent lateral swings and vertical bumps with aplomb. I encountered no such issues with wax Amberols, but they are prone to cut grooves that skip or hang.

• Indestructible cylinders in general are iffy. Some, like "Dill Pickles" above, play through without issue. In fact, the Wilson Home tracked that one better than did the Edison Triumph, which skipped when it got to a surface flaw that left the Wilson unfazed. One Indestructible cylinder that won't play on the Edison wouldn't play on the Wilson Home, either. Some others were prone to skipping or skating on the Wilson Home, particularly when I tried to seat the stylus in the first groove. Testing a theory that shrinkage has affected both width and depth of the groove, I applied the four-minute stylus to one very fussy two-minute Indestructible, which invariably caused the two-minute stylus to skip, and with coaxing and several retries I got a clean play. (Do not take that approach with any wax cylinder; it was safe only because the Indestructible is celluloid.) Played on the Triumph, it skipped once.

• I have rather few Pathe cylinders, and most tended to problematic in one way or another. I suppose not surprisingly, the salon sized ones appear to be sensitve to tonearm height and cartridge overhang; cylinders that played with few problems in one session gave nothing but problems in another, after I'd set the arm back down for standard size and then brought it back up again. But later, when I reset the height yet again and tried a newly purchased one, it played through relatively well. Both salon and standard sized Pathe cylinders are quite prone to cut grooves that will cause the Wilson to skip or, more frequently, hang; the new salon had one. When they do play properly, my Pathe cylinders, at least, usually have noisy surfaces. To be fair, one is beautifully quiet, and they are old even by cylinder standards; Pathe abandoned the cylinder format in 1906.

Otherwise, everything else I can recall that didn't have some sort of obvious groove damage played through without issues. No. 16 successfully played even cylinders with pretty violent eccentricities, as you can see in several segments of the companion video at the end of the review. On balance, then, I'd say the Wilson Home, as fitted with my LP Gear cartridges, tracks cylinders at least as well as could be wished or expected. I can't say, of course, how other cartridges might perform with it, although I have no reason to expect good quality alternatives would yield inferior results.

So, assuming you watched the video above, in addition to getting an idea of how the results obtainable by acoustic and electronic playback of these old records differ, now you've seen a sample of the Wilson Home actually playing a cylinder. How do you get there? Well, once a cylinder is on the Wilson Home's mandrel, as with any analogue record there's a routine (call it “ritual” if you insist) to follow. First, some preliminary setup.

• Make sure you have mounted the correct stylus; this is important, as playing a two-minute wax cylinder with the smaller four-minute stylus can and likely will damage it. Pay particular attention if you try the trick I outlined above to play a two-minute Indestructible with the four-minute stylus.

• Make sure the feedscrew setting is right for the cylinder you are playing, two- or four-minute. If you play a two-minute cylinder with the four-minute setting, the cartridge will move across the record twice as quickly as the mechanical feed moves the tonearm pivot; the tonearm will swing to greater and greater angles to the left until the cartridge finally falls off the back of the record. If you play a four-minute cylinder with the two-minute setting, the opposite happens: the pivot will move across twice as fast as the cartridge, with the arm describing ever greater angles to the right until it either begins to drag across the grooves, skipping wildly, or else falls off the cylinder. Again, take special care to reset the machine if you try the Indestructible trick.

• Check to make sure the azimuth is square; I've found that the headshell can easily develop a list during handling and often does. (I blush to say, I noticed that issue only after I'd recorded one or two segments of the companion video.)

• Double check that the cylinder is firmly on the mandrel (but don't push a wax one too hard, as it might burst). If the cylinder is loose, it will have massive amounts of rumble and terrible pitch stability. It won't hurt to glance at the mandrel and make sure it's firmly screwed onto its shaft, too; if it works loose, again you'll get all manner of rumbly pitch problems.

Now the tonearm/cartridge carrying sled must be moved to the beginning of the cylinder. Because of the mechanical feed, it's not a simple matter of swinging a tonearm on a pivot, as it would be on a disk turntable. Rather, it requires operating the mechanism shown in the photo, right. Push the black lever, which is attached to a strong spring, to the right, releasing the wheel with black teeth. Turning the crank handle on that wheel clockwise will move the sled to the right, counterclockwise to the left. Once the tonearm is aligned with the beginning of the cylinder, release the black lever and make sure the rack at the other end has firmly engaged the wheel's teeth to lock them in position. Incidentally, the small, silver colored crank wheel also visible in the photo is the fore-and-aft adjustment for the cartridge and should not be turned during this process. I mention that because it's all too easy to grab the wrong crank handle if you aren't paying attention!

Having aligned the tonearm with the beginning of the record, lower the stylus to the record surface. As with the backwards loading, this step contradicts expectations. With disk records, I think it's safe to say that only a DJ would place the stylus on a stationary record. Don Wilson recommends doing so on the Wilson Home, however, and I think he's right. Cylinders do not have lead-in grooves. When a light-tracking modern cartridge and stylus meet up with a beveled cylindrical record surface, smooth but, perhaps, not altogether even, spinning at 160 RPM, there's a strong likelihood it will skid off the front end onto the mandrel. Placing the stylus on an unmoving surface and then letting the surface come up to speed makes such mishaps much less likely (but not entirely out of the question, particularly with Blue Amberol cylinders, so be ready to grab the headshell quickly or nudge it to the groove if need be when you start up a cylinder). Moreover, whereas in the old design it was possible to turn on the mandrel but not the feedscrew, in the new one both come on with a single switch, meaning if the mandrel of a new-style machine is active, the mechanical feed is moving the sled, and with it the tonarm/cartridge assembly, inexorably to the left, greatly complicating setting the stylus at the beginning of the record.

After the record has finished playing, lift the arm, place it back on the arm rest, and pivot the arm rest to keep the arm/cartridge maximally clear of the cylinder surface. You can stop the cylinder first, or you can lift the arm and then stop the cylinder; I don't think it makes a difference at that point. What is important is to remove the stylus promptly and stop the machine, particularly if you are playing a two-minute cylinder. The Wilson Home has no automatic stop, and even if the cylinder has run out of grooves, until it's turned off the mechanism will continue pushing the cartridge to the left, eventually (or quickly) running the stylus off the end of the cylinder and onto the mandrel. The resultant noise will be ugly, and more to the point, if the stylus suffers damage it will become a threat to cylinders thereafter.

So What Do I Hear?

The companion video will let you judge for yourself, in a variety of music, how no. 16 acquits itself and at least to some extent how different variants of cylinder compare to each other. Here are some general observations, though, on the basis of having now played a wide array of records on Wilson Home no. 16. I've found life with no. 16 to be quite the ear-opening experience.

In a nutshell, listening to them electrically reproduced on the Wilson home completely changes expectations about the sound of cylinder records and reveals it to be very like the sound to be heard from other formats when properly played back. In other words, you can expect to hear cylinder records with the same natural sound balance you'd expect from good acoustic 78s played on a properly configured modern turntable, without the kinds of timbral artifacts that come of mechanically vibrating a diaphragm to pump air through a big horn. Furthermore, you get that sound without putting the kind of wear on century-old cylinders that would come from applying (relatively) heavy-tracking, low compliance antique equipment to them. That's the task assigned to the Wilson Home, and it does a capable job of accomplishing it. On the other hand, what the Wilson Home gives you is “warts and all”; all the flaws to which cylinders are heir will be more clearly audible than they are when filtered through the limited response of original equipment. But again on the other hand, reproducing records in the electrical domain opens the possibility of applying modern technology to minimize those shortcomings. To help you make your own assessment, I've put together a video compilation of examples, representing a range of music and cylinder types, embedded at the end of the article. I'd encourage you to give it a listen rather than taking my word for anything. That said, here are my thoughts about Edison's products, the most commonly found today, as a result of fairly extensive audition on no. 16:

On the Wilson Home, wax cylinders in general sound better than celluloid. This conclusion runs opposite to my thoughts about the two materials when played on antique machines. I have not made a scientific or even systematic study, but in going repeatedly from one type to another somewhat at random, I have the impression that among the cylinders in my collection, Edison's Gold Moulded wax records sound the best, with the quietest surfaces and the most stable speed. If shiny and well cared for, two minute wax records can sound excellent, I'd say better than disks of their period. Rumble, if present, usually is negligible. Four-minute wax cylinders are a dicier proposition, because their material is so fragile and hence prone to damage from the old players. On the whole, I think as they usually stand today they are a step down from the two-minute wax ones, because they tend to be noisier, but they do seem to have good speed stability and freedom from rumble. Note that many, but by no means all, four minute wax cylinders were reissued as celluloid Blue Amberols after Edison abandoned wax for the four-minute cylinders. One example, Selma Kurz singing “Una voce poco fa” from Rossini's Barbiere di Siviglia, appears in the photo to the left. Same recording, but the black copy is wax, the blue a celluloid Blue Amberol.

As to the Blue Amberol cylinders, in comparison to other types, on a good, properly restored Edison machine they can sound wonderful, with quiet surfaces and the best volume. The more revealing Wilson Home, however, exposes that they are prone to flutter and also to high levels of low frequency noise, both rumble and thumps. On average, I'd say the best are those recorded before Edison adopted the practice of dubbing cylinder masters from those for Diamond Discs, beginning in 1915. From that point onward, the sound quality, as you'd expect, suffers to a greater or lesser extent. An easy but imperfect way to tell by eye: if a Blue Amberol cylinder has a flat end, it's from 1912 or 1913 and is definitely a direct recording; if it has a beveled end, it is from late 1913 on and is likely to be a dub. Note that the flat end/beveled end test is not perfect: direct recordings from late 1913 through the end of 1914 were issued with beveled ends from the outset, and some earlier direct recordings continued in the catalogue and were also issued with beveled ends. The Royal Purple Amberol issues all had beveled ends, although the first five (and only the first five), all sung by tenor Alessandro Bonci and his sole contributions to the series, were direct recordings. The five Bonci cylinders also appeared as beveled Blue Amberols under the same numbers. My take is that the problems with Blue Amberol cylinders are artifacts of dimensional shifts with age, not inherent to the format as such; for an example of a Blue Amberol that plays close to perfectly, I'll refer you to Billy Murray singing “Casey Jones” in the companion video at the end of this review. On the basis of that evidence, I'd say Blue Amberols can play beautifully - they just usualy don't.

Turning to makers other than Edison, I have more limited experience with Pathe, Indestructible, and US Everlasting. Pathe cylinders, which were always in wax, are scarce in the United States, as the company did not open its branch here until long after it had abandoned the cylinder business in favor of discs, but I do have a few standard sized cylinders and five in the larger salon size. Without having done any kind of statistically valid study, I have the impression Pathe cylinders are more prone to mold issues than their domestic Edison counterparts (I have the same impression about Edison's European products), and the ones that are clean tend not to play as well. All my salon cylinders have cut groove or other tracking issues, and the standard cylinders, as often as not, tend to be faint, noisy, or both. Purely as speculation, perhaps Pathe's cylinder machine designs had something to do with the physical issues; unlike Edison's, at least many Pathe machines were set up like front mount disk players, imposing the weight of the reproducer and horn on the cylinder. Neither element was especially heavy - the reproducers were small and light, and Pathe cylinder machine horns were made of aluminum - but that's still asking delicate wax grooves to do a lot of work. The absolute bottom-end machine in the “Overgrown Pathe” header photo, with which I received four of my five salon cylinders, actually rotated the mandrel backwards, with the record pushing into the stylus rather than pulling away under it, a fraught arrangement for soft wax. Moreover, like a front-mount disk machine, it had no mechanical feed, instead calling on the end of the horn to swing across the cylinder like a tonearm. The machine in the adjacent photo, a step higher in the Pathe line, doesn't commit that sin, but it does show how Pathe put the reproducer directly on the cylinder. In effect, its design actually foreshadows that of the Wilson Home: the horn, mounted on a pivot, acts as a tonearm, and a mechanical feed carries the pivot across the cylinder as it plays. I guess truly nothing is new under the sun.

All Pathe cylinders were made of wax. All Indestructible and US Everlasting cylinders were of celluloid. Indestructible issued records under its own name, Columbia issued them under its name, and Sears issued them under its Oxford label. No maker's name appears on them, but they are easily recognized their cardboard cores, metal reinforcing rings at the ends, and distinctive white lettering labeling the flat end. I've already addressed their tracking issues. Surface noise of the ones I have varies from low to moderate, and they can have some rumble. US Everlasting, sold under its own name and by Montgomery Ward as Lakeside, had a solid core of some sort of waxy substance. Like Indestructible, it engraved label information into the flat end, but unlike Indestructible's its lettering is usually difficult to read. I have only four, as the company issued little of the classical/operatic music I collect. The few that I do have are superior to the run of Blue Amberols, both in surfaces and stability. The adjacent photo shows five cylinders for comparison: an Edison wax Amberol, Edison Blue Amberols with flat and beveled ends, an Indestructible, and a US Everlasting. Note the reinforcing ring of the Indestructible and the plaster cores of the Blue Amberols.

All Things Being Equal(ized)

Time for some examples. What follows is a chance for you to do some comparative listening. First, you can hear a wax and celluloid issue of the same recording, the Selma Kurz cylinders pictured immediately above. Kurz was a fixture of the Vienna State Opera for more than three decades beginning in 1899, when she joined the company at the invitation of Gustav Mahler (with whom she would later have a brief affair, but that's another matter), and she made important appearances all over Europe, but she sang only once in the United States. Such a resume - well known in Europe, not as much in the United States - was not uncommon for Edison's operatic singers, as Victor had locked up most of the Metropolitan Opera's stars under exclusive contracts. All the following dubs are from Wilson Home no. 16. Note that you may hear little difference between the Blue Amberol copies if you are listening to speakers with restricted bass, such as small computer speakers. The Wilson Home is a piece of component audio, to be played through a component audio system. Ideally you should play the files here, and for that matter the assorted videos, likewise if you're to form a valid idea of what the Wilson Home will give you. If you can't from your computer, consider auditioning through a good set of headphones.

In Part II, I suggested that an equalizer is a valuable addition to your arsenal when playing celluloid cylinders on the Wilson Home. The three dubs of this Blue Amberol cylinder will let you decide for yourself. The first is straight from the phono preamp, with no adjustment. To create the other two, I interposed an equalizer between the phono preamp and the computer's USB audio interface. When I began this article, my spare third-octave EQ was in the shop. Therefore, for purposes of this experiment I inserted an old octave (12-band) Technics into the chain, and by progressively, but not linearly, rolling off the bottom three sliders - 63 (down about 3 dB), 31.5, and 16 Hz (down 12 dB) - even that relatively blunt instrument made a pronounced improvement in the results from Blue Amberols, in most cases suppressing that prominent rumble entirely or nearly so. That arrangement is available for you to play via the third button below, and I was sufficiently happy with these results that I applied the same equalizer when copying most of the celluloid cylinders in the companion video. Note that the Library of Congress, although with a little fudging, indicates acoustic recording covered only 100 to 2,500 Hz. There will be very little content as low as 63 Hz and nothing but noise by the time the signal gets down toward 20. An equalizer set as I did the Technics is not going to affect the musical content, then, but it will give you a way to control noise that does affect the musical content.

Belatedly, after the video was done and as I was in the final stages of writing this review, the shop called and announced that my 1/3 octave equalizer was finished - several weeks earlier than promised. When's the last time that happened to you? I hastened to collect it and substitute it for the octave EQ, and as expected the results were substantially better still. With its narrower resolution, it revealed something curious: the rumble and particularly thumps that so often plague Blue Amberol cylinders seem to center around 80 Hz, which number is half a cylinder's 160 RPM rotational speed. I'm sure there must be some reason for the correlation, but the practical effect was that I could get better suppression of the unwanted audio artifacts by notching at 80 and, less aggressively, cutting the two adjacent sliders, 63 and 100 Hz, leaving everything else set flat. I haven't tested extensively, but for some cylinders as little as 4 to 6 dB of cut at 80 Hz sufficed to correct the issue, or at least render it unobtrusive, although in one or two cases as much as a full 12 dB cut was desirable. I also tried small cuts of the adjacent bands, 50 and 125 Hz, to keep a smooth curve, but I'd say for the most part doing so was of limited value.

I also tried a parametric equalizer that a friend kindly lent to me, again after the video was done. I've never worked with one before, but I'm impressed. It's even better adapted to zeroing in on a narrow frequency band and notching it out. It also can make a deeper maximum cut: the octave EQ is limited to 12 dB, but each control of the parametric goes to 18 dB, and the controls can be cascaded to double that figure or more should the user wish. On the basis of very limited experimentation, even at my humble level of competence, far from the upper reaches of the learning curve, I think it gives slightly but noticeably better results than I managed with the 1/3 octave unit. Accordingly, as the two were very close, I'm not offering an example from the 1/3 octave EQ; instead, the last button calls up a copy made with the parametric.

All this, of course, pertains to the low-frequency noise of celluloid cylinders. As to the other end of the audio spectrum, again limited experimentation suggests the octave EQ is not sufficiently flexible to be helpful. The third-octave was better at adding a bit more air to the limited top end, and the parametric strikes me as promising even better. As of now, though, I'd say that any equalizer's primary value is in controlling low-frequency noise and artifacts. Audio Control, 'way back when, made an equalizer called the Richter Scale that addressed only low frequencies; I've never seen one, but that might be something to investigate. A quick peek at a couple of websites, however, suggests that, against all expectations, these units have some sort of niche following and bring prices accordingly. You'll probably do better to seek out a good 1/3 octave or parametric model. Either would be a good choice, although on present information I'd give an edge to the parametric. Even an octave model, however, will pay big dividends relative to taking the output straight.

Onward to the examples. The wax Amberol shows all the virtues and flaws of this form: its pitch is relatively steady, and it has little or no rumble, but it is fairly noisy; audibly worn; and, in its first half, riddled with cut grooves that hang or skip. I have edited those tracking flaws out to the extent I could, and although I didn't achieve a perfectly smooth presentation, the exercise actually demonstrates one advantage of the Wilson Home: by recording them and then editing the files, even flawed cylinders can be salvaged and made playable, at least to some degree, while avoiding the likelihood of more damage to an already decayed cylinder. In other examples, not presented here, I've dubbed a couple of cracked wax Amberols from the Wilson Home; the cracks made them nearly unlistenable taken “raw,” but with application of declicking software to the resultant files you'd never know they were not perfect. Unfortunately, where groove damage has obliterated music, as has happened at one point in the Kurz cylinder presented here, nothing can be done in software or otherwise. By contrast to the wax Amberol, the Blue Amberol plays through perfectly and has relatively little surface noise, but it has heavy rumble, and the pitch stability is inferior, as is evident if you listen to the brief orchestral introduction and interludes. As to what equalization can do to address the low frequency noise, you be the judge!

Wax Amberol:

Celluloid Blue Amberol, no equalization:

Celluloid Blue Amberol, octave equalizer:

Celluloid Blue Amberol, parametric equalizer:

Assessment

The Wilson Home Phonograph, which as no. 5 proved to be something of a work in progress, in its current form impresses me as a product that has reached a satisfying maturity. It enables the private collector or would-be collector of cylinder records at last to jump into the 21st century and play them with modern gear to obtain modern sound reproduction. It avoids the kind of wear that early machines cause to the delicate wax cylinders, and for those who wish to copy their records it eliminates the need to set up microphones in a quiet environment.

In operation, the Wilson Home Phonograph does what it was designed to do: it plays the types of standard cylinder likely to be found in private collections, and it even can accommodate certain exotica. It is a no-frills player, with few adjustments and no built-in means by which to compensate for flawed cylinders. Put a cylinder on it, and it will play the cylinder as it stands, nothing more and nothing less. The machine's heritage as a bench lathe derivative does exact certain complexity relative to antique phonographs, although not at the level required for an archival transfer with at least some the high-end modern ones (I've seen a video of one in action, but I've never worked with any). On the other hand, the revised control layout is straightforward and, with one caveat I'll mention below, about as simple to operate as would be possible, ideal for those who just want to put a cylinder on the mandrel and play it without hassles. As distilled from no. 5, no. 16 offers the features a collector needs to play cylinder records into a modern amplifier with a minimum of fuss.

Admittedly, it's hard to say that a $1,700 audio component is “inexpensive” or a “bargain,” especially in the current economy, but a cursory check online reveals the Wilson Home is priced in the same ballpark as any number of popular turntables, inter alia offerings by Technics (SL-1200GR), Music Hall (MMF-7.3), and Rega (Planar 3 50th anniversary edition). In other words, it's in line with what audio enthusiasts regularly pay for other relatively “serious” analogue signal sources. It's also not out of line with what one would expect to pay for a top-end Edison antique phonograph like my Triumph, although admittedly a good bit more than one would spend for a common, lower end (but perfectly serviceable) model like the ubiquitous Edison Standard, Model B. For a unique niche, low-volume device embodying so much research and development work, I'd say the pricetag is more than reasonable. Certainly it's more manageable than the cost of a high-end machine aimed at institutional buyers, even factoring in the varous associated purchases that a new Wilson Home owner will want or need to make, as outlined in Part II. If you happen to collect the rarer, more expensive sorts of cylinders, like Edison's Grand Opera series, it's worth bearing in mind that your investment in records is likely to dwarf what you would spend on a Wilson Home, which will treat them far more gently than an original Edison machine would.

I should mention the flip side of this machine's ability to yield modern sound reproduction of cylinders: it yields modern sound reproduction of cylinders. If your goal is to hear the same sort of mechanically reproduced sound quality that people heard when these records were new, you won't get it from the Wilson Home Phonograph. Playing cylinders on the Wilson Home is the same as playing 78s on a modern turntable with a modern cartridge, and the sound is no more like that from an Edison phonograph's horn than a Red Seal 78 on the stereo sounds like a Victrola. I don't mean that as a criticism of either alternative; preserving and enjoying historical sound, like preserving and driving historical automobiles or preserving and modeling historical clothing, is a worthy pursuit, putting us directly in touch with domestic history, with what life was like in an earlier age, in a vivid way no written account can match. In other words, there's a dichotomy between hearing sounds as our forebears heard them from their records and hearing sounds as our forebears made them as they cut their records, and both are valid undertakings. There's something fascinating about a cunningly designed and executed purely mechanical device that can speak to us across a century or more, and I don't intend to discard my Edison just because I now can play cylinders on the Wilson Home. That said, records exist to give us access to music as an artist performed it, to give us back the sounds an artist created. As John Levin put it in the video about cylinder mold that I linked in Part I, to give us music without interference from the medium reproducing it. Electrical reproduction of cylinders comes closer to that goal than mechanical. In audio terms, I suppose that's applying an audiophile outlook to very old recordings, but that opportunity is what the Wilson Home offers the modern private collector. For those of us accustomed to thinking of cylinders simply as “antiques,” it asks us for a change of mindset, to think of them as records, just like 78s or LPs or CDs. If you can make that leap, I think the Wilson Home, which puts modern electronic playback of cylinders within reach of Everyman, is a valuable contribution to our hobby.

So where does all that leave us? With its combination of features and in light of the universe of cyinders and their demands, whose needs can a Wilson Home fill, and for whose will it fall short? Here's a quick summary as I see it:

• Who should consider a Wilson Home: Those who want to move beyond the sound offered by antique machines, can connect it to a modern sound system, and have or intend to have collections wholly or predominantly comprising standard sized two-minute moulded (black) wax, four-minute wax, and celluloid cylinders. Those who have or expect to have Columbia Twentieth Century or Pathe salon sized cylinders, whether exclusively or in combination with standard sized cylinders. Those who like to make copies of their cylinders for posting on line or personal pleasure. A Wilson Home is particularly desirable for those with expensive, uncommon or rare wax issues, like the Pathe salon cylinders and Edison Grand Opera series, where avoiding wear is even more desirable than with more common types. In particular, those who have significant collections of wax four-minute cylinders, which are especially prone to wear or damage from playback on antique equipment.

• Who should not consider a Wilson Home: Obviously, those who own no cylinders! (But if that describes you and you've read this far, admit it - you're interested, you really belong in the preceding category, and you need to go out and buy some cylinders and an Edison machine or Wilson Home right now!) At the other end of the spectrum, those who need to copy cylinders for commercial release or for archival preservation at the institutional level. Also those who are interested in cylinders only to recreate sound as it was heard from period equipment or who are primarily antique machine collectors and occasionally play cylinders just as a means of demonstrating their old phonographs. Those who cannot connect the Wilson to a modern sound system; without one, it is mute. Those who have a significant number of brown wax or concert sized cylinders or who place a premium on being able to play them. The Wilson Home lacks sufficient speed flexibility for the former and mandrel clearance for the latter. For these types, consider the Studio Edition.

• Who may or may not want to consider a Wilson Home: Those whose cylinder collections are entirely celluloid, as, for example, those who have bought cylinders only for play on an Edison Amberola. Here, wear considerations are more muted, and interest or lack of interest in hearing antique records with modern reproduction takes priority, bearing in mind that electronic reproduction seems to bring out the flaws in celluloid cylinders quite clearly. Those for whom the Wilson's industrial look would conflict with home decor, raising potential WAF issues. (Don't laugh; domestic harmony is important!) Those who have only mild interest in cylinders, owning only a few and playing them them infrequently.

Issues and Cautions

I like the Wilson Home, particularly the more recent version. It's a good idea, and Don Wilson has worked very hard to bring it to life, then to make that good idea progressively better by incorporating input from collectors and users. Between no. 5 and no. 16, he really did polish away the first generation design's rough edges. Of course, nothing is ever perfect, and I owe it to you to note a few quibbles and observations. I wouldn't say any is what people call a “deal breaker,” but they are points to bear in mind to keep expectations realistic. (Not capital-R-Realistic, but wouldn't it have been cool if Radio Shack had sold cylinder players alongside the 8-tracks?) Remember, this machine opens up a format previously out of reach to those unwilling to delve into antique playback gear and unwilling or unable to spend as much on a player as they would on a car. From that perspective, the Wilson Home is a decided success.

• Don Wilson told me that the tonearm rest cost him more redesign work than any other part of the Wilson Home. I can believe it. Those of no. 5 and original to no. 16 had an annoying habit of loosening up in use to the point that they would abruptly drop the cartridge onto the mandrel or, worse, a delicate wax record, and both put the cartridge at an angle to the record. Recently, Don issued yet another complete redesign that, on limited exposure, I've found to be an improvement. The new design, which Don is supplying to current owners of machines like no. 16 and which will be standard for Wilson Home phonographs going forward, imparts no lateral angle to the tonearm and seems to solve the “loosening” problem.

• When the machine is operated from above, as on a low table, no. 16's start/stop switch is awkward to access at the end of a cylinder. By that point it's buried behind the large gear-toothed wheel for manually positioning the sled, making for a find-it-by-feel exercise. Given the speed control knob's proximity, shifting the speed adjustment while fumbling for the switch is all too easy. No. 5's array of controls was better in this regard, because they were set into a front panel fully separated from each other and the machinery.

• Getting to that start/stop switch promptly after playing a cylinder is important, however. In operation, the Wilson Home is not a “set and forget” device. It has no provision for automatic stop. When a cylinder ends, the mechanical feed keeps going, and the user must quickly stop it and raise the arm to prevent the machine from running the stylus off the end of the cylinder and onto the spinning mandrel.

• The left-handed loading of cylinders, although necessary for reasons noted above, is awkward, particularly for one accustomed to playing cylinders on antique equipment that loads the other way.

• I'm not sure whether I miss no. 5's digital RPM readout for the mandrel. Such displays simplify adjusting a device's speed, as I've noted in regard to turntables, and ordinarily I consider them a key feature. Unlike acoustic disks, however, the cylinders that are no. 16's natural fodder all turn at one speed, 160 RPM. The new design won't slow down enough for earlier cylinders that spin at more like 120 RPM. Therefore, as long as the user doesn't inadvertently bump it in the way outlined above, the speed adjustment knob is a set-once-and-ignore control, and something like the hand-held digital tachometer in my speed stability video gives adequate guidance for the task. Furthermore, as I've noted earlier, I question the reliability of the Hall effect sensors that drove no. 5's readouts, and their frequent fluctuations were a distraction when playing cylinders, whereas with no. 16 once the speed is set I don't worry about it. Call me ambivalent on this issue.

• The tonearm segment has no provision for anti-skate. Generally, none is needed, as the system is linear tracking across a vertical cut cylindrical surface. Some defeatable anti-skate provision would be useful, however, for cylinders with groove damage or deformities that make them prone to skip. It would be better still if it could also apply force in the opposite direction (I guess call it “pro skate”) for application to those prone to hang.

• The machine can handle cylinders only up to Pathe salon size. For the larger concert size, if you have any (I don't), the Studio edition would be necessary. Playable concert cylinders are fairly rare, however, and even the salon cylinders are at the least uncommon; most collectors have only the standard sized types, and for them this issue is inconsequential.

  

• No way can you fit a Wilson home, first-generation or latest edition, into a conventional audio rack except on a top shelf, and both are heavy, no. 16 being lighter than no. 5 but no featherweight. Moreover, operating the sled positioning mechanism reqires a certain amount of force. Accordingly, for top-shelf installation, a sturdy rack is the order of the day. Moreover, the first generation machine, at 24 inches wide, is probably too big for most racks even on the top shelf, and in fact it's too big to fit easily on many small tables, as I discovered when I was looking for one to serve as a Wilson Home stand before no. 16 came into my life. At least no. 16 is more manageable, and more likely to fit a rack's top shelf. If you wish to stack the Wilson Home, a machine of the current design still must always be on top, but its footprint is small enough to fit on a standard 17-inch component. See the photo at right, showing no. 16 atop that old octave equalizer I discussed above and applied in recording it.

• For those who like their components to blend together into a sleek, sophisticated, aesthetically coordinated, Architectural Digest-worthy upscale statement, adding a Wilson Home will be something like accessorizing an elegant tuxedo with a pair of steel-toed work boots. This component is an unabashed example of form-follows-function, and its lineage as an adapted metalworking lathe is definitely on parade for all to see. I suspect its WAF is not such that it would receive a warm welcome in traditionally decorated living rooms, any more than Edison's open-horn machines did in days of yore. (There's a reason the Victrola, which concealed all the “works” in a handsome cabinet, was such a commercial success!) Of course, if your decorating scheme is Crate-and-Barrel or your system tends toward the steampunk or industrial look - say, built around something like the HiFi Rose RA-180 integrated amp - a Wilson Home will fit right in or maybe even enhance it.

Conclusion

The Wilson Home Phonograph is an entry-level component, but it's a good entry-level component, well thought out, well executed, and good value for the money. Will it fully match the performance of an Archeophone costing 20 times as much? Almost certainly not, or at best only rarely, and Don Wilson doesn't claim otherwise. Will it give enough of the expensive player's performance to justify its cost as a satisfying, practical choice for a private collector? Definitely. A Viking Professional range is great, but a plain old GE consumer cooktop can still make good, tasty omlets. Well, as long as I'm not the one trying to cook them!

Anyhow, the bottom line is, I recommend the Wilson Home both for hearing what excellent early sound is often locked in a long-dead format's grooves and for sparing them the inevitable depredations of antique playback gear, preserving them for future generations. I also reiterate what I said at the beginning of Part I: devices like this tend to disappear from the market quickly. Because I waited to write until, first, no. 5's teething issues were settled and, second, I had accumulated sufficient experience with no. 16, this review is late coming; I know Don's sales to date have not been what he hoped, and he's considered abandoning this project. Creation of the Wilson Home was at least in part a labor of love, but Don Wilson dba Wilson Materials is not The Don Wilson Charitable Foundation, and commercial concerns are hardly irrelevant. I'd advise moving quickly if getting a Wilson Home is of any interest. There's no telling how much longer it will be on the market, and if it goes I doubt anything else like it will come along anytime soon.

And who knows? With a Wilson in every Home, maybe we really will see a flood of new cylinders hit the market as the hot, new-old format. Could happen any day now.

“Dream on, buddy. Dream on.”

Video Demonstration

Below, please find a demonstration video putting no. 16 through its paces with a variety of music and cylinder types. I've tried to include a diverse selection, both in format and condition, to give an idea of how the machine handles the range of material that might be found in a typical collection. I hope you'll enjoy it and find it helpful in assessing the virtues of this unique audio component.

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© Copyright 2024 David Hoehl - drh@tnt-audio.com - www.tnt-audio.com

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