Those recordings aren't bad. The mechanical cylinder recording process was reasonably good, as was the duplication process; it was mechanical playback that introduced most of the distortion, because the playback mechanism was too massive to reproduce high frequencies well.
The Library of Congress has a machine which can read scratched and broken records, by optically scanning and building a 3D model of the surface.[1] But undamaged cylinders don't need it. They can be read out with a stereo cartridge and a suitable stylus.
Edison cylinders and records are vertically recorded; the groove bottoms go up and down, not left and right. Later records (RCA Victor, etc) were horizontally recorded. Stereo records are both; the groove format is called 45-45 Westrex, with two axes, both 45 degrees from vertical. This has the nice property that mono records played on stereo players, although one channel is phase-reversed.
If you want a cylinder phonograph, they're easily available on eBay for about $500.
A few hundred years ago someone threw out an Edison voice recorder. You would speak into it and it would record on the wax cylinders. I brought it home and looked up its value on the Internet. I was suprised this particular model was not bringing in much money. I didn't have much room, and my girlfriend at the time talked me into throwing it out.
Before I threw it out, I took the AC/DC motor out of the device. I just couldn't throw out that beautiful little motor. I now have that motor on my desk as a paper weight.
People look at it, and ask why does it have a DC switch. I don't actaually know, but my thoughts were Edison was unsure of our electrical future?
I wonder if it would be possible to enhance the reproduction by compensating for things like frequency response, wow and flutter, and perform some kind of denoising (some have a periodic noise to it which I think may be attributed to scratches or damage to one side of the cylinder)
On the old version of their website you could download the raw rip, a cleaned up version, and the settings file for whatever software they used for the audio processing. You could download the original rip and the settings and adjust them to your own taste. I haven't looked to see why those other files are no longer available.
At first, I though the recordings might have been based on the optical imaging technique outlined in this article [ http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/june-2015/lhc-physic... ] but it is apparently been used for a separate effort to preserve native American recordings.
The Library of Congress has a machine which can read scratched and broken records, by optically scanning and building a 3D model of the surface.[1] But undamaged cylinders don't need it. They can be read out with a stereo cartridge and a suitable stylus.
Edison cylinders and records are vertically recorded; the groove bottoms go up and down, not left and right. Later records (RCA Victor, etc) were horizontally recorded. Stereo records are both; the groove format is called 45-45 Westrex, with two axes, both 45 degrees from vertical. This has the nice property that mono records played on stereo players, although one channel is phase-reversed.
If you want a cylinder phonograph, they're easily available on eBay for about $500.
[1] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1185184...