Stephen wrote:What are you using to reproduce the recording? I would be interested in knowing the pickup manufacturer and model, the stylus type, tracking pressure and your method of mounting the pickup.
It's just a cheap crystal cartridge held on a home made arm fixed to my lathe cross slide as is the cutter. No idea of pressure or its spec. Just cheap and cheerful to experiment with.....but it does play back sound from an old Edison cylinder I have just obtained.
So the trouble must be in the cutter as it leaves swarf in the grooves. This is picked up by the playing stylus and thus just makes a big racket!
The cutter is working as this photo shows on a deliberate out of true cylinder with the cutter moving in to start cutting the grooves. The 'marks' seem are initial cuts being done from the output of the club CD test disc......looks like a pianola roll!
The other thing to be experimented with is the cutting angle to the cylinder. This was straight in at 90 deg, but angling it at about 30 seems to produce more 'interesting' looking grooves.
It's obvious now to me, as a beginner to this cutting lark, that it needs very careful cutter shapes/angles/amp drive etc etc.
If I eventually get a decent recording I aim to play it back into my laptop from the crystal cartridge and record it as a NBTV .wav file. Then use Gary's application to play the file, extract a few still frames, and I hope to post them here.
Albert.