THE BLUE AMBEROL AT 100 presented by David Giovannoni, Richard Martin, and Megan Hennessey

The Association for Recorded Sound Collections presents the following program from its 2014 ARSC Annual Conference at Sheraton Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina on Saturday May 17, 2014:
THE BLUE AMBEROL AT 100
presented by David Giovannoni, Richard Martin, and Megan Hennessey
A new preservation model reintroduces an old friend to the collector community. Deploying the best attributes of private stewardship and commercial promulgation, the Archeophone Archives is presenting Edison's live series of popular domestic Blue Amberols in honor of the 100th anniversary of their market debut.
The model is lithe and exacting: use the best copies of "common" cylinders, transfer them at abovearchival specifications, restore them to standards higher than those seen among pioneering institutions, issue them on major download sites for pennies on the dollar, and contextualize them with freely downloadable liner notes. And the old friend, Blue Amberol, shows depths never before appreciated. The sound is as glorious as Edison advertised, even though the challenges of transfer and restoration are far greater than previously understood.
We'll show you how we solved the problems and brought the music back to life for 21st-century ears.
Videographers: Michael and Leah Biel
Editor: Nathan Georgitis