A recent spate of fresh transfers of early 78 RPM vocal discs—those dating from the pre-electrical recording days before 1925 and thus made by the acoustic process—has again focused attention on what are undoubted musical treasures. The recognition of their value is nothing new; our forebears found them to be wonderful, and often said that so splendid was their reproduction of the great voices they preserve that the records could hardly be told apart from the live originals. But what is treasurable about the records for us today is hardly their primitive and constricted reproduction, dim in musical tone and full of loud and grating unmusical noise (caused by the abrasive shellac compound of which they were made) when played back directly on even the best and most up-to-date equipment; the discs are wonderful because they provide our only evidence in sound of a Golden Age of Singing, an age associated with Enrico Caruso, Luisa Tetrazzini, Nellie Melba, Giovanni Martinelli, Rosa Ponselle, and scores of other remarkable vocal artists.

Not surprisingly, there is no real agreement on how these treasures should be made available to listeners today. They were originally recorded through purely mechanical means, by singing or playing into the large end of a horn, which looked rather like a megaphone; the horn focused the sound on a vibrating needle that incised a groove into a rotating spring-driven disc of soft wax. The final disc was pressed from a stamper made from the wax original, and played back—again