Bad news about good ol' Wikipedia. They just lost my business permanently with the following quote, from their entry for Fred Gaisberg:
"A musically talented youngster, he encountered the fledgling recording technology in the early 1890s, and got a job working for the 'Graphophone' [sic] company in America. Sound quality and short playing time, however, meant that recordings were more an amusing novelty than a serious means of reproducing music. In this decade the first of the recording industry's format wars was taking place, with the original cylinder recordings gradually being ousted by the superior and more convenient flat disc. Gaisberg played an important part in this, helping to establish 78 revolutions per minute as the standard playing speed and shellac as the standard material for making discs." Of all the inaccuracies, generalizations, and needless oversimplifying there, I'll only address one glaring falsehood: the only disc records ever capable of competing sonically with Edison's cylinders were Edison's Diamond Discs. Non-Edison disc records never even approached Edison cylinders' tonal neutrality and naturalness, or got near their frequency response extension in the top end, until Columbia's Viva-tonals, which came out well past the timeline of this article's first two paragraphs. Too bad the world's greatest inventor was the world's worst A&R man. r.
