78 rpm records are the ancestors of our good old CDs. Appearing at the very beginning of the XNUMXth century, they marked the rise of recorded music and delighted audiophiles in the first half of the same century…
These 25 to 30 cm diameter discs were played at a speed of 78 revolutions per minute (hence their name) and allowed recording from 1 to 5 minutes of music per side... easier for artists of the time to release an album :p!
But as technology evolved, they were replaced in just a few years by vinyl microgroove records (33 rpm and 45 rpm) invented by Columbia in 1948, which allowed the listening time to be multiplied by 5 or 6 for a record of the same size, all with much superior audio quality.
Today, mainly sought after by collectors, these records have fallen into disuse.
But the superb web archivist, Internet Archive, to whom we owe fabulous projects such as WayBack Machine which allows you to review old versions of certain websites or even collections 80s video games, is back at it again by proposing a collection of more than 45 000 rpm records and digitized cylinders and available online!
Below for example is a jazz piece recorded in 1947 by Chubby Jackson and his orchestra, The Happy Monster:
And here is one of the oldest pieces in the collection, Dixie, recorded in September 1903:
I find all these pieces very moving, especially the oldest ones, when I imagine that the sound we hear was recorded more than 100 years ago...
The cherry on the cake is that these scans can even be downloaded in different formats, including FLAC and of course MP3!
Accessible for free, you will be able to listen to them online and rediscover their warm sound and the characteristic crackles of this type of support... in short, a real pleasure for the ears to be consumed without moderation!
78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
Article updated on January 5, 2025 by Byothe
