Diamond Cut Productions is an American company founded by Craig Maier and Rick Carlson in 1986 with the aim of preserving many of the original test pressing recordings made at the Edison Laboratories during the 1920s.
Diamond Cut Productions is the author of the popular audio editing and restoration program "Diamond Cut Audio Restoration Tools". This includes DC8, DC Live Forensics, DCForensics8.x through DCForensics10.8x, and DC Audio Mentor, and DCArt10.8x. Diamond Cut Productions is also a record label having 22 music albums in its catalog featuring mostly music from the 1920s and 1930s. Much emphasis has been placed by Diamond Cut Productions on the Unreleased Edison Laterals collection of test pressings archived at the Edison National Historic Site, in West Orange, NJ.
At present, Craig Maier and Rick Carlson remain the primary contributors to the company which now also invokes major developments in the areas of record restoration, audio restoration, through the continued improvements in the audio restoration software used to preserve Edison's test-pressing lateral recordings. Their company has expanded extensively into the field of Forensics Audio Enhancement and also including audio authentication and audio analysis which are widely used by various government agencies throughout the world. They maintain a website located at www.diamondcut.com.
Diamond Cut Productions was originally a private archival venture by Craig Maier and Rick Carlson that begun in response to proposed budget cuts to the Edison National Historic Site in 1986. [1] At the time Kitta MacPherson of The Star Leger reported on the deteriorating condition of the Edison National Historic Site and its archives located in West Orange, New Jersey. Among the many artifacts lacking proper curatorial attention resulting from funding deficiencies was a collection of test-press recordings made by the Edison Company between 1927 through 1929 (their last few years in the record business). Having read the disturbing article, R&D engineer Craig Maier and software engineer Rick Carlson offered to volunteer their time and technical expertise in the areas of audio hardware and software engineering in order to preserve the Edison Lateral Record collection of test pressings by transferring them to digital tape for archival and preservation in the digital domain.
Then Supervisor and Museum Curator, Dr. Edward Pershey, Ph.D. showed Craig and Rick the thousands of one-of-a-kind test recordings which were piled in stacks on a long row of tables on the second floor of the Edison main laboratory building. The total number of songs which were recorded numbered over 1200 with anywhere from two to five takes each, increasing the possibility of finding some truly important music that had remained unheard since the late 1920s. Following several meetings an informal agreement was made such that private funding could be sourced to construct the audio restoration laboratory required for the project. After seven months, enough funding was sourced to construct an audio in addition to designing and constructing several pieces of custom equipment required for the project. [2]
With the laboratory up and ready, Mr. Tom Owens of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical library in New York City was hired for his expertise in the area of archival audio transferring. Mr. Owens provided constructive criticism regarding the sound laboratory allowing them to improve upon their initial system. One significant problem which he had highlighted was that of establishing the correct turnover frequency for the transfer of the lateral test pressings. Documentation could not be found at the Edison site regarding the specifics of this important parameter, instead Craig and Rick had to devise and conduct experiments. This experimentation involved a "high-end" vacuum tube based Edison phonograph designed around the same time period as the test pressings in order to deduce the correct turnover frequency. The experiments proved useful allowing various modifications to be made to their magnetic phonograph pre-amplifier in order to provide the most likely proper turnover frequency for the transfers consistent with their era.
With the laboratory and equipment in place, a seven-year pro-bono contract was drawn up between the Edison National Historic Site / U.S. Department of the Interior, Rick Carlson and Craig Maier for the purposes of executing the archival project. Nearly one full year had lapsed before the first record was transferred to digital tape. Shortly thereafter, the sound lab was rebuilt in Rockaway Township, NJ where the lion's share of the transfer project took place over the next seven years.
After transferring around 900 of the recordings (times 2 - 5 takes per song, about 2,200 transfers in total) Craig and Rick decided that the music was not doing much good sitting in the underground vault of a museum. It was decided to release some of this previously unreleased material (only around 200 of the songs had ever been released in the Edison lateral format). At the time it worked out to be significantly easier to form a company and release these songs under a new record label. Thus Diamond Cut Productions was formed in 1992 through Craig Maier and Rick Carlson providing their own seed capital for the venture.
The first release was titled "Unreleased Edison Laterals 1”. This CD was an anthology of Edison Needle type records which had undergone complex analogue audio restoration techniques. The album was of such a success in the market that another project was able to be started in 1994.
The second release titled "The California Ramblers, Edison Laterals 2." This project saw improvements on the audio restoration process which had been used on the previous release. Instead of analog signal processing, digital signal processing utilizing their own algorithms to remove crackle, ticks, pops and hiss from the original material were employed. This new process (which ran on an inexpensive pc) was named Diamond Cut Audio restoration tools or DC-Art for short. The digital signal processing technique proved so successful to the extent that the Smithsonian Institution Press employed Diamond Cut Productions to perform audio restoration for some of their American Songwriter Series of CD releases.
Although no Edison recordings were released in this year, worked continued on improving the restoration software used for restoration of the many Edison recordings. During this time it was decided to make Diamond Cut Audio Restoration Tools (DC-Art16) available to other groups and the public with the focus on record archival and restoration.
The third CD release was entitled "Hot Dance of the Roaring 20's, Edison Laterals 3" and was again processed utilizing Craig and Rick's own audio restoration program. It was soon realized the digital audio restoration was superior and all analog processing equipment had been abandoned. In parallel with these efforts Craig worked with County Records to produce and release an Edison olde tyme group on CD called "Ernest Stoneman and his Dixie Mountaineers" using their audio restoration process.
Since the early years, Craig and Rick have released numerous CDs from the Edison collections including "Vintage Vallee - Rudy Vallee and his Connecticut Yankees" which includes 23 of the earliest recordings made by this group in the late 1920s. In addition, other recordings released on the Diamond Cut Productions label include other artists including "Early Eddy Duchin - 1932 to 1937."
In the future, Diamond Cut Productions expects to continue releasing more albums in various formats, outlets and venues within the Edison Lateral Cut series. However, they have also branched out into other musical venues from the 1920s and 1930s. They are also continuing the development of their professional audio restoration and editing software product line and are up to DCForensics10.8x as of 2021. Within their commercial software product line, they have released DCart10.8x during the third quarter of 2021 and also offer two VST plugins.
A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue recording and reproduction of sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a "record". To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, very faintly reproducing the recorded sound. In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated a diaphragm which produced sound waves which were coupled to the open air through a flaring horn, or directly to the listener's ears through stethoscope-type earphones.
Phonograph cylinders are the earliest commercial medium for recording and reproducing sound. Commonly known simply as "records" in their heyday, these hollow cylindrical objects have an audio recording engraved on the outside surface, which can be reproduced when they are played on a mechanical cylinder phonograph. In the 1910s, the competing disc record system triumphed in the marketplace to become the dominant commercial audio medium.
Post-production is part of the process of filmmaking, video production, audio production, and photography. Post-production includes all stages of production occurring after principal photography or recording individual program segments.
Edison Records was one of the early record labels that pioneered sound recording and reproduction, and was an important player in the early recording industry.
Mastering, a form of audio post production, is the process of preparing and transferring recorded audio from a source containing the final mix to a data storage device, the source from which all copies will be produced. In recent years, digital masters have become usual, although analog masters—such as audio tapes—are still being used by the manufacturing industry, particularly by a few engineers who specialize in analog mastering.
Puritan Records was an American record label which lasted from 1917 to 1929. For most of its existence Puritan was a product of the Wisconsin Chair Company, which also marketed Paramount Records, but as a label, Puritan briefly predates Paramount and began with United Phonographs Corporation.
The Edison Diamond Disc Record is a type of phonograph record marketed by Thomas A. Edison, Inc. on their Edison Record label from 1912 to 1929. They were named Diamond Discs because the matching Edison Disc Phonograph was fitted with a permanent conical diamond stylus for playing them. Diamond Discs were incompatible with lateral-groove disc record players, e.g. the Victor Victrola, the disposable steel needles of which would damage them while extracting hardly any sound. Uniquely, they are just under 1⁄4 in thick.
A remaster is a change in the sound or image quality of previously created forms of media, whether audiophonic, cinematic, or videographic. The resulting product is said to be remastered. The terms digital remastering and digitally remastered are also used.
Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical, mechanical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog recording and digital recording.
Audio restoration is the process of removing imperfections from sound recordings. Audio restoration can be performed directly on the recording medium, or on a digital representation of the recording using a computer. Record restoration is a particular form of audio restoration that seeks to repair the sound of damaged gramophone records.
The history of sound recording - which has progressed in waves, driven by the invention and commercial introduction of new technologies — can be roughly divided into four main periods:
Record restoration, a particular kind of audio restoration, is the process of converting the analog signal stored on gramophone records into digital audio files that can then be edited with computer software and eventually stored on a hard-drive, recorded to digital tape, or burned to a CD or DVD. The process may be divided into several separate steps performed in the following order:
A dictation machine is a sound recording device most commonly used to record speech for playback or to be typed into print. It includes digital voice recorders and tape recorder.
The AES coarse-groove calibration discs (AES-S001-064) are a boxed set of two identical discs, one for routine use, one for master reference. The intent is to characterize the reproduction chain for the mass transfer of coarse-groove records to digital media, much like using a photographic calibration reference in image work.
Thomas A. Edison, Incorporated was the main holding company for the various manufacturing companies established by the inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Edison. It was a successor to Edison Manufacturing Company and operated between 1911 and 1957, when it merged with McGraw Electric to form McGraw-Edison.
In sound recording and reproduction, audio mixing is the process of optimizing and combining multitrack recordings into a final mono, stereo or surround sound product. In the process of combining the separate tracks, their relative levels are adjusted and balanced and various processes such as equalization and compression are commonly applied to individual tracks, groups of tracks, and the overall mix. In stereo and surround sound mixing, the placement of the tracks within the stereo field are adjusted and balanced. Audio mixing techniques and approaches vary widely and have a significant influence on the final product.
Diamond Cut Audio Restoration Tools is a set of digital audio editor tools from Diamond Cut Productions used for audio restoration, record restoration, sound restoration of gramophone records and other audio containing media.
David Richardson is an English music producer, audio engineer and musician. He founded Sky Studios with rock band Jethro Tull, the studio later became leading facilities house, Sound Recording Technology (SRT).
IRENE is a digital imaging technology designed to recover analog audio stored on fragile or deteriorating phonograph cylinders, records, and other grooved audio media. It is in use by several archives and preservation institutions in the United States seeking to preserve and digitize historical audio.
The Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR) is a database catalog of master recordings made by American record companies during the 78rpm era. The 78rpm era was the time period in which any flat disc records were being played at a speed of 78 revolutions per minute. The DAHR provides some of these original recordings, free of charge, via audio streaming, along with access to the production catalogs of those same companies. DAHR is part of the American Discography Project (ADP), and is funded and operated in partnership by the University of California, Santa Barbara, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Packard Humanities Institute.