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Blue Amberol Records was the tradmarked name for cylinder recordings manufactured by the Edison company in the USA from 1912 to 1929. See also: Edison Records

These cylinder records, which were marketed as the Edison Blue Amberol Record, are made of an early variety of plastic patented by the Edison company. The celluloid-based surface was able to withstand hundreds of playings, with only a moderate increase in surface noise if played on well-maintained machines with a stylus in good condition.

The cylinders have a maximum playing time of just over 4 minutes at 160 rpm (a maximum of 4'45" is possible). They can not be played successfully on older machines set up to play the earlier standard of 2 minute cylinders, as the Amberols require a smaller stylus to track the groove and the worm-gear which moves the stylus over the surface of the cylinder must turn at a different rate. However, with this in mind The Edison company sold kits with gears and reproducers which could be attached to older varieties of cylinder phonographs by those who wished to be able to play the new Blue Amberol records. The Edison company marketed phonographs capable of playing both the older style 2 minute and the new Blue Amberol records; with these machines the user needed to adjust a lever (which changed gearing) and change the reproducer (which held different sizes of stylus) when going from one type of record to another. Other phonographs were manufactured which could only play the Blue Amberols, these were called "Amberolas".

Contents 1 History 2 Technical 3 See also 4 External links

The early issues of Blue Amberols are of higher audio fidelity than later issues. From January, 1915 onward, the Edison Company, which had concentrated most of its research on improving the sound of their Diamond Disc recordings disc records, began to release cylinders which were dubs from their Diamond Disc matrices. The dubbing technique used, acoustical-mechanical until December, 1927 (when the first electrically recorded disc dubs began to appear), resulted in a somewhat hollow "dead" sound on theses cylinders compared to the original discs they were dubbed from. On many such cylinders, one can hear the sound of the disc machine being started just at the beginning of the record and of it being stopped just before the end.

The "Amberol" plastic of the cylinders is molded around a core of plaster. This plaster core has proved the greatest problem with long-term survival of Blue Amberol Records, as the plaster often tends to expand over the decades, especially if exposed to moisture or kept in humid conditions. The expanding plaster in less severe cases can make the inside of the record not fit properly on the phonograph mandrel (which can be fairly easily remedied by reaming the inner surface of the cylinder out), or can warp the cylinder out of round making it not play properly. In worse cases, the expanding plaster will crack or split the plastic playing surface, rendering the record unusable.

The Blue Amberol plastic is highly flammable.

• List of record labels
• List of Blue Amberol Records

• Edison Blue Amberol cylinder recordings, from the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara Library.