Preservation Room

The control room used for preservation work has been equipped through corporate, private, and foundation contributions. This room houses equipment for playback of every major sound carrier format in the archive, including cylinder, discs (78, 45, and 33 1/3 RPM), cassette, and reel-to-reel tape.

A specially-built machine called the Archeophone allows playback of any of the varying lengths, diameters and recording speeds utilized for cylinder records, using a modern light-weight tone arm that does less damage to the sound carrier than original playback devices. Other components, including Packburn noise suppression units, are used in doing restoration and creating listening copies of recordings for patrons. A computer workstation allows recordings to be captured digitally and stored as uncompressed data files on preservation-standard gold CD-Rs or transferred onto Audio CD for listening.