Follow-up: Which device was able to produce a more accurate sound?
In: Engineering
A mechanical music box has a “comb” of metal tines that make a sound when plucked. The tines are made to be a particular length so that each makes a particular note when plucked. You can think of the tines as being like piano strings that play a note when the key is struck. But the music box would only have about 10 tines compared to 88 keys on a piano.
The music box then had a metal disc with bumps on it that would pluck the metal tine as it went around. The arrangement of the bumps determined which note was played and when – so it determined what song the music box played.
So a music box could play about 10 different notes.
Edison’s phonograph recorded as bumps the sounds that a microphone heard. It could then read those bumps and play back the same sound. It was not limited to certain notes. So it could play voices, songs, or other sounds.
A music box can play notes, but not audio. You can’t record into a music box, and a music box can’t play a voice, or a violin, or a trumpet. It’s an instrument that plays a pre-set melody, not a means of storing audio information.
A phonograph, on the other hand, can record and play back audio. You can record a voice, a violin, a trumpet, or any other sound.
If your sole objective is to store a short melody that can be listened to, and factors other than the notes themselves are irrelevant (timbre, volume, etc), a music box may be more accurate. If you want to store a piece of audio (such as a voice), that cannot be represented adequately/at all with a sequence of notes, a phonograph is infinitely more accurate.
The phonograph recorded and reduced actual sound waves. Maybe not really well, but that’s what it did. On the other hand, a music box is basically a musical instrument, it sounds like a music box or other similar instruments. So I guess if you’re trying to reproduce any general sound, like a voice singing, the phonograph of course does a better job. In a head to head competition, with different kinds of sounds, the only time the music box would come out ahead is when playing sounds that are similar to a music box. Another difference unrelated to sound quality is that the music box needs to be essentially programmed to play a particular song, unlike the phonograph which uses a recording.
The music box plays pure tone notes according to a musical score. The phonograph records analog sound.
If you have an Edison recording of a music box, the music box itself is more accurate sound.
In all other cases, the recording is better. Edison recorded human singers, something no music box can reproduce.
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