strange voices on cylinders.

as a collector of Phonograph Cylinders. I notice at the end of some cylinders, home recordings that people have made at the end of the comercial recordings. However I have never come across t his before. I have bought some blue amberol cylinders off eb ay from the same seller. and preety much each cylinder iHad, sounds like someone has tried to record themselves on there! The speech sounds un audiable due to the hard surface of thecaloid, but i'm amazed that so many of he blue amberols i had bought (over 20) had these mysterious voices on them..... maybe its Ghosts or something, anyone else come across anything strange like this?

Matt

http://www.matthewjamesrichards.co.uk

Someone was probably playing around with the recording attachment.

Is there any chance you could list a couple of the record numbers of these cylinders?
I'm wondering if what you're hearing are sound engineers or the like before or after the recording.
I haven't noticed this on any of my cylinders, but I have several disc records with people clearing their throat or speaking to each other immediately after the recording or in the runout grooves.
Also a worn groove or stylus can produce an echo. I'm not too sure about a blue amberol being recorded on, as you would thing the recording stylus would cut the surface of the celluloid producing a lighter blue coloured groove than the surface & more surface noise.

Matt,

I'm leaning towards Shane's answer. It's either a dull stylus or groove giving you an echo or an engineer or performer speaking in the background. Although it'd be possible I believe to record on the end of a celluloid BA you'd really have to make a lot of noise and probably lean on the cutter Interesting.

Regards,
J.

Thats very interesting about the engernier. I have some disc recordings with the artists clearing their throat etc, b ut these seem very much like an ametur playing around. Its on the blank parts of the blue amberol cylinder, and these was on a collection of cylinders that orignated from the same place. I was curious on how they managed to get (if all any), sound! Its not inteligable. the Blue Amberol cylinders vary from about 1913 till 1925. It doesn't seem as though when this person tried to record, it didn't make a good groove as such, as the groove is hardly visiable! could they have used a edison dictophone machine? :)

Matthew Richards
http://www.matthewjamesrichards.co.uk/

As noted in this relatively comprehensive Wikipedia article -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Amber ... #Technical --
starting in 1915 the Amberol records were dubbed from Diamond Disc matrices. Edison used a horn-to-horn coupling for the acoustical dubbing process until about 1927, so it stands to reason that extraneous voices/sounds -- or even echo -- may have been picked up and transferred to the cylinder masters.