Sharing culture through sound
Work Samples
Cracked disc repair
Being made of shellac, 78rpm records are notoriously fragile and often found cracked and shattered. We have developed a method employing organic, conservation-grade adhesives to repair broken discs, where all the components are still in hand. Listen here for before and after clips of the physical and digital restoration of a scarce Cantonese disc on the Beka label, which arrived to us broken in half.
Home record restoration
Home recordings go back to some of the earliest commercial cylinder machines, but by the 1940’s home recording discs and devices were becoming far more accessible and a great many unique discs can be found in personal collections. These discs present a great number of problems for playback. They were recorded on a number of fragile and unstable materials, including glass and cardboard substrate covered in a thin and volatile nitrocellulose coating. The resulting recordings are almost always low fidelity, but with proper attention to playback and restoration we can recover artifacts of the everyday from generations past. Listen here for a before and after restoration of a soldier's note to home.
More work samples coming soon - feel free to contact us for examples of our work that match your media digitization and restoration needs.
Public Projects
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Sound Archive at The Armenian Museum of America
Over the course of several years we have been working on the digitization, restoration and presentation of the 78rpm discs in the collection at the Armenian Museum of America in Watertown, MA. The collection represents the earliest recorded music made by Armenians in America.
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Moroccan Tapes
We’ve had the great opportunity to collaborate with the folks at Moroccantapes.com by contributing transfers of some remarkable Moroccan cassette tapes. You can hear our transfers at the links below, but take a listen through some other great recordings included in the project and keep an eye out for future contributions.
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Brightwood Audio on archive.org
The Internet Archive has been a remarkable repository and resource for the widest range of digital content imaginable. At Brightwood Audio our mission extends beyond the collections of our clients and we have been posting remarkable and scarce documents of recorded history from our own collection, and making them free and open for the public.
