TECHNES Encyclopedia Database

In 1898 and 1899, Baron carried out several tests with the recording micro-phonograph, and in a drawing dated, precisely, 1898,^[2] he showed the phonograph’s “recorder,” which in a second drawing he named the “micro-phonograph recorder.” This “recorder” was equipped with an electromagnetic engraving and playback head, furnished with two electromagnets.

The second kind of synchronous recording, based on the use of a telephone receiver connected to a phonograph, came out of a kind of research carried out in different branches of the field of distance communication. Baron, perhaps disappointed with the Dussaud microphone, carried out a synthesis of every extant method and developed a second technical solution. This method consisted in capturing the sounds with four microphones and, using three electrical relays, in sending the sounds to a telephone receiver amplifier equipped with a directional horn. This receiver, with its broadcast horn, was placed in front of the horn of an acoustic phonograph (one assumes a graphophone) tasked with recording the sounds emitted by the receiver. This system obliged Baron to insulate the device sonically in a padded room. The room was located at the other end of the studio, far from the stage, an arrangement that can be seen clearly in the two drawings Baron made of the Asnières studio.

The result of such a method, as one might suspect, must have been practically inaudible. For while Baron had solved the problem of recording sounds from a distance, this system, which ran the sound through several relay amplifiers, necessarily brought about a perceptible loss in the quality of the audio signal. Baron did not have true electric amplifying systems (and much less electronic ones) reliable enough fill a large public space with sound. We have seen that in order to capture the sound he placed four carbon granule microphones above the stage where the subjects to be recorded and filmed were moving about. To do so he made four panniers, or four truncated pyramids, inside of which he placed the microphones. According to Baron, one could speak at a distance of four or five metres from the group of microphones. An electromagnetic relay was inserted between this group of microphones and the recording phonograph. Later, it appears that Baron placed three successive relays to amplify the microphones’ modulated currents. He states in the margins of a drawing showing a helix electromagnetic amplifying relay that sounds relayed in this manner could travel fifty metres.^[3] The acoustic vibrations captured by the microphones reach the electrical relay via terminals which magnetize an electromagnet to some degree. This electromagnet proportionally draws towards it springs equipped with a contact stud. This stud, resting on brushes, heightens the intensity of the vibrations sent by the terminals to a telephone-type receiving amplifier equipped with a horn which broadcasts the sounds to a horn connected to the cylinder phonograph. Even with the Dussaud-type micro-phonographic recorders which Baron also used, it is unlikely that the sounds captured with this method, once they were transported, amplified and recorded on the cylinder, remained of good quality. The reason we may wonder about the efficiency of Baron’s system in a public presentation is because the recording obtained in the studio was no doubt already of quite poor sound quality.

All these operations were strictly mechanical, because electrical recording, and thus the introduction of a microphone into the recording and recreation circuit, came only in 1925. It was only 1899, and yet at that time Baron speaks, in his drawings, of microphones, an amplifier, a receiver, electromagnetic recorders, etc. We must, therefore, qualify these remarks and place them in the context of the earliest attempts at electrical recording rather than see them as concrete achievements.

There was also a handicap which Baron did not speak of officially until 1933 and which could have caused serious problems in the event of commercial exploitation of the graphophonoscope: in 1898, a cylinder could not be copied, and was thus a unique object. If one wanted an identical second cylinder, one had to restart the sound recording and, in Baron’s case, the image recording. Despite everything, in 1899-1900 Baron truly did create films with sound added from a phonograph – with what sound quality, what degree of exact synchronization, it is difficult to say for sure given the present-day state of our knowledge. These films were made inside a glass theatre built especially for this purpose. It was undoubtedly the first film studio entirely devoted to sound cinema.