Welte, Edwin

SUBJECT AREA: Recording

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b. 1876 Germany

d. after 1925

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German instrument maker who developed piano-music recording methods for reproducing pianos.

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He was the third generation of the Freiburg (Germany) firm of M.Welte \& Soehne, music box and orchestrion manufacturers, founded in 1832, and was made a partner in 1901. He was the driving force behind the development and refinement of the reproducing piano, which had an upper-class market from 1905 to c. 1925. With his partner and brother-in-law Karl Bockisch, he also developed recording methods that made it possible to distribute perforated paper rolls representing a reasonably accurate representation of the performance of famous soloists. This is a principle for recording and replay that is totally different from the mechanical recording principle, and at that time the quality was generally regarded as higher than that of mechanical reproduction. However, because of the possibilities of editing, the source value may be less certain. Welte's contribution was the first commercial use of a coded representation of live performances. The Welte patents were licensed to several other player-piano manufacturers.

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Bibliography

German patent no. 162,708 (controlling the dynamics of reproduction).

Further Reading

Q.D.Bowers, 1972, Encyclopedia of Automatic Musical Instruments, New York: Vestal Press, pp. 319–38 (a good if somewhat uneven account of the Welte involvement in the reproduction of recorded sound).

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