Enter the Endpoint Cylinder and Dictabelt Machine, invented by Californian Nicholas Bergh, which recently was acquired by the library. Thanks to the combination of its laser and needle, it can digitize even broken or cracked wax cylinders — and there are a lot of those. But Bergh said, the design of the cylinder, which makes it fragile, is also its strength. "Edison thought of this format as a recording format, almost like like a cassette machine," Bergh said. "That's why the format is a [cylinder]. It's very, very hard to do on a disc. And that's also why there's so much great material on wax cylinder that doesn't exist on disc, like field recorded cylinders, ethnographic material, home recordings, things like that."

The disc won over the cylinder because the ease of replication, so I wonder, was there any quality difference?

I wonder what the audio quality of the material on these wax cylinders is. Some time ago I listened to some digitized vinyl from before the introduction of electrical recording at archive.org: the difference with electrically recorded is stunning.