This is really an interesting story:

"The aged wax cylinder in Carl Haber's hands was cracked and spotted with
greenish mold, too fragile now to be played with a record needle, as it was
intended.

With a vintage Edison Standard Phonograph cranking out tinny Hawaiian hula songs
in the background, he put the moldy cylinder under a microscope and pointed out
the grooves that were still visible underneath the mold and other damage.

"We might be able to fix that," said Haber, a researcher for the University of
California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "There is still information
there."

Haber and Berkeley Lab colleague Vitaliy Fadeyev are working on a breakthrough
way of digitizing and archiving old recordings, such as wax cylinders and
traditional flat records, that are too far gone for a standard stylus. If
successful, the pair may be able to help archivists at The Library of Congress
and elsewhere rescue swaths of recorded musical and audio history that are today
in danger of being lost."

The rest is he
http://news.com.com/2100-1027_3-5208...?tag=nefd.lede

John