Nice cylinder. Until a few years later, cylinder manufacturers didn't have the means to press new cylinders from their masters. That was one of the advantages of disc recording. A negative image of the record could be pressed directly from the master recording and a positive directly pressed onto discs for the public. It lost very little fidelity and was how records through the LP era were created. But early commercial cylinders were usually reproduced in two ways. Pantographing had a needle trace the grooves of the cylinder and the vibration was duplicated onto a cylinder blank. A second method is even worse: they would play the master cylinder on an old acoustic machine and line up the horns of the recording machines around the playback horn! That's why, for a time, commercial cylinders sound so "thin" and "tinny" even when they are in great shape and played on modern electrical pickups. We're hearing a recording of an old cylinder phonograph playing the performance. Listen to some early Edison master band recordings from his lab. They have a drastically improved tonal range and even bass. And they're ten to fifteen years earlier than this 1900 performance. It was the questionable cylinder reproduction, pre-pressing process, that louses up the sound in these early commercial releases.

Pretty good for a brown wax cylinder; probably played on one of the earlier Edison reproducers (glass or mica). Sound may seem thin, but considering the VERY early medium of brown wax, this was quite good, and a hard cylinder to record to modern format. Commercially available cylinders were only about 6 years old!