Diamond Cut Productions is an American company founded by Craig Maier and Rick Carlson in 1986 with the aim of preserving many of the original test pressing recordings made at the Edison Laboratories during the 1920s.
[1] At the time Kitta MacPherson of The Star Leger reported on the deteriorating condition of the Edison National Historic Site and its archives located in West Orange, New Jersey.
Then Supervisor and Museum Curator, Dr. Edward Pershey, Ph.D. showed Craig and Rick the thousands of one-of-a-kind test recordings which were piled in stacks on a long row of tables on the second floor of the Edison main laboratory building.
[2] With the laboratory up and ready, Mr. Tom Owens of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical library in New York City was hired for his expertise in the area of archival audio transferring.
This experimentation involved a "high-end" vacuum tube based Edison phonograph designed around the same time period as the test pressings in order to deduce the correct turnover frequency.
The experiments proved useful allowing various modifications to be made to their magnetic phonograph pre-amplifier in order to provide the most likely proper turnover frequency for the transfers consistent with their era.
With the laboratory and equipment in place, a seven-year pro-bono contract was drawn up between the Edison National Historic Site / U.S. Department of the Interior, Rick Carlson and Craig Maier for the purposes of executing the archival project.
The digital signal processing technique proved so successful to the extent that the Smithsonian Institution Press employed Diamond Cut Productions to perform audio restoration for some of their American Songwriter Series of CD releases.
In parallel with these efforts Craig worked with County Records to produce and release an Edison olde tyme group on CD called "Ernest Stoneman and his Dixie Mountaineers" using their audio restoration process.