Victor Orthophonic Victrola

Western Electric demonstrated their process to the two leading recording companies, Victor and Columbia, who were initially unwilling to adopt it because they thought it would make their entire existing record catalogs obsolete.

Early electrical recordings sounded harsh when played on the acoustic phonographs of the day, which had been designed by trial and error, had highly "colored" frequency response, and emphasized higher frequencies.

The researchers invented the exponential horn, and, on realizing that it needed to be nine feet long to reproduce the lowest frequencies on the new discs, designed a method for "folding" the horn into a cabinet of practical size.

Its first public demonstration was front-page news in The New York Times, which reported that: A Wanamaker's ad from October 31, 1925 invited people to come to "Wanamaker's Salon of Music" and "join the throngs" who were "HEARING the new Victor Orthophonic Victrola .

The term "orthophonic" had previously been used in connection with speech therapy; an 1870 book mentions a therapist who "devised a series of orthophonic exercises to restore the harmony between nervous action and the organs of articulation.