[ The Subject line above is my invention, as always, and it describes
 [ the topic.  The text following is slightly abridged.  -- Robbie

'Cylinder' is fine with me, Todd.  I grew up on a farm in Yolo County
CA but there's nothing similar to a 'corn cob' and an organ 'roller'/
'barrel'/'cylinder' and other terms which history has sanctioned.
(Corn = 'corny' in connotation.)

Most of this 'cob' bit started in the late '60s, and I could name the
2 or 3 publishers who rammed it into the lingo of some current collectors.
It does suggest 'hick' and 'crude, rustic, rural' music, which, when
one considers the sound these instruments can provide, most of them
transcend their musical limitations, especially the Grand Roller Organ
(which plays 'cylinders' or 'rollers').

Mechanical musical instruments have been kicked-around in movies, the
broadcasting media, and by so many contemporary electronics people that
we, in the field, don't have to resort to making-up inappropriate terms
and then trying to rewrite history with them.

A 'reproducing' (not 'reproducer') piano doesn't 'reproduce', since
even an immediate replay has variations in the performance, making it
unlike audio or something from a stamping die or a photographic
negative.  (Those are true 'reproductions': one is similar to another.)

The correct term should have been 'expression' player, but the industry
tried to make it seem as if a Duo-Art or Welte-Mignon were _not_
related to a pedal Player-Piano instrument -- a marketing ploy.

The 'reproducing' piano was linked by implication to electric tele-
graphs, the telephone, the acoustic gramophone, motion pictures and
eventually radio, with the B Ampico even having a 'radio dial tempo
control' which probably looked similar to something on The Ampico
Radio, offered briefly about the same time.

Since 'reproducing' was the original term, I use it -- albeit with
quotation marks around it -- like 'Doc' Holliday or 'Col.' Sanders
of fast-food chicken fame.

When decades of catalogues, books and articles feature the real words
for mechanical musical instruments, why substitute modern terms which
are often a subtle put-down of the instrument itself?  It's like
calling women 'chicks' and 'babes'; many who do it today are probably
unaware of the negative forces that these words can impart.

Ignorance is something which needs to be eliminated from this varied
and complicated field of musical sound production, I say.

Regards from Maine,

Douglas Henderson
Artcraft Music Rolls
http://www.wiscasset.net/artcraft/