If I was offered the chance to buy a Hupfeld Triphonola at the right
price, I probably wouldn't hesitate too long before saying "Yes!"
This system has a good reputation, the few people who have heard
a working instrument saying just how well it plays.

The Triphonola is a full reproducing system, akin to the Duo-Art and
the Ampico.  It has a theme-accompaniment system like the Duo-Art, and
uses the same 'snakebite' accent holes, but has some form of crescendo
system to set the dynamics (I have no idea of the details).

The Triphonola roll library is drawn from the superb Hupfeld Animatic
library of hand-played 88-note rolls.  The Triphonola rolls merely have
expression coding added down the margins; what proportion of rolls
were coded I don't know.  Robbie's question comparing the Triphonola
with expression systems such as Themodist is misleading: the Hupfeld
Animatic rolls are the Themodist-like product, and by analogy the
Triphonola rolls are Duo-Art-like.

Many collectors think that Hupfeld's Animatic rolls are the best
prepared of all the hand-played rolls, and they are always on excellent
paper.  The quality of the editing and presentation is superb, as is
the catalogue of artists and classical music.  Hupfeld dance music is
always good for a laugh, but not to listen to!

The booklet, "Ferrucio Busoni and the reproducing piano at the
beginning of the 20th Century", by Antonio Latanza (published in Rome),
gives some useful background into the history of the Busoni recordings,
and it seems likely that other rolls have a similar history.

The Triphonola was not the first reproducing or expression system sold
by Hupfeld: the Hupfeld Dea system pre-dates it, and earlier still was
the Phonoliszt, being the piano-only version of the famous monster with
three violins, the Phonoliszt-Violana).  It seems that many of the
88-note rolls sold in the 1920s as Animatic or Triphonola actually
originate from 1905 onwards, the dynamic coding being a later addition
or conversion from the earlier systems.

Recut Triphonola rolls?  Never heard of any, seems unlikely to have
happened.  The Triphonola version of Hupfeld rolls are not particularly
common, although the 88-note versions are easy to find.

Julian Dyer