I'm listening now to Archeophone's "1912" release, and am stunned by the excellent, transparent sound quality of these very early recordings. In the booklet, under "Notes on Technology," they write: "Transfers on this CD were made directly from the original discs by microprocessor computing at 16-bit sampling rates." Since that's all they wrote, I'm left to wonder: have they found a way to transfer recordings without the use of a stylus? I'm guessing not, but who knows.