music box vintage antique For Sale

From about the 1880s disc music boxes replaced cylinder music boxes as they were less fragile, had a greater volume and also there was a range of relatively cheap metal discs that could be purchased to play. Cylinder music boxes tended to be made in Switzerland but the centre for disc music boxes was Leipzig in Germany. Q David Bowers in Encyclopaedia of Automatic Musical Instruments (Vestal Press, Vestal, NY, 1979) suggests that disc music boxes were also marketed more aggressively than the cylinder music boxes and this also contributed to them dominating the market. According to Bowers, the disc music box hey-day was from about 1895-1905 when they were in turn replaced by gramophones as one of the growing popular forms of domestic entertainment. The Symphonion Musikwerke company was founded in Leipzig in about 1885 by Paul Lochmann and was one of the three largest producers of disc music boxes along with Polyphon (which was begun by two ex Symphonion employees) and Regina. Bowers estimates they controlled about 90% of the market between them.