The BBC is reporting that scientists Vitaliy Fadeyev and Carl Haber of Lawrence Berkeley Labs are using non-contact means to reconstruct sound from old records and wax cylinders. They have been funded by the Library of Congress to help in their preservation of the 128 million audio iteems in their inventory.

You can read a bit more about the effort at LBL’s own press release, which includes both audio played with a stylus and reconstructed with their technique. You can go here for even more technical info, including their JAES paper.