MONTESANO, Wash. – In Bob Carter’s private museum of phonographs and radios, shelves are crowded with the technology of the past. Glass vacuum tubes peek out from between wooden panels, burnished metal and wood horns spring from spring-loaded turntables, and wax cylinders and discs sit on players, bearing titles of long-gone singers and songs that were popular about this time last century.

“I love old music,” Carter said. “I don’t really like modern music.”

Carter, 73, certainly has plenty of records to satisfy his taste – over 6,000, he estimates. Some of them are discs, others are rarer cylinders. And he has plenty of ways to play them; Carter’s Montesano museum holds the majority of his 73 phonographs.

The museum is the culmination of a lifetime of collecting and rehabilitating old technology.

When Carter and his wife, Cathy, moved to Montesano about four years ago, they did it with the intent of putting all Carter’s machines in one place where they could be shown and admired. The couple moved from Federal Way, where Carter’s marvelous phonographs had been consigned to the basement, where they were packed cheek-to-jowl.

Carter has restored all of the phonographs himself. A former radio engineer, Carter’s skills with tools have turned some very beat-up, dusty hulks into elegant machines, fit for an Edwardian drawing room. Take the phonograph in his living room; dark wood panels curve out of the tur ntable box with graceful, simple lines.

Carter gives the turntable a little push and carefully drops a needle, and all of the sudden crackley, sprightly band music bursts out. It sounds a bit tinny, and Carter cranks the handle on the side to correct the speed of the disc’s spinning, making the music jump in pitch and speed.

The music is a mandolin, Carter explained.

“I can’t believe how fast he plays,” Carter said.

Indeed, playing at the correct speed, the unknown player dazzles with rapid scale runs and melodies. There’s no label on the record; Carter would love to know who was playing, but it is a mystery.

Carter’s passion for phonographs runs in tandem with his love of old radios.

In fact, Carter probably wouldn’t have developed his love of phonographs into a museum if, as a 13-year-old boy growing up in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle, he hadn’t started repairing radios. His father was a radio repairman, and Carter still uses his Dad’s equipment in his restorations to this day.

“(Radios) were interesting,” Carter said. Mechanically inclined, Carter not only turned his hobby into a business, he managed to save money from repairing his neighbors’ radios to build his own ham radio.

Carter repairs radios to this day. A good friend of his showed him something she’d collected from her family a few months ago – a broken, rundown 1936 Art Deco radio with chrome and blue-mirrored glass. Carter popped it open, replaced the radio bits, cleaned up the outside, and now had the revamped artifact in its full, pre-Space Age glory.

Carter’s interest in phonographs really kicked in when motorized record players were coming into vogue. He just liked the phonograph’s wind-up ways, and the technology matched the music it played so perfectly.

The Carters have been married for a few decades, but Cathy Carter said she didn’t fully realize the depth of her husband’s hobby until one day, not too long after they were married, that he told her he was going out to buy a few records.

“I thought that meant he’d be out for a few hours and come back with a few records,” she said. “But no, he came back half a day later with a truck and a trailer full of records.”

Cathy Carter said she has learned to love phonographs since then, and even commented on how it cemented their family. Her son took to his stepfather’s hobby and now he has 200 phonographs of his own. Of course, the competition has stoked a little rivalry over the years.

“We’d go into a store and see a phonograph for, say, $250, and Bobby would say, ‘That’s interesting,’ and the store owner would sell it to him for $100 or something,” Bob Carter recalled. “It was because he was a kid, and the people liked seeing a young person interested in phonographs.”

The trick doesn’t work now that Bobby’s grown, Carter said.

Buying phonographs has become more complicated over the years. In the 1960s and ’70s, it was possible to scoop up a good find at an antique store. It wasn’t always easy to find a deal, but it was possible. Witness Carter’s prize phonograph, a model from the technology’s earliest days in the 19th Century, the 1896 Emile Berliner phonograph. Carter said when he and Bobby saw it on a shelf at an antique store they were both stunned, and bought the rare catch at a good price.

“Both of us kept our mouths shut,” Carter said.

Carter had to send away to get specially machined pieces so that particular phonograph could be restored. It is deceptively simple, driven only by the motion of a crank that has to be turned as a wax cylinder is played.

Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, it was possible to go to special events for phonograph collectors. There, Carter picked up many of his pieces and swapped knowledge with other enthusiasts.

But by the late 1990s and the new millennium, Carter said everything had migrated online, and now people were able to look up how much everything was worth. There were some benefits, like having access to a world-wide network of sellers of most every part and piece Carter could want, but it would be impossible to recapture the feeling of a bonanza, he said.

As able as Carter is at repairing phonographs, he’s a treasure trove of information about them.

“I think his museum is so interesting,” said friend Marilyn Redding. She, like Carter, is a member of the Grays Harbor Banjo Band.

“I learned a lot,” Redding added. “I never knew Edison was deaf.”

Indeed, Edison, though profoundly hard-of-hearing, developed the first phonograph. Edison hardly understood what it was he had unleashed, Carter said, because he intended to create a business device for bosses to dictate letters to their secretaries.

“That’s why it was called the Dictaphone,” Carter said.

Carter can also explain “hill-and-dale” recordings, where the needle read the wax by bouncing up and down, and the later recordings where the needle transmitted the vibrations by going side-to-side. Edison developed the up-and-down recording method, Emile Berliner the side-to-side method, which unlocked the idea of the phonograph from Edison’s patent and cleared the way for the development of the record player. Berliner also developed disc recordings.

The cylinders were improved by changing them from a thin layer of tin on cardboard to a thicker coat of wax. But the short length of cylinder recordings made it hard for Edison’s device to record much more than a small piece of music. This led to the development of players capable of handling large cylinders, which never caught on, and disc players, which did. Carter holds up a 6-inch “concert” cylinder, so wide and bulky it’s clear why it didn’t take.

Carter has all kinds of remnants of the phonograph era in his museum – an old bottle of motor oil, record jackets, even a little articulated man and woman who, when placed on the reproducer (the part that translates vibrations from the needle into sound), bounce around in a little jig.

Listening to an old phonograph is a real experience in these days of digital, Dolby, high-definition, remastered sound. Forget perfection: Your disc plays at a speed, and hence pitch, determined by how hard the crank turned the internal spring. Forget control, too, since it took decades to devise a way to muffle the volume closing a cabinet door over a speaker.

“This was all recorded acoustically,” Carter says over a tenor singing an aria. Musicians had to perform for one microphone, and a small needle at the other end scratched out the results. That recording was turned into a mold by which other records were made. No electricity went into the making of the initial recording, and none was used when Carter played the song.

A facility with all things mechanical helps Carter rebuild not only phonographs and radios, but also player pianos and even an old organ, which is in his museum with a mannequin posed over its keyboard.

Carter said he helped work on restoring the organ at the Paramount Theater in Seattle, and not only does he have a couple of player pianos out, he’s got more in his workshed, waiting for him to fix them.

“It’s not like rocket science,” Carter said, deprecating his own mechanical abilities.

The player piano in Carter’s museum runs on scrolling paper, and is powered by pumps that are filled with an electric motor. It gaily breezes through an old tune that sounds straight out of the soundtrack for a silent movie. He has about 1,000 paper rolls he can use to change the melody.

Carter also repairs old music boxes, and has interchangeable metal music discs that play beautiful, haunting melodies when set in motion.

But if Carter loves the technology of the past, he is beginning to embrace the technology of the future, too. Although he has told his children and grandchildren that their CDs and tapes will degrade long before his cylinders and discs give up their ghosts, he is taking steps to preserve what music he has with a record player plug-in that converts acoustically-recorded music into MP3s.

Even though the recordings last, Carter explained, decay especially sets in on the wax cylinders, which grow mold and become unbearably screechy to listen to.

“There’s nothing you can do about it,” Carter said. He’s tried everything, and his museum has humidity and temperature controls to stem as much future damage as possible.

For discs made of plastic, the recordings themselves can wear down with repeated playing. And few people, no matter how careful, have owned a record player and did not accidentally scratch an album.

So Carter plays his records, which were made so simply, on a record player that is capable of distinguishing between the inside and outside tracks of the groove. Carter said most players tend to wear harder on one side of the groove, and he can flip a switch on a filter that will siphon the recording from the least-damaged side, for optimum clarity.

Although Carter has thousands of recordings, he’s only ever had time to listen to a small percentage of his collection. He just doesn’t have the time, he said.

Carter said his museum is open to anyone who gives him advance warning. Like those dealers of yore, Carter said he’d particularly like to show his collection off to kids to get them interested.

“My goal is to get kids in here,” Carter said. “I love to have older people come in and listen to music they loved, but I think young kids need to hear this, too.”