Thomas Edison has been dethroned as the father of recorded sound. The New York Times is today reporting on a find by American audio historians in Paris of a 10-second recording etched on paper in 1860, seventeen years before Edison invented the phonograph. The device, called a phonautograph, captured the snippet of song by scratching marks onto a paper blackened by smoke. Its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, was a typesetter who was interested in the written preservation of speech. The resulting document was never intended for playback.

Ultrasone iCans (above)

$130; ultrasone.com

Reviewed by Joe Brown

The Claim: The off-center drivers bounce sound off the cartilage of your outer ear instead of shooting it into your inner ear, to make the music seem more like it's coming from speakers.

The Test: I listened to upward of 80 hours of music, from 128-bit MP3 files to vinyl to DVD-audio discs.