There is an exhibit on the history of audio recording at San Francisco
International Airport in Terminal 3 (United Airlines) right now. It
coincides with the AES Convention this weekend and runs through May
2007: http://www.sfoarts.org/exhibits/f2/f2-current.html.
It's behind security, so you have to be flying to see it. But if you
happen to be flying through or to SFO, you should check it out.
There are lots of cool artifacts from cylinders and Berliner discs,
to an Ampex 2" videotape machine (which was actually drawing a crowd
when I was there) to videogame consoles and "early" iPods. It's a
well done exhibit with quite a bit of text on the various engineers
and their contributions to audio recording. I couldn't figure out
exactly who curated it, but it includes a lot of vintage equipment
from the Ampex collection at Stanford, gear from Dolby Labs and some
from private collectors like René Rondeau.
SFO has a great art exhibition program. It's too bad it's mostly behind
security now where nobody has time to pay attention to it.
David Seubert
UCSB