Bulan lalu saya mengirim netbook Acer Aspire One ke biak papua melalui jasa pengiriman PCP dengan ongkos kirim yang menurut saya cukup mahal. Beratnya tidak sampai 3kg, tapi ongkos kirimnya 300ribu lebih. Nah, seminggu yang lalu saya kembali kirim barang ke makassar dengan berat 24kg. Nah, kebayang nggak berapa ongkos kirim-nya kalau lewat jasa pengiriman seperti JNE atau TIKI ? Saya coba cek pake fasilitas check tarif di situs JNE, dan hasilnya 720 ribu (Yogyakarta – Makassar).mahal sekali ! Hampir setengah dari harga barang yang dikirim (kipas untuk souvenir pernikahan), yaitu 1,5 juta rupiah.

Bagi saya ongkos kirim segitu terlalu mahal untuk sebuah barang yang nilai harganya hanya 1,5 rupiah. Saya pun telah mencoba mencari info jasa kirim barang yang lebih murah. Setelah tanya sana-sini, akhirnya ada seorang teman yang memberi tahu "kalau mau kirim barang dengan ongkos kirim murah, kirim langsung lewat bandara aja, tapi nanti penerimanya harus ngambil sendiri di bandara loh...", katanya.

Setelah dapat info tersebut, tanpa banyak tanya lagi, saya langsung hubungi adik saya di makassar, untuk dapat memastikan bisa atau tidak ke bandara untuk mengambil barang yang akan saya kirim nanti. Karena adik saya bilang “bisa”, saya pun langsung meluncur ke bandara Adisutjipto Yogyakarta untuk dapat mencari tahu kebenaran info teman saya tersebut, sekaligus mencari tahu kira-kira berapa ongkos kirim-nya.

Sesampai di Bandara, saya coba tanya tukang parkir yang ada disitu “dimana tempat kirim barang”. Tukang parkirnya langsung menunjuk ke salah-satu bangunan yang persis ada di samping area parkiran motor. “Wah, ternyata tidak sulit untuk mencari tempat kirim barangnya” kata saya dalam hati. Habis parkir motor, sayang langsung berjalan menuju gedung yang ditunjuk si tukang parkir tadi. Dari kejauhan sudah keliatan kalau bangunan tersebut sepertinya memang tempat khusus untuk pengambilan dan kirim barang.

Ternyata benar, gedung tersebut memang tempat pengambilan dan kirim barang. Saya lihat disitu juga ada mobil-mobil dari jasa pengiriman seperti TIKI, JNE, dan PCP. Karena sudah yakin kalau ini benar2 tempat kirim barang, saya kemudian mulai tanya-tanya, mulai dari ongkos kirim, berapa lama barang sampai, dan cara pengambilan barang di kota tujuan.

Benar saja, kirim barang langsung melalui bandara, ongkos kirimnya memang lebih murah, bahkan boleh dibilang jauh lebih murah dibanding kalau melalui jasa pengiriman yang diantar langsung ke alamat tujuan. Bayangkan, kalau saya krim melalui JNE ongkos kirimnya sekitar 720 ribu, tapi waktu saya kirim langsung lewat bandara hanya 314 ribu. Aslinya 240ribu (10ribu/kg) tapi ditambah biaya packing, adminitrasi, pajak dan lain-lain, jadi totalnya 314ribu. Ini ongkos kirim dari jogja ke makassar loh yaa.. kalau ke daerah lain saya kurang tahu, karena setiap daerah beda-beda.

Satu lagi keunggulan kalau kirim barang langsung lewat bandara, yaitu barang lebih cepat sampai. Tapi disarankan, kalau barang sudah sampai, secepatnya diambil, karena kalau kelamaan nanti kena biaya penyimpanan gudang. Orang yang boleh ngambil tidak harus orang yang namanya tercatat di penerima, bisa siapa saja, yang penting membawa atau menunjukkan nomor pengiriman yang didapat saat melakukan pengiriman.

Satu yang lupa saya tanyakan, yaitu: barang-barang  yang beratnya cuma satu atau dua kilogram atau yang tidak sampai satu kilogram, kira-kira diterima juga gak, ya? Soalnya yang saya liat disitu barang-barang berat semua.

Though Robin and Joan Rolfs owned two rare talking dolls manufactured by Thomas Edison’s phonograph company in 1890, they did not dare play the wax cylinder records tucked inside each one.

The Rolfses, longtime collectors of Edison phonographs, knew that if they turned the cranks on the dolls’ backs, the steel phonograph needle might damage or destroy the grooves of the hollow, ring-shaped cylinder. And so for years, the dolls sat side by side inside a display cabinet, bearers of a message from the dawn of sound recording that nobody could hear.

In 1890, Edison’s dolls were a flop; production lasted only six weeks. Children found them difficult to operate and more scary than cuddly. The recordings inside, which featured snippets of nursery rhymes, wore out quickly.

Yet sound historians say the cylinders were the first entertainment records ever made, and the young girls hired to recite the rhymes were the world’s first recording artists.

Year after year, the Rolfses asked experts if there might be a safe way to play the recordings. Then a government laboratory developed a method to play fragile records without touching them.

The technique relies on a microscope to create images of the grooves in exquisite detail. A computer approximates — with great accuracy — the sounds that would have been created by a needle moving through those grooves.

In 2014, the technology was made available for the first time outside the laboratory.

“The fear all along is that we don’t want to damage these records. We don’t want to put a stylus on them,” said Jerry Fabris, the curator of the Thomas Edison Historical Park in West Orange, N.J. “Now we have the technology to play them safely.”

Last month, the Historical Park posted online three never-before-heard Edison doll recordings, including the two from the Rolfses’ collection. “There are probably more out there, and we’re hoping people will now get them digitized,” Mr. Fabris said.

The technology, which is known as Irene (Image, Reconstruct, Erase Noise, Etc.), was developed by the particle physicist Carl Haber and the engineer Earl Cornell at Lawrence Berkeley. Irene extracts sound from cylinder and disk records. It can also reconstruct audio from recordings so badly damaged they were deemed unplayable.

“We are now hearing sounds from history that I did not expect to hear in my lifetime,” Mr. Fabris said.

The Rolfses said they were not sure what to expect in August when they carefully packed their two Edison doll cylinders, still attached to their motors, and drove from their home in Hortonville, Wis., to the National Document Conservation Center in Andover, Mass. The center had recently acquired Irene technology.

Cylinders carry sound in a spiral groove cut by a phonograph recording needle that vibrates up and down, creating a surface made of tiny hills and valleys. In the Irene set-up, a microscope perched above the shaft takes thousands of high-resolution images of small sections of the grooves.

Stitched together, the images provide a topographic map of the cylinder’s surface, charting changes in depth as small as one five-hundredth the thickness of a human hair. Pitch, volume and timbre are all encoded in the hills and valleys and the speed at which the record is played.

At the conservation center, the preservation specialist Mason Vander Lugt attached one of the cylinders to the end of a rotating shaft. Huddled around a computer screen, the Rolfses first saw the wiggly waveform generated by Irene. Then came the digital audio. The words were at first indistinct, but as Mr. Lugt filtered out more of the noise, the rhyme became clearer.

“That was the Eureka moment,” Mr. Rolfs said.

In 1890, a girl in Edison’s laboratory had recited:

There was a little girl,

And she had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good,

She was very, very good.

But when she was bad, she was horrid.

Recently, the conservation center turned up another surprise.

In 2010, the Woody Guthrie Foundation received 18 oversize phonograph disks from an anonymous donor. No one knew if any of the dirt-stained recordings featured Guthrie, but Tiffany Colannino, then the foundation’s archivist, had stored them unplayed until she heard about Irene.

Last fall, the center extracted audio from one of the records, labeled “Jam Session 9” and emailed the digital file to Ms. Colannino.

“I was just sitting in my dining room, and the next thing I know, I’m hearing Woody,” she said. In between solo performances of “Ladies Auxiliary,” “Jesus Christ,” and “Dead or Alive,” Guthrie tells jokes, offers some back story, and makes the audience laugh. “It is quintessential Guthrie,” Ms. Colannino said.

The Rolfses’ dolls are back in the display cabinet in Wisconsin. But with audio stored on several computers, they now have a permanent voice.