It would be tough to get all those band members at the working end of this ...
Yup! It was actually done
in reverse in the very early (pre-electronics) recording days. Imagine
an entire orchestra crowded in front of a huge megaphone. At the small end was a diaphragm connected to a needle which wiggled in the wax coating of a turning cylinder. Edison at his finest!
Wiki - "The earliest practical recording technologies were entirely mechanical devices. These recorders typically used a large conical horn to collect and focus the physical air pressure of the sound waves produced by the human voice or musical instruments. A sensitive membrane or diaphragm, located at the apex of the cone, was connected to an articulated scriber or stylus, and as the changing air pressure moved the diaphragm back and forth, the stylus scratched or incised an
analogue of the sound waves onto a moving recording medium, such as a roll of coated paper, or a cylinder or disc coated with a soft material such as
wax or a soft metal. These early recordings were necessarily of low fidelity and volume, and captured only a narrow segment of the audible sound spectrum — typically only from around 250 Hz up to about 2,500 Hz — so musicians and engineers were forced to adapt to these sonic limitations. Bands of the period often favored louder instruments such as trumpet, cornet and trombone, lower-register brass instruments (such as the tuba and the euphonium) replaced the string bass, and blocks of wood stood in for bass drums; performers also had to arrange themselves strategically around the horn to balance the sound, and to play as loudly as possible. The reproduction of domestic phonographs was similarly limited in both frequency-range and volume."
You would need two such contraptions to properly mix music - WinAmp, at it's worst, was a quantum leap!
