Recording Sound - A History

By

Terry Rawkins

Copyright © 2020

terryrawkins@gmx.co.uk

I

Table of Contents

1. Wire Recording

2. Magnetic Tape

3. Cassette Tape

4. 8 Track Tape

5. Compact Disc

6. Mini Disc

7. MP3 Player

Wire Recorder

Wire recording or magnetic wire recording was the first magnetic recording technology, an analog type of audio storage in which a magnetic recording is made on a thin 37 gauge (0.004") steel wire. The first crude magnetic recorder was invented in 1898 by Valdemar Poulsen. The first magnetic recorder to be made commercially available anywhere was the Telegraphone, manufactured by the American Telegraphone Company, Springfield, Massachusetts.

The wire is pulled rapidly across a recording head which magnetizes each point along the wire in accordance with the intensity and polarity of the electrical audio signal being supplied to the recording head at that instant. By later drawing the wire across the same or a similar head while the head is not being supplied with an electrical signal, the varying magnetic field presented by the passing wire induces a similarly varying electric current in the head, recreating the original signal at a reduced level.

Link 1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_recording

Magnetic Tape

Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic recording, made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on magnetic wire recording. Devices that record and playback audio and video using magnetic tape are tape recorders and video tape recorders respectively. A device that stores computer data on magnetic tape is known as a tape drive.

Magnetic tape revolutionized sound recording and reproduction and broadcasting. It allowed radio, which had always been broadcast live, to be recorded for later or repeated airing. It allowed gramophone records to be recorded in multiple parts, which were then mixed and edited with tolerable loss in quality. It was a key technology in early computer development, allowing unparalleled amounts of data to be mechanically created, stored for long periods, and rapidly accessed

Link 2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_tape

Compact Cassette

The Compact Cassette or Musicassette (MC), also commonly called the tape cassette, cassette tape, audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. It was developed by Philips in Hasselt, Belgium, and introduced in September 1963. Compact Cassettes come in two forms, either already containing content as a prerecorded cassette (Musicassette), or as a fully recordable "blank" cassette. Both forms are reversible by the user.

The compact cassette technology was originally designed for dictation machines, but improvements in fidelity led the Compact Cassette to supplant the stereo 8-track cartridge and reel-to-reel tape recording in most non-professional applications. Its uses ranged from portable audio to home recording to data storage for early microcomputers. The first cassette player (although mono) designed for use in car dashboards was introduced in 1968. From the early 1970s to mid-2000s, the cassette was one of the two most common formats for prerecorded music, first alongside the LP record and later the compact disc.

Compact Cassettes contain two miniature spools, between which the magnetically coated, polyester-type plastic film (magnetic tape) is passed and wound. These spools and their attendant parts are held inside a protective plastic shell which is 4 by 2.5 by 0.5 inches (10 cm × 6.3 cm × 1.3 cm) at its largest dimensions. The tape itself is commonly referred to as "eighth-inch" tape, supposedly 1⁄8 inch (3.17 mm) wide, but it is slightly larger: 0.15 inches (3.81 mm). Two stereo pairs of tracks (four total) or two monaural audio tracks are available on the tape; one stereo pair or one monophonic track is played or recorded when the tape is moving in one direction and the second (pair) when moving in the other direction. This reversal is achieved either by flipping the cassette, or by the reversal of tape movement ("auto-reverse") when the mechanism detects that the tape has come to an end.

Link 3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape

8 Track Tape

The 8-track tape (formally Stereo 8; commonly called eight-track cartridge, eight-track tape, and eight-track) is a magnetic-tape sound recording technology that was popular in the United States from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s, when the Compact Cassette tape, which predated 8-track, surpassed it in popularity for pre-recorded music. The format is obsolete and was relatively unknown outside the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Italy, and Japan. The main advantage of the 8-Track tape cartridge is that it does not have to be "flipped over" to play the alternative set of tracks.

The Stereo 8 Cartridge was created in 1964 by a consortium led by Bill Lear, of Lear Jet Corporation, along with Ampex, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Motorola, and RCA Victor Records (RCA - Radio Corporation of America). It was a further development of the similar Stereo-Pak four-track cartridge, which had been introduced by Earl "Madman" Muntz (marketing and television-set dealer), which was adapted by Muntz from the Fidelipac cartridge, which had been developed by George Eash. A later quadraphonic (four-channel sound, as opposed to earlier, more widely used stereo/two-channel sound) version of the format was announced by RCA in April 1970 and called first Quad-8 and later Q8.

Link 4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-track_tape

Compact Disc

Compact disc (CD) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was co-developed by Philips and Sony and released in 1982. The format was originally developed to store and play only digital audio recordings (CD-DA) but was later adapted for storage of data (CD-ROM). Several other formats were further derived from these, including write-once audio and data storage (CD-R), rewritable media (CD-RW), Video CD (VCD), Super Video CD (SVCD), Photo CD, PictureCD, Compact Disc-Interactive (CD-i), and Enhanced Music CD. The first commercially available audio CD player, the Sony CDP-101, was released October 1982 in Japan.

Standard CDs have a diameter of 120 millimetres (4.7 in) and are designed to hold up to 74 minutes of uncompressed stereo digital audio or about 650 MiB of data. Capacity is routinely extended to 80 minutes and 700 MiB by arranging more data closely on the same sized disc. The Mini CD has various diameters ranging from 60 to 80 millimetres (2.4 to 3.1 in); they are sometimes used for CD singles, storing up to 24 minutes of audio, or delivering device drivers.

Link 5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_disc

Mini Disc

MiniDisc (MD) is a magneto-optical disc-based data storage format offering a capacity of 60, 74, and later, 80 minutes of digitized audio or 1 gigabyte of Hi-MD data. Sony brand audio players went on the market in September 1992

Sony announced the MiniDisc in September 1992 and released it in November of that year for sale in Japan and in December in Europe, Canada, the US and other countries. The music format was originally based on ATRAC audio data compression, but the option of linear PCM digital recording was later introduced to meet audio quality comparable to that of a compact disc. MiniDiscs were very popular in Japan and found moderate success in Europe. Until March 2011 Sony has sold 22 million MD players.

Sony has ceased development of MD devices, with the last of the players sold by March 2013.

Link 6

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDisc

MP3 Player

MP3 player - MP3 was introduced as an audio coding standard in 1994. It was based on several audio data compression techniques, including the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT), FFT and psychoacoustic methods.

In 1997, the world's first MP3 player, the MPMan F10, was developed by a South Korean company SaeHan Information Systems. The world's first car audio hard drive-based MP3 player was also released in 1997 by MP32Go and was called the MP32Go Player. It consisted of a 3GB IBM 2.5" hard drive that was housed in a trunk-mounted enclosure connected to the car's radio system. It retailed for $599 and was a commercial failure. The first handheld portable MP3 player released on the American market was the Eiger Labs F10, a 32MB imported version of the MPMan F10 that appeared in the summer of 1998. It was a very basic unit and wasn't user-expandable, though owners could upgrade the memory to 64MB by sending the player back to Eiger Labs with a check for $69.00 plus $7.95 shipping.

Devices that read digital audio files from a hard drive. These players have higher capacities, ranging from 1.5GB to 100GB, depending on the hard drive technology. At typical encoding rates, this means that thousands of songs—perhaps an entire music collection—can be stored in one MP3 player. Apple's popular iPod player is the best-known example.

Link 7

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3_player

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29 December 2020

Table of Contents

Wire Recording

Magnetic Tape

Cassette Tape

8 Track Tape

Compact Disc

Mini Disc

MP3 Player