Listening to Recorded Music

Before the late 19th century, if you wanted to hear music, you had to play it yourself or get someone to play it for you. That was the case until 1877 when Thomas Edison invented the phonograph cylinder. It was the in vogue technology until around 1910 when the shellac disk, introduced by Emile Berliner in 1889, took over. The machine that played these disks was known as the gramophone. It changed the world of music. On it, the disks spun at 78 revolutions per minute and contained only about three to four minutes of music. Recordings were strictly acoustic, made through megaphones, and did not include very high or low frequencies. The disks were brittle and broke if not properly handled.

In 1948 Columbia Records introduced microgroove recordings on vinyl disks that were flexible and did not shatter if dropped. They spun at 33 1/3rpm so they contained a lot more music, almost 26 minutes on a side. A year later RCA introduced 7-inch disks that were designed for single song popular albums. By the 1960s the 78s were gone. This new technology was labeled LP for long playing. Many strides were made in electrical recording techniques in the 1920s and 1930s so that by the time LPs came along audiences could hear the full spectrum of recorded sound, from 20Hz to 20KHz.

Although the first motion picture with sound, The Jazz Singer of 1927, used a recorded disk, movies since that time have used an optical recording track on all 35mm film. Other technologies, such as magnetic tape and magnetic wire, were also developed mid-century to record sound. The wire recorders were usually used for office dictation. Magnetic tape had the capability of two-channel recording so it was used for music and produced a stereo effect by the early 1940s. By the 1950s most vinyl recordings were mastered on tape. By the 1960s multi-track recordings were common practice.

The introduction of the compact cassette in 1964 put tape recordings in the hands of listeners worldwide. A similar technology, the higher quality 8-track tape player was mainly used in automobiles. Mechanical miniaturization led to the universally popular Sony Walkman in 1979, the first personal cassette player. Recordings were vastly improved by the contributions of Ray Dolby in the area of background noise suppression in 1966. Home sound systems ran on vacuum tubes until the introduction of the transistor in the 1960s. That is when fidelity got even higher in the hands of inventors like Avery Fisher who helped fund Philharmonic Hall in Lincoln Center.

The technology changed again in 1982 with the introduction of the digitally recorded compact disk (CD). Suddenly LPs were history and relegated to boxes in the basement. CDs were small, held a lot of music and you could record them yourself. Of course, that was a long time ago and now our CDs are in boxes in the basement next to the LPs. Since the 1990s we listen to and record music using the software in our computers and hand held devices. Our hard drives and flash drives hold more music than a room full of 78s. In your lifetime there will probably be at least one major shift in sound technology, so stay tuned for further developments. It only gets better.