Any audio and visual lover understands the importance of the history of recording sound and video. As a music lover I want to just present a brief tribute to those who made wonderfully recorded music available.
As far back as the late 1700's there was groundwork set out to create the technology to record sound. However it was Leon Scott who invented the "phonoautograph" in 1857. It is believed this is the first machine to record an arbitrary sound. Through vibration a membrane attached to a pen, would trace the sound waves to the retracing of that sound wave onto a roll of paper. However you could not play this sound back immediately. More success was had using a metal plate but technology was behind the engineering.
In 1877 Thomas Edison unveiled the phonograph that played a metal cylinder with a vertical groove that varied in depth. (Note:There were other items like tin foil involved in his product but the cylinder was the catalyst). However cylinders were hard to reproduce or duplicate.
In 1887 however Emile Berliner patented the gramophone. He developed a flat disc which had a groove across the width of the track. (The cylinder had a vertical groove compared to the horizontal groove of the disc). The depth of the groove was even instead of varying depths and vertical direction on earlier machines with cylinders. He called his disc a "gramophone record". In US English people started calling it a phonograph record.
The early disc's were made from a natural "plastic" that was a flaky secretion of a female insect. (Reportedly from Thailand) In these times of development it was only possible to make up to 25 copies, although steadily more inferior to the original. So as a result in those days musical artists would gather in a studio and be recorded by multiple machines. Maybe ten or more. This was in hopes that they could get maybe one hundred to three hundred decent salable copies.
By 1902 a molding process was developed. The early discs and cylinders were recorded at 78 rpm. It wasn't until vinyl was introduced that you had a 45 rpm or even a 33 1/2 rpm recording.
The early discs were played on hand wound devices. By 1925 and on into the 1930's electrical machines drastically improved the sound quality.
Although the concept goes back as far as 1898, it wasn't until the 20Th century that magnetic recording became a viable option. An electrical signal would be "imprinted", so to speak, on a medium like magnetic tape from a recording head. Then a play back head would read the pattern and play it back. With the amplification equipment that came from the likes a men like Curt Stille in the 1920's this became a popular way to record public speaking or dictation well in to the 1950's. Not so much a full blown musical production.
The quality of magnetic recording was deemed inferior to cylinder and disc recording as far as music was concerned. However this did not stop men like C. Lorenz and S. J. Begun to continued to work on this method.
By 1943 they had developed stereo tape recording. The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company (3M) was a pioneer in trying improve the quality as fast as possible.
An American audio engineer named John Mullin and famous entertainer of his day, Bing Crosby, jumped on board to make a commercial magnetic tape recording product. Mullin learned a lot about recording in his military tour through Europe in countries like France and Germany. His first goal when he got home was to improve on what he had learned and convince Hollywood to use magnetic tape recording for movie soundtracks.
By the late 1940's he had given some impressive demonstrations. Bing Crosby saw the big picture.
Radio stations would only allow for live music and speaking performances over their airwaves since the sound quality of disc and cylinder was adequate for home play but not radio ready. Imagine if you only had a great recording that could be aired simultaneously on multiple radio stations. What if you could add background music and effects to your shows. Gee there was a couple novel ideas. Imagine if you are Bing Crosby and you see this potential for the first time? And it is yours for the taking.
Crosby tried pushing and persuading NBC to try pre-recorded performances but he was shot down. Eventually he was the first to air a pre-recorded radio broadcast. He invested $50,000 of his own money to move this technology forward. Improvements even included things as sound effects inserted or "spliced" into shows such as a laugh track or what was termed "canned" laughter.
During this time period video recording was also a worthy endeavor. Crosby had many thanks to the Ampex company and Mullin for this industry breakthrough. It was Ampex that also helped develop multi-track recording.
Oddly enough another entertainer, this time guitar great Les Paul. Yes the same Les Paul who has a Gibson guitar named after him that he designed. He came up with and improved the practice of recording tracks "beside" previously recorded tracks while listening to them at the same time. Thus the name multiple track. Les and his then wife singer Mary Ford were the first to record separate elements of a song at separate times that could then be synchronized and replayed as one recording. The rest is history.
Producers like Phil Spector created a method called the "wall of sound" to make three tracks sound bigger then they really were. Soon 4 track recording was being used by bands like the Beatles and The Rolling Stones. Then there was 8 tracks, 16, 24, 32 and so on. The computer technology has opened a whole new world of recording with the advent of digital recording.
So thank you pioneers and innovators for giving us the ability to reproduce sounds and video at such a great quality. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?
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