Like the early years of the personal computing industry some hundred years later, the early years of the recording industry were chaotic, marked by incompatible approaches and bitter rivalries. But the idea of hearing sound that had been captured at another time and place was as appealing then as it is now, and the industry's pioneers persisted through technical and financial difficulties, laying the foundation for today's thriving market for sound recordings.
The Early Days
• Electronic Recording
Vinyl, Stereo, and Beyond
• New Record Formats
• Tape Recording
The Digital Age
• Digital Playback and the CD
• Digital Recording Formats
The Early Days
While various ideas for sound recording were explored in theory through much of the Nineteenth Century, the first known success in building a functioning device was that of Thomas Edison (aided by machinist John Kruesi). Edison's phonograph recorded and played back sound mechanically, using a metal stylus and a cylinder wrapped with tin foil. As the cylinder was rotated, sound directed into a horn would vibrate a diaphragm connected to the stylus, and the diaphragm's movements were written as a groove in the foil. On playback, the movement of the stylus in the groove made the diaphragm vibrate, effectively turning the cone into a speaker.
Edison's device yielded harsh sound and did not hold up to repeated plays, and after a period of initial interest it failed to catch on with business (for dictation) or consumers. But that did not discourage other inventors from trying their hand. By the mid-1880s, Alexander Graham Bell (along with Chichester Bell and Charles Tainter) had developed a wax-coated cardboard cylinder - the graphophone - with better sound quality, and Edison had responded with the wax-based phonogram. By the end of the decade Edison was releasing the first commercial sound recordings, and a sort of early jukebox named the nickelodeon had been developed by Lewis Glass of the American Phonograph Company.
As mechanical recordings on cylinders established a commercial presence at the close of the century, experiments continued in alternative approaches to sound playback. Early research in magnetic recording was carried out by Edison, by Bell and Tainter, by Oberlin Smith, and by Valdemar Poulsen, who later developed the wire recorder. Edison also looked into wireless transmission, as did Amos Dolbear and Guglielmo Marconi, who was able to develop his ideas into what we now know as radio.
In the record industry, meanwhile, Emile Berliner pushed the idea of recording and playback from discs rather than cylinders, allowing the mass-production of sound recordings. Berliner's shellac discs sounded better and lasted longer than wax cylinders. During the first decades of the Twentieth Century, cylinders slowly faded from the scene while disc recordings became the standard.
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Electronic Recording
By the mid-1920s, advancements in areas such as microphones and loudspeakers that had been spurred by the advent of radio were also being applied to recording. Electrical recording and playback systems developed at AT&T's Bell Labs were introduced by Western Electric in 1925. Long-playing records were demonstrated by Brunswick in 1925 and again by RCA in the early 1930s. At the same time, German scientist Fritz Pfleumer was learning how to apply iron-oxide particles to paper tape for magnetic recording, and motion picture sound moved from the lab to theaters.
Despite these promising technical developments, the 1930s were a tough period for a record industry that found itself competing against the free content offered by radio in a time of deep economic distress. The industry, dominated by 78 RPM records with a playing time of just three to five minutes per side, bottomed out in the early 1930s. Fortunes began to revive somewhat in the mid-1930s, due largely to the popularity of newly-introduced juke boxes. The outlook brightened further by the end of the decade, but continued to be hampered in the 1940s by wartime diversion of materials, as well as by a lengthy dispute with the musicians' union over recording royalties.
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Vinyl, Stereo, and Beyond
With both the Great Depression and the Second World War behind them, more and more Americans in the post-war years had the time and the money to enjoy prerecorded music in their homes. The late 1940s began a period of both innovation and standardization that changed the technology of prerecorded music and revitalized the record industry.
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New Record Formats
From a technical standpoint, the industry's first big post-war event was the 1948 introduction of the vinyl LP, developed under the direction of Peter Goldmark at Columbia Records. The 12-inch, 33 1/3 RPM LP offered playback of more than 20 minutes per side, and was far more durable than the dominant "78s" of the time.
RCA Victor followed Columbia's move with the introduction of the plastic 7-inch 45 RPM record in 1949, and the two formats, requiring record players with different speeds, competed for the next few years. Spurred by the impact of consumer confusion on record sales, the industry came together in the early 1950s around the concept of LPs for albums (collections of songs) and 45s for singles.
The RIAA, formed in 1952, facilitated the technical standardization of records by bringing together engineers from member companies to develop the RIAA curve, a frequency response specification for optimizing the performance of phonographic playback systems. Record industry sales nearly tripled in the decade following the introduction of the LP, while 78s had faded from the scene by 1955.
In 1958 another major format change began with adoption of a world standard for stereo records, based on the work of Columbia Records scientist A.D. Blumlein during the 1930s. While some early stereo recordings relied on gimmicks to show off the new system, it was quickly evident that stereo added greatly to music listening enjoyment. Release in both mono and stereo became the norm, and by the end of the 1960s mono had been essentially phased out.
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Tape Recording
Developed at BASF in Germany and first shown publicly in 1935, magnetic tape recording was largely ignored in the United States for the next decade. That changed, however, when Bing Crosby and Ampex Corporation took an interest in Magnetophon recorders brought home to the US by serviceman John Mullin after the war. Recording on tape allowed performances to be edited rather than played perfectly in one pass. And multitrack tape recording eventually allowed the overdubbing of performances against existing tracks, expanding creative freedom.
While reel-to-reel tape formats were the standard for professional use, prerecorded reel-to-reel tapes proved difficult and inconvenient for consumers, and never amounted to more than a niche market. In 1963, however, Philips demonstrated a format that would bring tape to the masses: the audio compact cassette.
Like Edison's phonograph some eighty years before, cassettes were originally marketed as a medium for dictation, but held greater consumer appeal for music. The RIAA engineering committee worked with tape manufacturers to ensure that magnetic tapes were optimized for prerecorded applications, and Dolby B Noise Reduction was introduced in 1969 to address the "hiss" problem. The prerecorded cassette soon became a popular option for portable and automotive listening.
A rival tape format, the 8-track stereo cartridge, was introduced in 1966, and found broad success in automotive applications. Cassettes proved less cumbersome and more reliable, however, and their versatility was enhanced with the 1979 introduction of the Sony Walkman portable. The cassette's dominance of the prerecorded tape market was complete by 1983, by which time record labels ceased production of prerecorded 8-tracks.
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The Digital Age
By the early 1980s the prerecorded music market had settled into two main formats: vinyl records (LPs and 45s) for the home (and for radio play), and compact cassettes for portables and car stereos. But digital recording and optical playback technologies were being refined in the lab, promising a profound departure from the past. By 1982 Sony and Philips were ready to launch the Compact Disc, ushering in the digital age.
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Digital Playback and the CD
From Edison's first foil cylinders, audio recording technology had been based on converting sound waves in the air into a physical transcription or magnetic pattern analogous to the waveform of the original sounds. With digital recording, however, the amplitude of the original waveform is sampled at regular intervals (tens of thousands of times per second), and numeric values are assigned to those samples, which in turn are transmitted or stored as binary code. On playback, the values of the samples are used to reconstruct the original waveform.
In the case of the Compact Disc, the sample rate is 44.1 kHz, while the resolution of each sample is 16 bits. The digital code of sampled sound is stored on disc as a series of non-reflective "pits" in an otherwise reflective surface (the "land"), and is read by a laser pickup. Able to store at least 74 minutes of uninterrupted high-fidelity sound, and free of the surface noise which can mar LP playback, the CD also offers random access to conveniently take listeners directly to any track. The format first caught the attention of classical music lovers, then grew rapidly to become the dominant release format within its first decade on the market.
The rise of the CD coincided with growing interest in home computing, and CD-ROM formats for personal computers were first introduced in 1986. By the mid-1990s, computers were finally powerful enough to begin taking advantage of CD-ROM's multimedia capabilities, and parties both in and out of the music industry began looking for ways to add graphics, text and video to music CDs. The RIAA engineering committee helped record labels understand the pros and cons of various proposed technologies, and ultimately developed a specification for Enhanced CD. But incompatibilities in the way computers handled playback of the discs ultimately undermined efforts to get the format off the ground.
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Digital Recording Formats
Spurred by the public's enthusiasm for CDs and cassettes, consumer electronics manufacturers began looking for ways to combine the fidelity of the former with the recordability of the latter. But cassettes had already enabled both widespread home taping and wholesale copying by organized pirates, which were depriving artists, songwriters, publishers and labels of the revenues they depend on for their livelihood.
The RIAA, as well as other organizations representing the interests of those who create and distribute prerecorded music, was especially concerned by digital recording because there is no generation loss in digital transfers - a copy sounds the same as the original. Without limits on unauthorized copying, a digital audio recording format could easily encourage the pirating of master-quality recordings.
As a consortium of hardware manufacturers developed the R-DAT (rotary head digital audio tape) format, the RIAA and similar international groups tried to encourage the adoption of copying safeguards. Unable to reach agreement with the manufacturers, most labels did not release any prerecorded software in support of the format when it was introduced to consumers in 1987.
The R-DAT launch initiated several years of controversy over digital copying, culminating in an agreement in July 1989 obligating both sides to support legislation mandating the inclusion in consumer digital recorders of serial copying technology, such as SCMS (Serial Copy Management System). Developed by Philips, SCMS recognizes a "copyright flag" encoded on a prerecorded original (such as a CD), and writes that flag into the subcode of digital copies (such as a transfer from a CD to a DAT tape). The presence of the flag prevents an SCMS-equipped recorder from digitally copying the copy, thus breaking the chain of perfect digital cloning.
With the passage of the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992, inclusion of serial copying technology became law in the United States. But subsequent developments – both technical and legal – have demonstrated the limited benefits of this legislation. The Act applies only to devices designed or marketed for the "primary purpose" of making digital audio recordings, thus excluding general-purpose computer devices. Based on this exclusion, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected RIAA's effort to require new MP3 players like the Diamond Rio to comply with the requirements of the Audio Home Recording Act. And since 1992, the convergence of consumer electronics and computer products has accelerated, and many of the latest and most exciting technologies (such as MP3) have been built around general-purpose computer platforms. As a result, the requirements of the Act apply to only a limited subset of recording devices. These developments have underscored the need for the new, collaborative approach exemplified by the Secure Digital Music Initiative.
For a variety of reasons -- including the difficulty of mass producing prerecorded tapes -- DAT never caught on as a consumer format, though it has been widely adopted for professional and "pro-sumer" applications. In the early 1990s, two rival digital home recording formats (each of which included SCMS) were introduced, both targeting the replacement market for the cassette, which was beginning to decline in popularity. Philips' DCC (Digital Compact Cassettes) took a tape-based approach, while Sony's Mini Disc used magneto-optical recording and playback from a disc. Neither format, however, achieved widespread popularity, leaving the CD with the bulk of prerecorded music sales, the cassette with a fair-sized minority, and the once-dominant LP with a tiny niche market.
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