creating a record

Phonograph

Edison presented his own account of inventing the phonograph. "I was experimenting," he said, "on an automatic method of recording telegraph messages on a disk of paper laid on a revolving platen, exactly the same as the disk talking-machine of to-day. The platen had a spiral groove on its surface, like the disk. Over this was placed a circular disk of paper; an electromagnet with the embossing point connected to an arm travelled over the disk; and any signals given through the magnets were embossed on the disk of paper. If this disc was removed from the machine and put on a similar machine provided with a contact point, the embossed record would cause the signals to be repeated into another wire. The ordinary speed of telegraphic signals is thirty-five to forty words a minute; but with this machine several hundred words were possible.

Home Phonograph

The phonograph was developed as a result of Thomas Edison's work on two other inventions, the telegraph and the telephone. In 1877, Edison was working on a machine that would transcribe telegraphic messages through indentations on paper tape, which could later be sent over the telegraph repeatedly. This development led Edison to speculate that a telephone message could also be recorded in a similar fashion. He experimented with a diaphragm which had an embossing point and was held against rapidly-moving paraffin paper. The speaking vibrations made indentations in the paper. Edison later changed the paper to a metal cylinder with tin foil wrapped around it. The machine had two diaphragm-and-needle units, one for recording, and one for playback. When one would speak into a mouthpiece, the sound vibrations would be indented onto the cylinder by the recording needle in a vertical (or hill and dale) groove pattern. Edison gave a sketch of the machine to his mechanic, John Kruesi, to build, which Kruesi supposedly did within 30 hours. Edison immediately tested the machine by speaking the nursery rhyme into the mouthpiece, "Mary had a little lamb." To his amazement, the machine played his words back to him.

The Gramophone

Early attempts to design a consumer sound or music playing gadget began in 1877 when Thomas Edison invented his tin-foil phonograph. The word "phonograph" was Edison's trade name for his device, which played recorded sounds from round cylinders. The sound quality on the phonograph was bad and each recording lasted for one only play. Edison's phonograph was followed by Alexander Graham Bell's graphophone. The graphophone used wax cylinders which could be played many times, however, each cylinder had to be recorded separately making the mass reproduction of the same music or sounds impossible with the graphophone.

Shellac Record Player

Shellac 78s are brittle, and must be handled carefully. In the event of a 78 breaking, the pieces might remain loosely connected by the label and still be playable if the label holds them together, although there is a loud "pop" with each pass over the crack, and breaking of the stylus is likely. Another problem with Shellac was that the size of the disks tended to be larger due to the fact that it was limited to 80-100 groove walls per inch before the risk of groove collapse became too high, whereas vinyl could have up to 260 groove walls per inch.

Modern Record Player

The appearance of turntablists and the birth of turntablism was prompted by one major factor - the disappearance of the DJ in hip hop groups, on records and in live shows at the turn of the 1990s. This disappearance has been widely documented in books and documentaries (such as Black Noise and Scratch The Movie), and was linked to the increased use of other studio techniques that would ultimately push the DJ further away from the original hip hop equation of the MC as the vocalist and the DJ as the music provider alongside the producer.

Open Reel Tape Recorder

The reel-to-reel format was used in the very earliest Tape Recorders, including the pioneering German Magnetophons of the 1930s. Originally, this format had no name, since all forms of magnetic tape recorders used it. The name arose only with the need to distinguish it from the several kinds of tape cartridges or cassettes which were introduced in the early 1960s. Thus, the term "reel-to-reel" is an example of a retronym.

Reel-to-reel tape was also used in early tape drives for data storage on main frame computers, video tape machines, and later for high quality analog and digital audio recorders as early as the late 1940s, up until modern day studios where it is still in use

Multitrack Recorder

The process was conceived and developed by guitarist Les Paul in the 1940s with the financial and inspirational assistance of Bing Crosby and the Ampex Corpiration, resulting in the first 8-track machine which used 1-inch tape. Through the 1950s, many popular recordings, notably those of Les Paul and Mary Ford and Patti Page used the technology to enhance vocals and instrumentals. From these pioneering beginnings, it evolved in subsequent decades into a mainstream recording technique.

Audio Cassette

The Compact Cassette, often referred to as audio cassette, cassette tape, cassette, or simply tape, is a magnetic tape sounding recording format. Although originally designed for dictation, improvements in fidelity led the Compact Cassette to supplant reel to reel tape recording in most non-professional applications. Its uses ranged from portable audio to home recording to data storage for early micro computers. Between the early 1970s and late 1990s, the cassette was one of the two most common formats for prerecorded music, first alongside the LP and later the Compact disk. Cassette is a French word meaning little box.

Digital Audio Tape (DAT)

Digital Audio Tape (DAT or R-DAT) is a signal recording and playback medium developed by Sony and introduced in 1987. In appearance it is similar to a compact audio cassette, using 4 mm magnetic tape enclosed in a protective shell, but is roughly half the size at 73 mm × 54 mm × 10.5 mm. As the name suggests, the recording is digital rather than analog. DAT has the ability to record at higher, equal or lower sampling rates than a CD at 16 bits quantization. If a digital source is copied then the DAT will produce an exact clone

CD

A Compact Disc (also known as a CD) is an optical disc used to store digital data. It was originally developed to store sound recordings exclusively, but later it also allowed the preservation of other types of data. Audio CDs have been commercially available since October 1982. In 2010, they remain the standard physical storage medium for audio. Standard CDs have a diameter of 120 mm and can hold up to 80 minutes of uncompressed audio (700 MB of data). The Mini CD has various diameters ranging from 60 to 80 mm; they are sometimes used for CD singles or device drivers, storing up to 24 minutes of audio.

MP3

The MP3 lossy audio data compression algorithm takes advantage of a perceptual limitation of human hearing called auditory marking. In 1894, Alfred Marshall Mayer reported that a tone could be rendered inaudible by another tone of lower frequency. In 1959, Richard Ehmer described a complete set of auditory curves regarding this phenomenon. Ernst Terhardt et al. created an algorithm describing auditory masking with high accuracy. This work added on a variety of reports from authors dating back to Fletcher, and to the work that initially determined critical ratios and critical bandwidths.