What are the most important recording technologies develop through the anolouge and digital eras? How do they work and what are the pros/cons between each step forward?
Wax Cylinders
Vinyl
Cassette Tapes
MP3
1877-1910
The Wax cylinder was created by Thomas Eddison in 1877, the first used a sheet of tin foil wrapped around a metal cylinder. Later versions used groves in wax instead of indents in the tin foil. Recording onto a wax cylinder was done by playing music or singing into a horn, the air pressure then moves a diaphram that is attached to a stylus. The stylus then makes a continuous indentation into the wax. Playback is essentially just reversing this process using a different shaped horn. Using this method around 3 minutes of sound could be recorded onto a cylinder. The cylinders themselves were very fragile and it was easy to damage the wax grooves.
1888-1962
The first form of vinyl was invented in 1888 by Emile Berliner and was used on the Gramophone. It came in a flat disk form and was inbetween 12.5 and 18cm in diameter. Up until 1925 recording was done by projecting noise into a horn that would then move a diaphram that was attached to a stylus which would then scratch into the rotating disk. This method was updated once microphones developed enough to record music. Play length on these disks varied through the ages, early vinyl records could record around 3 minutes of sound. This slowley increased until eventually the LP (long play) record was invented and could record up to 45 minutes of sound. Late forms of vinyl are said to rival todays digital music in terms of sound quality as it is fully analouge and fully lossless, this is affected however by how long the recording is. The longer the recording is the smaller the needle grooves are and the quieter the sound is. Portablilty of the record itself depends on where you want to listen to it, if you just want to trasport it to another location with a turntable then it's relatively easy but if you want to listen to it on the go it's pretty much impossible.
1962-2001
A cassette tape is a magnetic tape recording used for recording and playing back audio. The first cassette tapes were made by Philips in 1962 and could be purchased either already having audio on it or as blank tapes. The magnetic tape is simply consists of a black plastic as a base with ferric oxide on it, an electromagnet then produces a magnetic field proportional to the signal recorded. A diagram is provided below for further clarification. Playback time on a cassette tape was around 30-45 minutes per side and they were extremely portable compared to previous formats. They could be played from portable players that would fit in a persons hand so music could be listened to on the go. They are also more durable than vinyl as it is stored magnetically and the physical magnetic tape cannot be touched without taking the case apart.
1993-Present
MP3 is a digital format for audio most commonly used for streaming and storing music and is now one of the most common formats for audio compression and the playback of music on most audio players. It is said to have been developed by MPEG (Moving Picture Expert Groups) with MPEG-1 being released in 1993 and later MPEG-2 being released in 1995. Unlike Cassete tapes, Vinyl and Wax Cylinders MP3 is completely digital and thus is recoreded in a different way. MP3 uses lossy data compresion meaning that it uses "approximations and partial data to represent content". In the case of MP3 depending on the bitrate it will sacrafice audio information in order to keep file sizes compact. Because mp3 is a digital file format analog signals need to be converted into a digital format before they can be played back. This is done through sampling. The analog signal is played into a computer that records information such as frequencies and volumes of that signal about 44,000 times per second for a 44khz recording. The computer then takes that stored information and recontructs a signal that resembles the analog signal but is stored as 1s and 0s as shown in the diagram. The recording length of MP3 is theoretically infinate as it is completely digital, this would be prevented by how much storage your recoding device has. Compared to the other formats MP3 is extremely durable and portable, as its digital is impossible to physically destroy an MP3 without destroying the medium it's stored on, it can also be backed up to the cloud or other storage devices meaning it can be replicated infinately. As for portability in the current year pretty much everything supports MP3 and can play it back meaning it can be played pretty much anywhere.
A Cassette Tape Diagram
Pros-
Records sound
Cons-
Is fragile and recording can be ruined or broken easily
Is not electrically amplified when played back
Pros-
Can store music digitally
Is easier to distrubute and playback
Cons-
Audio compression means lower quality audio
Easier to distribute ileaglly
Pros-
Are more durable than wax cylinders
Are recorded with micrphones rather than a horn
Cons-
If a mistake was made during recording the whole disk was ruined
Pros-
Multirack which allows for stero playback
Better sound quality than vinyl
Cons-
Stong magnets can erase tapes
Phonograph - 1877
Vinyl - 1888
4 Track - 1955
24 Track -
Cassette Tape - 1962
CD - 1982
MP3 - 1993
FLAC - 2001
