Talk:History of sound recording

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Methods of recording

 * Acoustical or Mechanical method
 * Electric analogue recording
 * Digital recording

Does anyone know anything about this Smooth Nikola? Is this name for real? Does anyone have outside sources confirming this name? When I google it, all I can find are websites that copy-pasted the wiki article. 189.61.138.46 (talk) 16:25, 26 November 2009 (UTC)

Mediums of storing recorded sound

 * Phonograph Records
 * Phonograph Cylinder
 * Dictaphone Cylinder
 * Analogue disc record
 * Berliner Gramophone records
 * Edison Disc Records
 * Vinyl record
 * Microgroove records
 * Stereo
 * "Quadrophonic" recordings
 * Ambisonic recordings
 * Surround sound
 * Wire recordings
 * magnetic tape, BASF
 * 8-track tape
 * compact cassettes

Digital sound recording

 * compact discs
 * digital audio tape
 * Audio compression
 * Minidisc
 * MP3

BBC Steel Tape Recorder - Units
It's very unlikely that the designers of a tape system in 1932 in Britain would have made it go at exactly 90 m/s. They would have been working in feet and inches. Therefore translating 90 metres to 98.4 yards is misleading, giving a false sense of precision. For those accustomed to non-metric units (which doesn't include me) yards probably isn't a suitable measure for tape speed anyway.Steve Graham (talk) 11:27, 25 March 2010 (UTC)


 * Microphone
 * Audio amplifier

See also:
 * Audio editing
 * blank media tax
 * Write protection

Shouldn't this article mention Les Paul, who (AFAIR) invented multi track recording? -- Jimregan 03:30 27 May 2003 (UTC)

Or rather, mention him earlier. (Just saving face for not having read the article, don't mind me...) -- Jimregan 03:32 27 May 2003 (UTC)

You must have been reading it as i was editing it becuase i just added the bit about Les Paul --User:Iain


 * That could be it. Good stuff, Iain. -- Jimregan

Most of the stuff on magnetic tape should be separated out into the magnetic tape entry.

this is my first time editing anything, so bear with me. i added this bit about the adat:

"The most notable of this type of recorder is the ADAT. Developed by Alesis and first released in 1991, the ADAT machine is capable of recording 8 tracks of digital audio onto a single S-VHS video cassette. The ADAT machine is still a very common fixture in professional and home studios around the world."

is that proper, or would it be best to replace all that with a simple "See: ADAT"? --Nic.stage 06:09, August 13, 2005 (UTC)

Tinfoil vs. Aluminum foil
FOr the record (pun unintentional). I think the original Edison phonograph truly used tinfoil, i.e. made of the metal Sn, and efforts to correct it to "aluminium" or "aluminum" foil are incorrect. All descriptions of the Edison phonograph use the word tinfoil (usually a single word, no space). The 1911 Britannica article on foil, http://16.1911encyclopedia.org/F/FO/FOIL.htm, mentions tinfoil but not aluminum foil. I've been Googling to find out just when aluminum foil became common, but I think the rise of aluminum as anything other than an expensive specialty substance did not occur until well into the twentieth century. Indeed, I don't think it was possible until large-scale electricity infrastructure was in place. Dpbsmith 17:28, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * Absolutley correct. Tin foil is stiffer and tends to "krinkle" less than aluminium foil, so is a more suitable medium for engraving, even if it weren't much more common back in the 1870s. -- Infrogmation 17:36, 5 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * Do I recall there was some early patent dispute (Edison vs. Berliner maybe?) turned on the difference in meaning of "emboss" and "inscribe." Something to do with what happens with tinfoil, where I guess the stylus just indents the medium without removing any of it, and everything else (wax, shellac, acetate) in which the stylus or cutter actually removes material. When I was a kid, I tried to make an Edison-style phonograph myself using aluminum foil. I was probably about ten years old at the time. It didn't work. Dpbsmith 14:50, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)

First recordings
I am putting this here for people to develop to put on the main entry.


 * First British Prime Minister to be recorded: William Gladstone.
 * First Pope to be recorded: Leo XIII.

I was once told that if the (known) people who had had recordings made of their voices were put in order of birth, the first would be Lajos Kossuth. (I am putting it slightly more elegantly.) Can anyone confirm this? Jackiespeel 17:31, 8 August 2005 (UTC)


 * In order of birth, the first would be Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, born two years prior to Kossuth in October 1800. A recording of his voice was part of the recently-discovered batch of Edison cylinders that also included a recording of Otto von Bismarck. --2003:EF:13DB:3B59:8015:665A:91FC:B341 (talk) 11:15, 4 September 2019 (UTC)

Make this page 'History of sound recording'
This page seems to me to be an excellent example of the need for better coordinated editing on Wikipedia, something I have been trying to promote at Root page. Firstly, I suggest one might expect the title 'Sound recording' to be accessed by people expecting to find out primarily about the modern technology, not work their way through the history of the phonograph (important though this is). Secondly, there is not even a link on the page to Sound reproduction which would seem to be an intimate part of the whole idea! And until I put one there there was no link to this page from Sound reproduction. Then the opening sentence is a little odd, using bold in two places.

I've been attempting to pull together the whole subject, using Root page principles, and have put templates on many pages to promote easy navigation and awareness by editors of how the whole subject is being covered. So far this uses Sound reproduction as the Root page with Hubs for various aspects. But Sound reproduction had nothing on it but some links (until I added a paragraph).

I suggest that a new page Sound recording and reproduction would be better as a starting point or Root page, with a Hub page called Sound recording that leads to studio technology etc. This page is an excellent History of sound recording and should be renamed as such, with perhaps some parts copied over to the new Root page. Redirects would bring various things like Sound recording to the Root page. Any objections? I may start the process by creating the new root page (since this does not currently exist), with template, to show how it will work. I feel that with the templates in place many more people will find the pages that they want, and it will be easy for editors to see how the land lies so far. --Lindosland 14:19, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

(The above was copied from Sound recording --Lindosland 14:36, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

Bing Crosby leading the way
I'd fix the following sentence, but I'm not certain how much of it is wrong, and I don't want to introduce new errors. "Although 33⅓ rpm and 45 rpm vinyl records were the dominant consumer format, recordings were customarily made first on tape, then transferred to compact disc, with Bing Crosby leading the way in the adoption of this method in the United States." Maybe this means Crosby Enterprises, and if so that would be clearer. (Bing the person died in 1977, predating CDs by a few years.) But it also seems like "compact disc" is being introduced prematurely. Was Crosby Enterprises a player in this? It's not mentioned on Bing Crosby's bio page. / edg ☺ ★ 03:57, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Jimmy T & Twotoes
Jimmy t and Twotoes are up and coming drum and bass producers from the south coast near brighton. The are involved in the running of resin8records and are promoters for the labels events. link title —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.66.140.198 (talk) 16:40, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

"Recording"?
I don't understand what the technologies described under "mechanical recording" are doing here. They are examples of programming, not recording. To record is to make, strangely enough, a record of something as it happens so that it can be read or played back later. Setting something up mechanically for the purpose of creating pre-planned sounds is not recording. —Largo Plazo (talk) 17:17, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I emphatically concur. This article is about recording sound, q.v., not about programming mechanical musical instruments to create sound, which is a very different subject. Although the contribution was obviously made in good faith and contains interesting information which might well illuminate some other corner of Wikipedia (there seems to be no umbrella article about mechanical musical instruments and their history, only articles about specific devices), the entire contents of the section are patently out of place here and will serve only to confuse and distract a novice seeking information about the plainly stated topic of the article.


 * Therefore, I am herewith proposing the complete deletion of the "Mechanical recording" section and its present contents. If no persuasive objections are registered below in the near future, I will do the deed myself, but anyone else similarly astonished by the presence of this off-topic material is more than welcome to do so at their pleasure. AVarchaeologist (talk) 12:58, 3 September 2011 (UTC)


 * This material was repeated in the History section of the Sound recording and reproduction article. I've combined the two and it now lives in the other article. This is not an optimal solution but it is an improvement over having two copies of the same material and answers the above complaints that the material does not belong here. --Kvng (talk) 13:32, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

Improper focus or tittling
The article is tittled History of sound recording so should it not have a more general look at the creation of sound recording devices rather than focus entirely on the recording of music? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.167.7.166 (talk) 05:45, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

"Amazing sound quality" of tape in 1947?
"Crosby was stunned by the amazing sound quality", or so it says here. Similar statements explaining the rapid acceptance of tape recording by radio networks and record companies in the late 1940s may be found in several other articles. This does not ring true to me. A top-quality lacquer was practically noiseless when new (unlike hissy tape, which, especially pre-Dolby, was very far from entirely noiseless even running at high speed—just listen to the hiss cut in with an opening pianissimo passage on a typical early classical LP), and several years before Mullin discovered the "secret" German developments, English Decca's ffrr 78s were reproducing high frequencies well beyond the limitations of commercial AM broadcasting and practically all contemporary home sound reproduction equipment.

My understanding is that the persuasive boon that hastened the adoption of tape recording was the ease and precision with which tape could be edited, without the generational loss of sound quality inherent in the far more difficult and less precise disc-to-disc editing procedures hitherto in use. Was the enthusiasm for direct-to-disc mastering several decades later just an instance of collective self-delusion by an effete corps of audio snobs?

Is there any high-quality source which provides objective evidence that the sound quality of a tape recording was then, or ever, superior to contemporary results obtained by live-recording a signal of equal quality on either wax (which, I believe, enjoyed some lingering use and a very limited revival in the 1950s for audiophile purposes because high-frequency detail and transients cut better in that venerable medium) or lacquer masters? AVarchaeologist (talk) 14:15, 3 September 2011 (UTC)

Salvaged material
This material was removed from Sound recording and reproduction by. It may be useful for further improvements to this article.

History of recorded sound timeline
1857 – Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invents the Phonautograph in Paris. Twenty years before Edison invented the recording process, Frenchman Leon Scott de Martinville invented a device for recording sound. He called it the Phonautograph and patented it on March 25, 1857. The Phonautograph recorded sound, tracing the shape of sound waves as undulations or other deviations in a line traced on smoke-blackened paper or glass, but it was not capable of playing sound back. A digitally converted phonautograph recording of Au Clair de la Lune is now considered the earliest recognizable record of the human voice and the earliest recognizable record of music.

1877 – Charles Cros invents the Paleophone. Paris was clearly the centre of the world in the early days of sound recording. It was there that Leon Scott de Martinville invented his Phonautograph to capture sound onto paper in 1857, and 20 years later Charles Cros took the process forward by working out how to record sound onto a cylinder by tracing oscillations using a screw. In April 1877 he wrote a paper describing his thesis and submitted it in a sealed envelope to the Academy of Science in Paris. Before he got a chance to build a prototype, Thomas Edison in the USA did so. Edison had been independently considering the same problem and in late 1877 he built a machine that recorded and played back sound, which he called a Phonograph. Edison became world famous whilst Charles Cros is largely forgotten.

1878 – Thomas Edison perfects a cylinder based Phonograph that he invented the previous year. It expanded on the principles of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph and recorded sound onto a tinfoil sheet phonograph cylinder, and could both record and reproduce sounds. His first recording was the nursery rhyme Mary Had a Little Lamb. He also set up the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company in the same year.

1880's – Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell, working under Alexander Graham Bell at his Volta Laboratory, improved the phonograph cylinder including developing wax covered cardboard cylinders, ultimately creating a new form of recording machine: the Graphophone.

1887 – Emile Berliner changes the game by inventing the gramophone. Briefly based on cylinders, Berliner changed his methodology in 1888 to use discs with imprinted grooves on the flat side of a disc rather than the outside of a cylinder. He initially envisioned his invention would be used as a toy.

1888 – Columbia Records is born out of Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Graphophone Company. Columbia Records, named after its home state, broke away from the North American Phonograph Company, selling records and phonographs manufactured by Columbia itself.

1889 – William Barry Owen and Trevor Lloyd Williams register the Gramophone Company in London. On February 23, 1889, William Barry Owen and Trevor Lloyd Williams registered the small, private Gramophone Company. Trevor Williams was a young lawyer working in the same hotel where Owen was staying in London. American-born Owen was in London with the aim of securing large amounts in funding and investment to set up The Gramophone Company in the UK, but Owen did not have much luck with his high profile visitors and English businessmen, so in a final attempt he lent a gramophone to his lawyer – Trevor Lloyd Williams. Williams was unimpressed by the new technology at first, but became convinced of the future success of The Gramophone Company after a visit to meet the gramophone inventor himself, Emile Berliner, in Washington D.C.

1898 – Magnetic recording is demonstrated in principle by Valdemar Poulsen in his Telegraphone. Poulsen obtained a Telegraphone Patent in 1898, and later developed other magnetic recorders that recorded on steel wire, tape, or disks. None of these devices had electronic amplification, but the recorded signal was strong enough to be heard through a headset or transmitted on telephone wires. In 1900 at the World Fair in Paris, Poulsen had the chance to record the voice of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, which is widely believed to be the oldest surviving magnetic audio recording.

1902 – Successful moulding processes for cylinder recordings are developed and mass production begins. Previously only several hundred sale-able cylinders could be made from each recording, so the talent was booked for hours-long marathon sessions to create as many master copies of the recording as possible.

1904 – Enrico Caruso becomes the first superstar recording artist. First recorded by the Gramophone Company, Caruso went on to make over one million pounds in royalties as a result of his contacts with the Gramophone Company.

1917 – First jazz recordings are made. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the music's first recordings early in 1917, and their "Livery Stable Blues" became the earliest released jazz record. The band was made up of five musicians who had previously played in the Papa Jack Laine bands, a diverse and racially integrated group of musicians who played for parades, dances, and advertising in New Orleans.

1920 – First electrical recordings are made by scientists at the Bell Laboratories in the United States. The first electrical recording issued to the public was of the November 11, 1920 funeral services for the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey, London. The microphones used were like those in contemporary telephones. They were inconspicuously set up in the abbey and connected by wires to recording equipment in a vehicle outside. Although electronic amplification was used, the resulting audio was weak and unclear. The novel procedure did, however, allow a recording to be made, which would otherwise not have been practical in those circumstances.

1925 – The invention of electrical recording allows major labels to start using microphones in studio sessions. The clear tone compared to acoustic recordings meant that acoustic recordings could no longer compete with their electrically-recorded counterparts, so all the major labels moved over to electrical recordings.

1928 – Fritz Pfleumer develops magnetic tapes for sound recording in Germany. The tapes become widely used over the next decade, with almost all studios adopting the new technology by 1935. In 1927, after experimenting with various materials, Pfleumer coated thin paper with iron oxide powder using lacquer as glue. He received a patent in 1928 for magnetic tape recording, and on December 1, 1932 Pfleumer granted AEG the right to use his invention when building the world's first practical tape recorder.

1929 – Flat discs become very popular, making the cylinder obsolete, and production of cylinders stops.

1931 – Alan Blumlein develops binaural sound (now known as stereo sound) at the Central Research laboratories at the EMI site in Hayes. After a night at the cinema Blumlein was frustrated that the sound from a character on screen could only be heard from a speaker at the other side of the room. To solve this problem, he invented the audio stereo system, which is still in use today. He began by rejecting the idea that two loudspeakers represented the listeners' two ears, instead seeking to recreate the features of the sound field including directional information.

1934 – Lacquer coated discs are introduced. The introduction of lacquer-coated blank discs made instantaneous recording possible for broadcast and home recording. Very soon all the major networks began recording their programs on 16" lacquer-coated aluminum discs that could hold up to 15 minutes of audio recording on a side. Using lacquer coated discs was used well into the 1970's, when it was replaced by magnetic tape recording.

1934 – Talking Books for the blind. The American Federation for the Blind collaborated with the Library of Congress and RCA Victor records to make long-playing audio books for the sight-impaired. A year later the Royal Institute of Blind People in London introduced their 'Talking Books' service.

1940 – Multi track recording developed. The guitarist, composer, and technician Les Paul experimented with multi track recordings, and his experiments lead to the development of 4 and 8 track recordings. These were later adopted by all the major studios in the 60's with many of the Beatles' and Rolling Stones' albums being the first to have 4 track records. Walt Disney's animated feature Fantasia was one of the first commercial appearances of a four-track record, producing something similar to what is now known as surround sound.

1948 – All the major American labels introduce Vinyl records. (Shellac records are still available.)

1963 – Phillips develops the cassette tape. Their compact audio cassette was the first to combine the convenience of a tape recording format that did not require manual threading. It took about a decade before cassettes began to dominate the consumer market.

1964 – Vinyl records become the worldwide industry standard. Shellac discs are no longer produced commercially.

~Kvng (talk) 16:04, 26 August 2023 (UTC)