The Progress of
Recorded Sound
Sometimes a technology's time is due. By the last quarter
of the nineteenth century, scientists on both sides of the Atlantic had gained a pretty
good notion of what sound was -- a succession of rapid changes in air pressure -- and the
race was on to find a way to record it in a way that it could be reproduced.
There had been experiments using a diaphragm attached to a
needle that scratched a wiggly line in soot on a piece of glass, the pattern so formed
representing the sound's waveform, but there was no way to play it back. One inventor who
thought he had discovered a method was a Frenchman named Charles Cros, but he didn't have
the resources to build a prototype, so he wrote down his ideas, sealed them, and waited
for someone else to come with a workable machine. By the time anybody read Cros's notes,
Thomas Alva Edison was being hailed as the inventor of the "talking machine".
Edison's device was pretty crude: a brass cylinder with a
bit of tinfoil wrapped around it, rotated by a crank. A chamber containing a diaphragm
attached to a metal needle rested against the tinfoil, and Edison shouted "Mary had a
little lamb" into this as he turned the crank. When he returned the needle to its
starting position, the crackly -- but intelligible -- sound of his voice could be heard.
No one is exactly sure when that occurred, but Edison filed the patent application for the
phonograph on Christmas Eve of 1877, and it's generally accepted that the breakthrough
occurred earlier that year.
Edison and his company refined the cylinder, now made of
hard wax, and marketed it for several decades. But it had serious drawbacks, the main one
being that it could only be duplicated by making a real-time cylinder-to-cylinder dub,
which was both time-consuming and sonically inadequate.
The real father of recorded sound, many believe, was a
German-born American named Emile Berliner, who developed and then marketed the flat disc
recording. At the time, lots of people -- Edison chief among them -- felt that the disc
was technically inferior to the cylinder, but it had the signal advantage that a mold
could be made of it and duplicates stamped out by the thousands.
Although cylinders and discs co-existed for some decades,
it's perhaps significant that none of Edison's various companies have any present-day
association with the recording business, while of the five huge multinational record
companies, three are descended directly from outfits founded by Berliner. His Victor
Talking Machine Company in the United States is now the RCA portion of Germany's
Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG), the Gramophone Company he founded in Britain is now EMI,
and Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft (DGG) is now part of Universal Music.
But whether on cylinder or disc, recording was a fairly
awkward procedure in its first four decades, as the whole process was totally acoustic.
Musicians and singers performed into large funnels set into studio walls, which
concentrated the sound and conducted it to the cutting mechanism. What got on the record
often depended on the size of the opening of the funnel, and how loud the performers could
sing or play. But the coming of radio -- at first seen as a mortal threat to the record
business -- ultimately revolutionized its production techniques.
Radio was totally electronic of course, and had pioneered
the use of microphones to pick up voices and music. All that was needed was a way to use
the varying audio signal to drive a cutting stylus, which happened in 1925. By 1926,
electric cartridges for playing discs had been developed, which meant that record players
and radios could be combined so they could play through the same newfangled loudspeaker.
A principle that was established in this period, at least
when it came to Berliner's discs, was that of compatibility. Even though recordings were
now made electrically, the result -- the groove -- had exactly the same characteristics as
those on an acoustic recording, so an older player could handle the new discs, and the new
electric players the old recordings.
And for some 20 years, not much changed. The recording
industry grew substantially, having a sort of symbiotic relationship with both the film
and radio industries, but the records themselves changed hardly at all.
That's not to suggest that people weren't working in labs
around the world to come up with better formats and techniques. Various forms of
long-playing records were tried out, including at least one that used a complicated
electromechanical linkage that would speed up the rotation of a disc as it approached its
center. A Brit named Alan Dower Blumlein obtained a patent on a form of stereo disc in
1931, which was virtually identical to the standard adopted a quarter of a century later.
As with so much else, the watershed for music recordings
was the end of the Second World War. A lot of the technical brains that had been focused
on military technology now turned their attention to the home front, and the record
business was one of the early beneficiaries.
The familiar 78-rpm record was heavy and brittle, noisy and
short, and it was obviously time to upgrade. The two American biggies -- RCA and Columbia
--agreed on this, but they didn't agree on how it should be done, although their
approaches did share some elements. Both, for example, decided that a new material called
polyvinyl chloride would produce quieter, more durable recordings. And both accepted that
a much finer groove -- the "microgroove" -- would allow slower rotation and
closer-packed grooves, both of which would increase information density.
But there they parted company, and for some five years,
observers watched one of the most bitter format wars ever. But when the dust cleared, the
two formats settled into a forty-year coexistence.
RCA Victor accepted the existing marketing practices,
whereby the recording industry sold music a song at a time, periodically packaging a
number of discs together in an "album". Their intention was simply to make these
individual discs smaller, with better performance, and they came up with the 45. It was
seven inches in diameter rather than ten, rotated at 45 rpm rather than 78, was about half
the thickness, and had a big hole in the middle that allowed the changer mechanism to be
housed in the spindle.
Columbia's approach was to accept the basic physical size
of the older records, although now in vinyl, and put more on it. The 33-1/3-rpm speed was
already in use for transcriptions in radio stations, so that seemed a natural choice.
One thing that made the LP possible -- and the continuing
existence of multiple formats -- was the use of tape recorders for the original masters.
These had been perfected by German broadcasters during the war, and several were brought
back to the U.S. after the armistice. American versions soon found their way into radio
stations and recording studios, where they began to be used as the original recording
medium, and their output dubbed at leisure to all three formats.
The LP/45 rivalry was acrimonious for a while, but in the
end, it turned out that there was definitely room for both formats. By 1950, Columbia was
making 45s; by the next year RCA was making LPs.
Another big rivalry of the day was movies vs. television,
and Hollywood was determined to pull out all the stops to win the eyes of the American
consumer. Ears too -- one of the technological trump cards they used was stereo sound,
which they knew TV could not duplicate, not yet at least.
Stereo was popular, and it seemed an obvious next step for
music recordings as well. In fact, there had been various lab attempts to come up with a
stereo disc, and stereo tape showed up in a hobbyist form in the early 1950s. Fearing
another 45-vs.-LP scrap, the U.S. recording industry association, RIAA, took on the task
of coming up with a standard, and they eventually adopted a system that recorded a
different signal on each wall of the groove; we were stuck with two channels for decades
afterwards. The first recording that used the new standard was in fact issued before the
standard was formally adopted; a company that specialized in railroad sounds issued the
first stereo disc in November, 1957.
Not long before that, a new form of magnetic tape, housed
as an endless loop in a plastic cartridge had been introduced to the broadcast market, and
there was some interest in finding a consumer use for it as well. The result was a
four-track cartridge that contained two stereo programs and automatically switched from
one to the other. It's main problem was a too short recording time.
The four-track languished for a number of years until a
company called Lear Jet (yes, the aircraft people) modified the cartridge and doubled the
number of tracks by splitting them in half. The resulting eight-track version created a
market for tape, which had hitherto been a hobbyist pursuit. Most of the tapes were played
in cars, and autosound has been a big part of the consumer electronics landscape ever
since.
But outside North America, nobody wanted anything to do
with the eight-track cartridge, which was seen as an inferior technology to begin with,
and which had practically no engineering upgrading since the day it was introduced.
The contrast with its main rival was considerable.
Philips's Compact Cassette had been a big deal in Europe and Japan since it was unveiled
in 1963, and audio technicians on three continents worked to make it a true high fidelity
medium. Dr. Ray Dolby, an American working in Britain, contributed his noise reduction
system; du Pont in the U.S. came up with chrome tape; and the main Japanese deck
manufacturers set to work to tame the speed irregularities that plagued early machines.
All that effort paid dividends, and the cassette became so
good that even the record companies realized it, and dropped the eight-track even faster
than they were later to drop vinyl records.
Throughout the 70s, however, vinyl was still the premium
recording format, even though the oil crunch of that decade made vinyl so expensive that
economizing on its use produced some very compromised discs. Reused vinyl tended to be
noisy, for instance, and thinner discs tended to warp easily. And the heavy use of
multi-track recording and multiple tape generations tended to make for noisy and distorted
records.
One response was the audiophile recording, which sought to
redress these practices by using the best vinyl, minimal (or no) tape, better packaging,
and so forth. Never more than a curiosity, these premium recordings did point up how good
a vinyl recording could be, and how rarely it was.
The early 1970s also saw the abortive introduction of
four-channel sound. The theory was sound: use extra channels of information to recreate
the sound field of real musical venues, but the realization never worked. There were a
multiplicity of record standards, and a definite lack of interest on the part of the
record companies. By the time the record companies showed a glimmer of interest, the
hardware manufacturers had given up.
Some of the technology applied to four-channel sound was
used to advantage elsewhere, however, especially that associated with the CD-4 discrete
disc promoted by JVC and RCA. One technique they used was mastering their discs at half
speed to give the cutter head a better chance to carve the fine details into the surface
of the master. This was later used in the making of some brands of audiophile recording.
Another technology that was aimed at that market was
digital sound. Some of the best-sounding recordings of that era had been originally
recorded digitally, even though the final product was analog. But it was perhaps
inevitable that a digital delivery system would eventually arrive, and in 1979, Philips
provided the first glimpse of the Compact Disc.
It was evidently a product that needed work, and Philips
made an alliance with Sony, who already had experience with tape-based digital recording
systems. In 1982, the first CD players appeared, although there were only a handful of
discs available, and very pricey at that.
Initially the record companies were unenthusiastic about
the new medium, especially if it meant that it would have to coexist with the LP and
cassette for any length of time. But its success was probably inevitable, and the record
companies ultimately chose it over the existing technology and effectively canned the LP.
For now, CD is still king. A series of alternative media --
digital audio tape (DAT), digital compact cassette (DCC) and MiniDisc (MD) -- have
appeared, but none of them has received more than minimal software support. Now we're in
the DVD era, although it remains to be seen whether its dedicated audio version -- or
rival Super Audio CD (SACD) will thrive. And along the way we've dabbled in hi-fi VCRs,
Elcasets, and numerous other audio technologies.
Edison was a visionary in his way, but it's hard to believe
that he could have imagined any of this as he hollered "Mary had a little lamb"
into that tube.
...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com
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