History of Sound Recording
From DSPWiki
A brief history of sound recording:
1877: Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner experiment with sound recording through mechanical processes, and Edison invents the tin-foil phonograph, which was Edison's trade name for his device. The recording could only be played back once, required the use of a metal crank, and the sound was very poor.
1880: With prize money he received from inventing the telephone, Alexander Grahm Bell establishes the Volta Laboratory Association, an electro-acoustic research facility. and develops an improved phonograph, called the Graphophone, and patents it in 1885. Eventually propelled by an electric motor, the Gramophone used wax-coated cardboard cylinders, which produced a higher-quality recording, and a longer life.
1893: Emile Berliner established the United States Gramophone Company, and developed the Gramophone, which used flat vulcanized rubber discs, that were created from a zinc negative master that could be used to mass-produce discs.
1898: Valdemar Poulsen invents the Telegraphone, which was the first practical magnetic sound recording medium. It recorded varying magnetic fields on steel wire.
1906: The triode vacuum tube is released, and brings the era of electronics, however electronically produced records did not become practical until 1924.
1922: Optical recording on film was first demonstrated.
1928: Dr. Fritz Pfleumer patents magnetic strips of paper or film in Germany, and...
1931: Dr. Fritz Pfleumer and AEG construct the first magnetic tape recorders.
1935: BASF and AEG demonstrate the first magnetic tape recorder, the Magnetophon at the Berlin Radio Fair.
Digital Recording
1928: Harold Nyquist of Bell Labs coins the Nyquist Theorem, which is defined elsewhere in this notebook.
1938: The British researcher Alec Reeves developed the first patented Pulse-Code-Modulation (PCM) system for transmission of messages in "amplitude dichotomized, time quantized (digital) form".
1957: Max Matthews (supposedly m.v.mathews@worldnet.att.net) demonstrates sound synthesis on a digital computer with his Music I program. Max Matthews is discussed in more detail elsewhere in this notebook.
1977: The first commercial digital recording system, the PCM-1, is brought to market by Sony. It encoded 13-bit audio signals onto Beta format videocassette recorders, and was replaced within a year by 16-bit encoders such as the PCM-1600.
1982: The 12cm optical compact disc (CD) is developed and released jointly by Sony and Philips corporations.
