150 Years Of Great Home Audio Inventions
Vinyl records are an interesting creation, and were one of the first generally affordable home audio entertainment media available. Compact discs were yet another groundbreaking disc medium that showed up almost a century later. The non-disc substitute for both, tape cassettes, were widely used starting in the later years of vinyl and concluding in the earlier years of CDs. All these technologies made it possible for us to hear recordings of music and bypass or rifle through tracks at our leisure (though in different ways), and each format had its various pros and cons.
The advent of the gramophone, a device cheap enough for lots of people in Western nations to afford to purchase and listen to recorded music on, heralded the beginning of the era of classic vinyl records. This device was a result of a concept by American innovator Emile Berliner, with Berliner’s design specifically calling for vinyl discs instead of bulky tinfoil or wax cylinders as Thomas Edison’s older phonograph machine had. The audio that reached a listener’s ears, increased in volume by a device connected to a player, was produced by the vibrations of a stylus over tiny grooves in a record. Records adequately reproduced audio over a wide array of frequencies, but were very easily scratched and also distorted in the presence of too much heat.
The tape player was intended to be a smaller sized alternative to the relatively unwieldy gramophone. An audio cassette, played by this type of machine, was made up of a length of tape wound around two spools, all situated in a plastic cartridge. The magnetic information contained in a tape could be read by a player’s components through a gap at the bottom of a cassette. Pre-recorded cassettes had the major advantage of mobility over vinyl LPs, and many players that individuals could take wherever with them, for example Sony’s Walkman, sold exceedingly well for some years. The tape, unfortunately, could be readily snagged or ripped by a player, and pitch during playback varied with the factory-set rates of players.
Besides mp3s, compact discs are the most popular commercial audio format today. The technology involves a spiral track with a string of microscopic pits of different lengths in it, which a laser in a player detects and converts to sound by using a complicated digital decoding process. The potential for scraping is real with CDs, though resurfacing devices can at least fix issues with the bottom, transparent side of a disc.
Without needing to rely on radio, we could hear our favorite songs anytime on Beatles vinyl records, Allman Brothers cassettes, Nirvana CDs, and tons of others. By having these three media in existence, therefore, our lives were definitely made more pleasant.
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