Audio History

By ccaraco

  • Phonograph

    Thomas Alva Edison, working in his lab, succeeds in recovering Mary's Little Lamb from a strip of tinfoil wrapped around a spinning cylinder. He demonstrates his invention in the offices of Scientific American, and the phonograph is born.

  • First Stereo Effect

    Clement Ader, using carbon microphones and armature headphones, accidentally produces a stereo effect when listeners outside the hall monitor adjacent telephone lines linked to stage mikes at the Paris Opera.

  • Flat Disc Gramophone

    Emile Berliner is granted a patent on a flat-disc gramophone, making the production of multiple copies practical.

  • Telegraphone

    Valdemar Poulsen patents his "Telegraphone," recording magnetically on steel wire.

  • First Talking Movie

    The first "talking movie" is demonstrated by Edison using his Kinetophone process, a cylinder player mechanically synchronized to a film projector.

  • Radio Corporation of America

    The Radio Corporation of America (RCA) is founded. It is owned in part by United Fruit.

  • First Radio Broadcast

    The first commercial AM radio broadcast is made by KDKA, Pittsburgh PA.

  • Blattnerphone

    Harry Nyquist publishes the mathematical foundation for the sampling theorem basic to all digital audio processing, the "Nyquist Theorem." The "Blattnerphone" is developed for use as a magnetic recorder using steel tape.

  • Magnetic Recording

    Magnetic recording on steel wire is developed commercially.
    Snow, Fletcher, and Steinberg at Bell Labs transmit the first inter-city stereo audio program.

  • First Loudspeaker Array

    Benjamin B. Bauer of Shure Bros. engineers a single microphone element to produce a cardioid pickup pattern, called the Unidyne, Model 55. This later becomes the basis for the well known SM57 and SM58 microphones. Under the direction of Dr. Harry Olson, Leslie J. Anderson designs the 44B ribbon bidirectional microphone and the 77B ribbon unidirectional for RCA. RCA develops the first column loudspeaker array.

  • Fantasia

    Walt Disney's "Fantasia" is released, with eight-track stereophonic sound.

  • Moog

    CBS releases "Switched-On Bach," Walter (Wendy) Carlos's polyphonic multitracking of Moog's early music synthesizer.

  • Recording Tape

    Dr. Thomas Stockham begins to experiment with digital tape recording. Bill Hanley and Company designs and builds the sound system for the Woodstock Music Festival.
    3M introduces Scotch 206 and 207 magnetic tape, with a s/n ratio 7 dB better than Scotch 111.

  • Micro Cassette Tape Recorders

    Olympus released the first micro cassette recorder in 1969 andit was extremely small for it's time.

  • Cassette Tape

    D. B. Keele pioneers the design of "constant-directivity" high-frequency horns. The Grateful Dead produce the "Wall of Sound" at the San Francisco Cow Palace, incorporating separate systems for vocals, each of the guitars, piano and drums.
    3M introduces Scotch 250 mastering tape with an increase in output level of over 10 dB compared to Scotch 111.
    DuPont introduces chromium dioxide (CrO2) cassette tape.

  • Walkman

    3M, Mitsubishi, Sony and Studer each introduces a multitrack digital recorder. EMT introduces its Model 450 hard-disk digital recorder. Sony introduces a palm-sized stereo cassette tape player called a "Walkman."

  • CD's

    The first popular music CD produced at the new factory was The Visitors (1981) by ABBA. The first album to be released on CD was Billy Joel's 52nd Street, which reached the market alongside Sony's CDP-101 CD player on 1 October 1982 in Japan.

  • First CD Player

    Sony introduces the PCM-F1, intended for the consumer market, the first 14- and 16-bit digital adaptor for VCRs. It is eagerly snapped up by professionals, sparking the digital revolution in recording equipment. Sony releases the first CD player, the Model CDP-101.

  • MP3 Players

    MP3 technology started in German in the year 1987. German Company named Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft started the research program for coding music with the high quality and low bit rate sampling at its institute. The project was controlled by an expert in mathematics and electronics, Harlheinz Bradenburg. Based on his 10 year long experience in music compression, Harlheinz Bradenburg invented MP3 players.

  • Voice Activated Tape Recorders

    Voice activated tape recorders were developed so that tape recorders could be turned on and off and only record when sound was present. This would save the tape for various types of covert recording.

  • Third Gen Digital Recorders

    The recorders got cheaper and cheaper with more and more memory in them. They also developed with better sampling rates and more features. In 2005 Diasonic released a new generation digital tape recorder that had a much higher sampling rate than the typical digital recorder.

  • 4th Gen Digital Recorders

    Soon, a digital recorder had a micro SC card which would solve all the memory probelms and let you remove the card, place another one in it for continued use. Digital recorders got much better with more and more ways to store it's memory. The micro SD card gave digital recorders the ability to have just about as much memory and long play ability anyone would ever need.