Seth Frank

Big 3 Home Audio Technologies From The Past 150 Years

The fascinating innovation that was the technology of vinyl records totally changed the home entertainment sector with its great affordability. Compact discs were yet another ingenious disc medium that showed up almost a century later. Tape cassettes, as a non-disc substitute, experienced popularity spanning the later years of vinyl and the earlier years of CDs. All three media had good and bad points, but they all enabled listeners all over to play their favorite songs on a whim.

The advent of the gramophone, a unit cheap enough for many people in developed nations to afford to pay for and listen to recorded music on, signaled the beginning of the epoch of classic vinyl records. Thomas Edison had some years before invented a gadget that utilized wax or tinfoil cylinders, but this machine, devised by Emile Berliner, utilized space-saving vinyl discs instead. Very small grooves in a vinyl record would emit sound via a vibrating stylus which ran over them, with the noise then being augmented by an attachment of some kind. While records could reproduce sounds of a large range of frequencies, their surfaces had the potential to be easily scratched and they could deform if exposed to too much warmth.

The gramophone was rather big, nonetheless, and tape players were supposed to be a smaller alternative. This machine read lengths of tape that were strung on a pair of spools contained within a plastic casing, the complete assembly being known as an audio cassette. The tape inside of a cassette, accessible by playback equipment through a hole on the underside of the plastic case, had audio information magnetically coded into it. People had the ability to take in tapes on the go with the aid of portable players, popular for many years; this was a big upside of this medium. Unfortunately, playback pitch was dependent upon a player’s manufacturer-set speed, and tape ran the risk of being snagged or torn by players.

Apart from mp3s, compact discs are the most familiar commercial audio format today. A spiral track with infinitesimal pits of varying lengths, which a player’s laser detects and transmits to decoding electronics in the machine, is imprinted on every compact disc. The potential for scratching exists with CDs, though resurfacing devices can certainly address issues with the bottom, read-through side of a disc.

Without needing to rely on radio, we could hear our favorite songs whenever we wanted on Beatles vinyl records, Allman Brothers cassettes, Nirvana CDs, and tons of others. By having these three media in existence, then, our lives were definitely made more satisfying.

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