The Hotel Schiff is a hotel in Linz . In 1934 it was the starting point of the Austrian Civil War .
114-569: The Gasthof Zum Goldenen Schiff was built in 1788 on a site which had been used since 1563 by the Brethren of the Poor . The Hotel zum Goldenen Schiff , was established in the 19th century. It was here in 1895 that the first public demonstration of the gramophone was given and in September 1896 the first cinematic performance occurred following Roithner 's variety show. From March to April 1897
228-648: A cassette tape , audio cassette , or simply tape or cassette , is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback . Invented by Lou Ottens and his team at the Dutch company Philips , the Compact Cassette was released in August 1963. Compact Cassettes come in two forms, either containing content as a prerecorded cassette ( Musicassette ), or as a fully recordable "blank" cassette. Both forms have two sides and are reversible by
342-533: A phone connector converts the electrical signals to be read by the tape head, while mechanical gears simulate reel to reel movement without actual tapes when driven by the player mechanism. In order to wind up the tape more reliably, the former BASF (from 1998 EMTEC ) patented the Special Mechanism or Security Mechanism advertised with the abbreviation SM in the early 1970s, which was temporarily used under license by Agfa . This feature each includes
456-419: A "cue lever", a device that mechanically lowers the tonearm on to the record. It enables the user to locate an individual track more easily, to pause a record, and to avoid the risk of scratching the record, which may require practice to avoid when lowering the tonearm manually. Early developments in linear turntables were from Rek-O-Kut (portable lathe/phonograph) and Ortho-Sonic in the 1950s, and Acoustical in
570-474: A Graphophone and my mother was a phonograph." Most of the disc machines designed at the Volta Lab had their disc mounted on vertical turntables. The explanation is that in the early experiments, the turntable, with disc, was mounted on the shop lathe, along with the recording and reproducing heads. Later, when the complete models were built, most of them featured vertical turntables. One interesting exception
684-651: A US affiliate of Philips, introduced M.C. to the US in July 1966. The initial offering consisted of 49 titles. However, the system had been designed initially for dictation and portable use, with the audio quality of early players not well suited for music. Some early models also had an unreliable mechanical design. In 1971, the Advent Corporation introduced their Model 201 tape deck that combined Dolby type B noise reduction and chromium(IV) oxide (CrO 2 ) tape, with
798-609: A boom in bootleg cassettes made at live shows in the 1980s. The Walkman dominated the decade, selling up to 350 million units. So synonymous did the name "Walkman" become with all portable music players—with a German dictionary at one point defining the term as such without reference to Sony—that the Austrian Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that Sony, which had not sought to have the publisher of that dictionary retract that definition, could not prevent other companies from using that name, as it had now become genericized. As
912-409: A cassette. Very simple cassette recorders for dictation purposes did not tightly control tape speed and relied on playback on a similar device to maintain intelligible recordings. For accurate reproduction of music, a tape transport incorporating a capstan and pinch roller system was used, to ensure tape passed over the record/playback heads at a constant speed. If the cassette is held with one of
1026-723: A commercial-grade tape transport mechanism supplied by the Wollensak camera division of 3M Corporation. This resulted in the format being taken more seriously for musical use, and started the era of high fidelity cassettes and players. British record labels began releasing compact cassettes in October 1967, and they exploded as a mass-market medium after the first Walkman , the TPS-L2, went on sale on 1 July 1979, as cassettes provided portability, which vinyl records could not. While portable radios and boom boxes had been around for some time,
1140-399: A continuation of the increasingly slower speed series in open-reel machines operating at 30, 15, 7 + 1 ⁄ 2 , or 3 + 3 ⁄ 4 inches per second. For comparison, the typical open-reel 1 ⁄ 4 -inch 4-track consumer format used tape that is 0.248 inches (6.3 mm) wide, each track .043 in (1.1 mm) wide, and running at either twice or four times the speed of
1254-540: A continuous demand for English language cassettes, as of 2011, due to the affordable cost. National Audio Company in Missouri, the largest of the few remaining manufacturers of audio cassettes in the US, oversaw the mass production of the "Awesome Mix #1" cassette from the film Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014. They reported that they had produced more than 10 million tapes in 2014 and that sales were up 20 percent
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#17327732114021368-484: A definite method for accomplishing the reproduction. On April 30, 1877, he deposited a sealed envelope containing a summary of his ideas with the French Academy of Sciences , a standard procedure used by scientists and inventors to establish priority of conception of unpublished ideas in the event of any later dispute. An account of his invention was published on October 10, 1877, by which date Cros had devised
1482-400: A device that could replicate the function of the human ear. Scott coated a plate of glass with a thin layer of lampblack . He then took an acoustic trumpet, and at its tapered end affixed a thin membrane that served as the analog to the eardrum . At the center of that membrane, he attached a rigid boar's bristle approximately a centimetre long, placed so that it just grazed the lampblack. As
1596-541: A different machine that played nonrecordable discs (although Edison's original Phonograph patent included the use of discs. ) In Australian English , "record player" was the term; "turntable" was a more technical term; "gramophone" was restricted to the old mechanical (i.e., wind-up) players; and "phonograph" was used as in British English . The "phonograph" was first demonstrated in Australia on 14 June 1878 to
1710-437: A double-coating technique to enhance overall tape output levels. This product was marketed as "High Energy" under its Scotch brand of recording tapes. Inexpensive cassettes commonly are labeled "low-noise", but typically are not optimized for high frequency response . For this reason, some low-grade IEC Type I tapes have been marketed specifically as better suited for data storage than for sound recording. In 1968, DuPont ,
1824-566: A few hours later there were violent confrontations between Schutzbund on the one hand and the right-wing Heimwehr , police and army on the other. The Hotel Schiff was finally seized later that same day and occupied by army units. In 1948, three years after the Second World War , the building was returned to the Social Democratic Party. The building still houses the offices of Social Democratic Party, and until 2006,
1938-501: A foothold for Western culture among the younger generations. Likewise, in Egypt cassettes empowered an unprecedented number of people to create culture, circulate information, and challenge ruling regimes before the internet became publicly accessible. One of the political uses of cassette tapes was the dissemination of sermons by the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini throughout Iran before the 1979 Iranian Revolution , in which Khomeini urged
2052-411: A helical or spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a rotating cylinder or disc, called a record . To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, faintly reproducing the recorded sound. In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated a diaphragm that produced sound waves coupled to
2166-515: A high quality cartridge and that the surfaces are clean. An alternative approach is to take a high-resolution photograph or scan of each side of the record and interpret the image of the grooves using computer software . An amateur attempt using a flatbed scanner lacked satisfactory fidelity. A professional system employed by the Library of Congress produces excellent quality. Cassette tape The Compact Cassette , also commonly called
2280-660: A human voice was conducted on April 9, 1860, when Scott recorded someone singing the song " Au Clair de la Lune " ("By the Light of the Moon") on the device. However, the device was not designed to play back sounds, as Scott intended for people to read back the tracings, which he called phonautograms. This was not the first time someone had used a device to create direct tracings of the vibrations of sound-producing objects, as tuning forks had been used in this way by English physicist Thomas Young in 1807. By late 1857, with support from
2394-410: A large margin. Philips was competing with Telefunken and Grundig (with their DC International format ) in a race to establish its cassette tape as the worldwide standard, and it wanted support from Japanese electronics manufacturers. Philips' Compact Cassette became dominant as a result of Sony pressuring Philips to license the format to them free of charge. In the early years sound quality
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#17327732114022508-419: A lesser extent in hardcore punk , death metal , and black metal circles, out of a fondness for the format. Even among major-label stars, the form has at least one devotee: Thurston Moore stated in 2009, "I only listen to cassettes." By 2019, few companies still made cassettes. Among those are National Audio Company, from the US, and Mulann, also known as Recording The Masters, from France. Sony announced
2622-709: A meeting of the Royal Society of Victoria by the Society's Honorary Secretary, Alex Sutherland who published "The Sounds of the Consonants, as Indicated by the Phonograph" in the Society's journal in November that year. On 8 August 1878 the phonograph was publicly demonstrated at the Society's annual conversazione , along with a range of other new inventions, including the microphone . The phonautograph
2736-522: A more direct procedure: the recording stylus could scribe its tracing through a thin coating of acid-resistant material on a metal surface and the surface could then be etched in an acid bath, producing the desired groove without the complication of an intermediate photographic procedure. The author of this article called the device a phonographe , but Cros himself favored the word paleophone , sometimes rendered in French as voix du passé ('voice of
2850-456: A period in the 1990s. Another barrier to cassettes overtaking vinyl in sales was shoplifting ; compact cassettes were small enough that a thief could easily place one inside a pocket and walk out of a shop without being noticed. To prevent this, retailers in the US would place cassettes inside oversized "spaghetti box" containers or locked display cases , either of which would significantly inhibit browsing, thus reducing cassette sales. During
2964-460: A result of this, a number of Sony's competitors produced their own version of the Walkman. Others made their own branded tape players, like JVC, Panasonic, Sharp, and Aiwa, the second-largest producer of the devices. Between 1985, when cassettes overtook vinyl, and 1992, when they were overtaken by CDs (introduced in 1983 as a format that offered greater storage capacity and more accurate sound),
3078-399: A role in the development of the gramophone , whose inventor, Emile Berliner, worked with the phonautograph in the course of developing his own device. Charles Cros , a French poet and amateur scientist, is the first person known to have made the conceptual leap from recording sound as a traced line to the theoretical possibility of reproducing the sound from the tracing and then to devising
3192-437: A similar machine. On the early phonograph's reproductive capabilities he wrote in retrospect: "It sounded to my ear like someone singing about half a mile away, or talking at the other end of a big hall; but the effect was rather pleasant, save for a peculiar nasal quality wholly due to the mechanism, although there was little of the scratching that later was a prominent feature of the flat disc. Recording for that primitive machine
3306-402: A slightly earlier one that is believed to preserve the voice of U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes , but as of May 2014 they have not yet been scanned. These antique tinfoil recordings, which have typically been stored folded, are too fragile to be played back with a stylus without seriously damaging them. Edison's 1877 tinfoil recording of Mary Had a Little Lamb , not preserved, has been called
3420-522: A small case (cartridge)—hence "cassette". These spools and their attendant parts are held inside a protective plastic shell which is 4 by 2.5 by 0.5 inches (10.2 cm × 6.35 cm × 1.27 cm) at its largest dimensions. The tape itself is commonly referred to as "eighth-inch" tape, supposedly 1 ⁄ 8 inch (0.125 in; 3.17 mm) wide, but actually slightly larger, at 0.15 inches (3.81 mm). Two stereo pairs of tracks (four total) or two monaural audio tracks are available on
3534-422: A small, simple machine about which few preliminary remarks were offered. The visitor without any ceremony whatever turned the crank, and to the astonishment of all present the machine said: 'Good morning. How do you do? How do you like the phonograph?' The machine thus spoke for itself, and made known the fact that it was the phonograph..." The music critic Herman Klein attended an early demonstration (1881–82) of
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3648-480: A stylus with a small diamond or sapphire tip that runs in the record groove. The stylus eventually becomes worn by contact with the groove, and it is usually replaceable. Styli are classified as spherical or elliptical, although the tip is actually shaped as a half-sphere or a half- ellipsoid . Spherical styli are generally more robust than other types, but do not follow the groove as accurately, giving diminished high frequency response. Elliptical styli usually track
3762-504: A trend that continued in 2017 and 2018. In the UK, sales of cassette tapes in 2021 reached its highest number since 2003. Cassettes are favored by some artists and listeners, including those of older genres of music such as dansband , as well as independent and underground artists , some of whom were releasing new music on tape by the 2020s, including Britney Spears and Busta Rhymes . Reasons cited for this include tradition, low cost,
3876-428: A zigzag groove around the record. In the 1890s, Emile Berliner initiated the transition from phonograph cylinders to flat discs with a spiral groove running from the periphery to near the centre, coining the term gramophone for disc record players, which is predominantly used in many languages. Later improvements through the years included modifications to the turntable and its drive system, stylus, pickup system, and
3990-414: Is 0.15 in (3.81 mm) wide, with each mono track 1.5 millimetres (0.059 in) wide, plus an unrecorded guard band between each track. In stereo, each track is further divided into a left and a right channel of 0.6 mm (0.024 in) each, with a gap of 0.3 mm (0.012 in). The tape moves past the playback head at 1 + 7 ⁄ 8 inches per second (4.76 cm/s), the speed being
4104-591: Is 3.8 mm. For mono recording the track width is 1.5 mm. In stereo mode each channel has width of 0.6 mm with a 0.3 mm separation to avoid crosstalk . The head-gap width is 2 μm which gives a theoretical maximum frequency of about 12 kHz (at the standard speed of 1 7/8 ips or 4.76 cm/s). A narrower gap would give a higher frequency limit but also weaker magnetization. Cassette tape adapters allow external audio sources to be played back from any tape player, but were typically used for car audio systems. An attached audio cable with
4218-409: Is especially important for playback of quadraphonic recordings. A few specialist laser turntables read the groove optically using a laser pickup. Since there is no physical contact with the record, no wear is incurred. However, this "no wear" advantage is debatable, since vinyl records have been tested to withstand even 1200 plays with no significant audio degradation, provided that it is played with
4332-588: Is often identified as the oldest surviving playable sound recording, although the evidence advanced for its early date is controversial. Wax phonograph cylinder recordings of Handel 's choral music made on June 29, 1888, at The Crystal Palace in London were thought to be the oldest-known surviving musical recordings, until the recent playback by a group of American historians of a phonautograph recording of Au clair de la lune recorded on April 9, 1860. The 1860 phonautogram had not until then been played, as it
4446-774: The Berlin Radio Show , and in the United States (under the Norelco brand) in November 1964. The trademark name Compact Cassette came a year later. The team of Dutch and Belgian origin at Philips was led by the Dutch Lou Ottens in Hasselt , Belgium. Philips also offered a machine to play and record the cassettes, the Philips Typ EL 3300 . An updated model, Typ EL 3301 was offered in
4560-494: The DIY ease of use, and a nostalgic fondness for how the format's imperfections lend greater vibrancy to low-fi, experimental music, despite the lack of the "full-bodied richness" of vinyl. Cassette tapes are made of a polyester-type plastic film with a magnetic coating. The original magnetic material was based on gamma ferric oxide (Fe 2 O 3 ). Circa 1970, 3M Company developed a cobalt volume-doping process combined with
4674-765: The Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) made use of cassettes to spread their messages. Cassette technology was a booming market for pop music in India , drawing criticism from conservatives while at the same time creating a huge market for legitimate recording companies, as well as pirated tapes. Some sales channels were associated with cassettes: in Spain filling stations often featured a display selling cassettes. While offering also mainstream music these cassettes became associated with genres such as Gipsy rhumba , light music and joke tapes that were common in
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4788-426: The Royal Society of Victoria , writing "There was a large attendance of ladies and gentlemen, who appeared greatly interested in the various scientific instruments exhibited. Among these the most interesting, perhaps, was the trial made by Mr. Sutherland with the phonograph, which was most amusing. Several trials were made, and were all more or less successful. 'Rule Britannia' was distinctly repeated, but great laughter
4902-461: The 1940s as record players or turntables, the movements of the stylus are transformed into an electrical signal by a transducer . This signal is then converted back into sound through an amplifier and one or more loudspeakers . The term "phonograph", meaning "sound writing", originates from the Greek words φωνή (phonē, meaning 'sound' or 'voice') and γραφή (graphē, meaning 'writing'). Similarly,
5016-422: The 1956 season had ended, Philco decided to discontinue both models, for transistors were too expensive compared to vacuum tubes, but by 1961 a $ 49.95 ($ 509.29 in 2023) portable, battery-powered radio-phonograph with seven transistors was available. There are presently three main phonograph designs: belt-drive , direct-drive , and idler-wheel . In a belt-drive turntable the motor is located off-center from
5130-446: The 1970s and 1980s. Despite sales of CDs overtaking those of prerecorded cassettes in the early 1990s in the U.S., the format remained popular for specific applications, such as car audio , personal stereos , boomboxes , telephone answering machines , dictation , field recording , home recording , and mixtapes well into the decade. Cassette players were typically more resistant to shocks than CD players, and their lower fidelity
5244-520: The 78-rpm format was completely phased out. (Shellac records were heavier and more brittle.) 33s and 45s were, however, made exclusively of vinyl, with the exception of some 45s manufactured out of polystyrene . In 1955, Philco developed and produced the world's first all- transistor phonograph models TPA-1 and TPA-2, which were announced in the June 28, 1955 edition of The Wall Street Journal . Philco started to sell these all-transistor phonographs in
5358-561: The Central Cinema. 48°18′06″N 14°17′24″E / 48.30167°N 14.29000°E / 48.30167; 14.29000 Phonograph A phonograph , later called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a generic name in the UK since 1910), and since the 1940s a record player , or more recently a turntable , is a device for the mechanical and analogue reproduction of sound . The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical deviations of
5472-516: The French Academy of Sciences, claiming due scientific credit for priority of conception. Throughout the first decade (1890–1900) of commercial production of the earliest crude disc records, the direct acid-etch method first invented by Cros was used to create the metal master discs, but Cros was not around to claim any credit or to witness the humble beginnings of the eventually rich phonographic library he had foreseen. He had died in 1888 at
5586-606: The Graphophone, U.S. patent 506,348 , was developed by Tainter in 1893 to compete with nickel-in-the-slot entertainment phonograph U.S. patent 428,750 demonstrated in 1889 by Louis T. Glass, manager of the Pacific Phonograph Company. The work of the Volta Associates laid the foundation for the successful use of dictating machines in business, because their wax recording process
5700-839: The SDP by the Austro-fascists , the Hotel Schiff was an important meeting place and of the SDAPÖ and their paramilitary arm, the Schutzbund . In 1922 cinema, the Central Theater, opened. On 12 February 1934 the police legally raided the Hotel Schiff, looking for weapons. Those inside violently attacked the police: the Austrian Civil War had begun. The armed conflict soon spread to nearby areas of Linz, and within
5814-579: The Société d'encouragement pour l'industrie nationale, Scott's phonautograph was recording sounds with sufficient precision to be adopted by the scientific community, paving the way for the nascent science of acoustics. The device's true significance in the history of recorded sound was not fully realized prior to March 2008, when it was discovered and resurrected in a Paris patent office by First Sounds, an informal collaborative of American audio historians, recording engineers, and sound archivists founded to make
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#17327732114025928-509: The US dropped from 442 million in 1990 to 274,000 by 2007. For audiobooks , the final year that cassettes represented more than 50% of total market sales was 2002 when they were replaced by CDs as the dominant media. The last new car with an available cassette player was a 2014 TagAZ AQUiLA. Four years prior, Sony had stopped the production of personal cassette players. In 2011, the Oxford English Dictionary removed
6042-422: The US in November 1964 as Norelco Carry-Corder 150 . By 1966 over 250,000 recorders had been sold in the US alone and Japan soon became the major source of recorders. By 1968, 85 manufacturers had sold over 2.4 million players. By the end of the 1960s, the cassette business was worth an estimated 150 million dollars. By the early 1970s the compact cassette machines were outselling other types of tape machines by
6156-423: The Volta Associates were sure that they had a number of practical inventions, they filed patent applications and began to seek out investors. The Volta Graphophone Company of Alexandria, Virginia, was created on January 6, 1886, and incorporated on February 3, 1886. It was formed to control the patents and to handle the commercial development of their sound recording and reproduction inventions, one of which became
6270-483: The Walkman was the first truly personal portable music player, one that not only allowed users to listen to music away from home, but to do so in private. According to the technology news website The Verge, "the world changed" on the day the TPS-L2 was released. Stereo tape decks and boom boxes became some of the most highly sought-after consumer products of both decades, as the ability of users to take their music with them anywhere with ease led to its popularity around
6384-566: The age of 45. Thomas Edison conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound between May and July 1877 as a byproduct of his efforts to "play back" recorded telegraph messages and to automate speech sounds for transmission by telephone . His first experiments were with waxed paper. He announced his invention of the first phonograph , a device for recording and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877 (early reports appear in Scientific American and several newspapers in
6498-541: The beginning of November, and an even earlier announcement of Edison working on a "talking-machine" can be found in the Chicago Daily Tribune on May 9 ), and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was patented on February 19, 1878, as US Patent 200,521). "In December, 1877, a young man came into the office of the Scientific American , and placed before the editors
6612-471: The cassette shell indicate the type of tape. Type I cassettes have only write-protect notches, Type II have an additional pair next to the write protection ones, and Type IV (metal) have a third set near the middle of the top of the cassette shell. These allow later cassette decks to detect the tape type automatically and select the proper bias and equalization. The cassette was the next step following reel-to-reel audio tape recording , although, because of
6726-444: The cassette tape was the most popular format in the United States and the UK. Record labels experimented with innovative packaging designs. A designer during the era explained: "There was so much money in the industry at the time, we could try anything with design." The introduction of the cassette single , called a "cassingle", was also part of this era and featured a music single in Compact Cassette form. Until 2005, cassettes remained
6840-426: The cylinder was rotated and slowly progressed along its axis , the airborne sound vibrated a diaphragm connected to a stylus that indented the foil into the cylinder's groove, thereby recording the vibrations as "hill-and-dale" variations of the depth of the indentation. By 1890, record manufacturers had begun using a rudimentary duplication process to mass-produce their product. While the live performers recorded
6954-484: The dominant medium for purchasing and listening to music in some developing countries , but compact disc (CD) technology had superseded the Compact Cassette in the vast majority of music markets throughout the world by this time. Compact cassettes served as catalysts for social change. Their small size, durability and ease of copying helped bring underground rock and punk music behind the Iron Curtain , creating
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#17327732114027068-581: The earliest sound recordings available to the public. The phonautograms were then digitally converted by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who were able to play back the recorded sounds, something Scott had never conceived of. Prior to this point, the earliest known record of a human voice was thought to be an 1877 phonograph recording by Thomas Edison . The phonautograph would play
7182-508: The earliest verified recordings by the famous that have survived to the present. Alexander Graham Bell and his two associates took Edison's tinfoil phonograph and modified it considerably to make it reproduce sound from wax instead of tinfoil. They began their work at Bell's Volta Laboratory in Washington, D. C., in 1879, and continued until they were granted basic patents in 1886 for recording in wax. Although Edison had invented
7296-695: The early '70s. By 1968, 85 manufacturers had sold over 2.4 million mono and stereo players. By the end of the 1960s, the cassette business was worth an estimated 150 million dollars. By the early 1970s the compact cassette machines were outselling other types of tape machines by a large margin. The mass production of "blank" (not yet recorded) Compact Cassettes began in 1964 in Hanover , Germany. Prerecorded music cassettes (also known as Music-Cassettes , and later just Musicassettes ; M.C. for short) were launched in Europe in late 1965. The Mercury Record Company ,
7410-502: The early 1960s Philips Eindhoven tasked two different teams to design a tape cartridge for thinner and narrower tape compared to what was used in reel-to-reel tape recorders. By 1962, the Vienna division of Philips developed a single-hole cassette , adapted from its German described name Einloch-Kassette . Philips selected the two-spool cartridge as a winner and introduced the 2-track 2-direction mono version in Europe on 28 August 1963 at
7524-485: The early 1960s. These were eclipsed by more successful implementations of the concept from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. The pickup or cartridge is a transducer that converts mechanical vibrations from a stylus into an electrical signal. The electrical signal is amplified and converted into sound by one or more loudspeakers . Crystal and ceramic pickups that use the piezoelectric effect have largely been replaced by magnetic cartridges . The pickup includes
7638-443: The early 1980s some record labels sought to solve this problem by introducing new, larger packages for cassettes which would allow them to be displayed alongside vinyl records and compact discs , or giving them a further market advantage over vinyl by adding bonus tracks . Willem Andriessen wrote that the development in technology allowed "hardware designers to discover and satisfy one of the collective desires of human beings all over
7752-442: The end of cassette Walkman production on 22 October 2010, a result of the emergence of MP3 players such as Apple's iPod. As of 2022, Sony uses the Walkman brand solely for its line of digital media players. In 2010, Botswana-based Diamond Studios announced plans for establishing a plant to mass-produce cassettes in a bid to combat piracy. It opened in 2011. In South Korea, the early English education boom for toddlers encourages
7866-494: The fall of 1955, for the price of $ 59.95. The October 1955 issue of Radio & Television News magazine (page 41), had a full page detailed article on Philco's new consumer product. The all-transistor portable phonograph TPA-1 and TPA-2 models played only 45rpm records and used four 1.5 volt "D" batteries for their power supply. The "TPA" stands for "Transistor Phonograph Amplifier". Their circuitry used three Philco germanium PNP alloy-fused junction audio frequency transistors. After
7980-571: The first Dictaphone . After the Volta Associates gave several demonstrations in the City of Washington, businessmen from Philadelphia created the American Graphophone Company on March 28, 1887, in order to produce and sell the machines for the budding phonograph marketplace. The Volta Graphophone Company then merged with American Graphophone, which itself later evolved into Columbia Records . A coin-operated version of
8094-549: The first instance of recorded verse . On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the phonograph, Edison recounted reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb to test his first machine. The 1927 event was filmed by an early sound-on-film newsreel camera, and an audio clip from that film's soundtrack is sometimes mistakenly presented as the original 1877 recording. Wax cylinder recordings made by 19th-century media legends such as P. T. Barnum and Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth are amongst
8208-614: The first regular film screenings in Linz were held here. In 1909 John Wind bought the hotel and developed cinema here. In 1920, the hotel, restaurant and cinema became the property of the Upper Austrian Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria (SDAPÖ). The existing facilities were now augmented with the offices of the Linz SDP party secretariat, a library and reading room. Until the suppression of
8322-520: The following year, their best year since they opened in 1969. In 2016, cassette sales in the United States rose by 74% to 129,000. In 2018, following several years of shortage, National Audio Company began producing their own magnetic tape, becoming the world's first known manufacturer of an all-new tape stock. Mulann, a company which acquired Pyral/RMGI in 2015 and originates from BASF , also started production of its new cassette tape stock in 2018, basing on reel tape formula. In Japan and South Korea,
8436-407: The glass plate was slid horizontally in a well formed groove at a speed of one meter per second, a person would speak into the trumpet, causing the membrane to vibrate and the stylus to trace figures that were scratched into the lampblack. On March 25, 1857, Scott received the French patent #17,897/31,470 for his device, which he called a phonautograph. The earliest known surviving recorded sound of
8550-459: The globe. Like the transistor radio in the 1950s and 1960s, the portable CD player in the 1990s, and the MP3 player in the 2000s, the Walkman defined the portable music market for the decade of the '80s, with cassette sales overtaking those of LPs . Total vinyl record sales remained higher well into the 1980s due to greater sales of singles, although cassette singles achieved popularity for
8664-410: The groove more accurately, with increased high frequency response and less distortion. For DJ use, the relative robustness of spherical styli make them generally preferred for back-cuing and scratching. There are a number of derivations of the basic elliptical type, including the shibata or fine line stylus, which can more accurately reproduce high frequency information contained in the record groove. This
8778-476: The hard rubber used to make the discs with a shellac compound. Berliner's early records had poor sound quality, however. Work by Eldridge R. Johnson eventually improved the sound fidelity to a point where it was as good as the cylinder. In the 1930s, vinyl (originally known as vinylite) was introduced as a record material for radio transcription discs , and for radio commercials. At that time, virtually no discs for home use were made from this material. Vinyl
8892-404: The inventor of a chromium dioxide (CrO 2 ) manufacturing process, began commercialization of CrO 2 media. The first CrO 2 cassette was introduced in 1970 by Advent , and later strongly backed by BASF , the inventor and longtime manufacturer of magnetic recording tape. Next, coatings using magnetite (Fe 3 O 4 ) such as TDK 's Audua were produced in an attempt to approach or exceed
9006-1124: The labels facing the user and the tape opening at the bottom, the write-protect notch for the corresponding side is at the top-left. Tape length usually is measured in minutes of total playing time. Many of the varieties of blank tape were C60 (30 minutes per side), C90 (45 minutes per side) and C120 (60 minutes per side). Maxell makes 150-minute cassettes (UR-150) - 75 minutes per side. The C46 and C60 lengths typically are 15 to 16 micrometers (0.59 to 0.63 mils) thick, but C90s are 10 to 11 μm (0.39 to 0.43 mils) and (the less common) C120s are just 6 μm (0.24 mils) thick, rendering them more susceptible to stretching or breakage. Even C180 tapes were available at one point. Other lengths are (or were) also available from some vendors, including C10, C12 and C15 (useful for saving data from early home computers and in telephone answering machines ), C30, C40, C50, C54, C64, C70, C74, C80, C84, C94, C100, C105, C110, and C150. As late as 2010, Thomann still offered C10, C20, C30 and C40 IEC Type II tape cassettes for use with 4- and 8-track portastudios . The full tape width
9120-438: The limitations of the cassette's size and speed, it initially compared poorly in quality. Unlike the 4-track stereo open-reel format, the two stereo tracks of each side lie adjacent to each other, rather than being interleaved with the tracks of the other side. This permitted monaural cassette players to play stereo recordings "summed" as mono tracks and permitted stereo players to play mono recordings through both speakers. The tape
9234-453: The market that use a pure (CrO 2 ) coating. Simple voice recorders and earlier cassette decks are designed to work with standard ferric formulations. Newer tape decks usually are built with switches and later detectors for the different bias and equalization requirements for higher grade tapes. The most common are iron oxide tapes (as defined by the IEC 60094 standard ). Notches on top of
9348-400: The master phonograph, up to ten tubes led to blank cylinders in other phonographs. Until this development, each record had to be custom-made. Before long, a more advanced pantograph -based process made it possible to simultaneously produce 90–150 copies of each record. However, as demand for certain records grew, popular artists still needed to re-record and re-re-record their songs. Reportedly,
9462-566: The matrixes to stamp disc can be shipped to other printing plants for a global distribution of recordings; cylinders could not be stamped until 1901–1902, when the gold moulding process was introduced by Edison. Through experimentation, in 1892 Berliner began commercial production of his disc records and "gramophones". His " phonograph record " was the first disc record to be offered to the public. They were five inches (13 cm) in diameter and recorded on one side only. Seven-inch (17.5 cm) records followed in 1895. Also in 1895 Berliner replaced
9576-492: The medium's first major African-American star George Washington Johnson was obliged to perform his " The Laughing Song " (or the separate "The Whistling Coon") up to thousands of times in a studio during his recording career. Sometimes he would sing "The Laughing Song" more than fifty times in a day, at twenty cents per rendition. (The average price of a single cylinder in the mid-1890s was about fifty cents.) Lambert 's lead cylinder recording for an experimental talking clock
9690-458: The name by competing disc record manufacturers was rigorously challenged in court. However, in 1910, an English court decision ruled that the term had become generic; In American English , "phonograph", properly specific to machines made by Edison, was sometimes used in a generic sense as early as the 1890s to include cylinder-playing machines made by others. But it was then considered strictly incorrect to apply it to Emile Berliner 's Gramophone,
9804-464: The next five years developing the New York City electric light and power system. Meanwhile, Bell, a scientist and experimenter at heart, was looking for new worlds to conquer after having patented the telephone . According to Sumner Tainter , it was through Gardiner Green Hubbard that Bell took up the phonograph challenge. Bell had married Hubbard's daughter Mabel in 1879 while Hubbard
9918-435: The open air through a flaring horn , or directly to the listener's ears through stethoscope -type earphones. The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison ; its use would rise the following year. Alexander Graham Bell 's Volta Laboratory made several improvements in the 1880s and introduced the graphophone , including the use of wax-coated cardboard cylinders and a cutting stylus that moved from side to side in
10032-530: The overthrow of the regime of the Shah , Mohammad Reza Pahlavi . During the military dictatorship of Chile (1973–1990) a "cassette culture" emerged where blacklisted music or music that was by other reasons not available as records was shared. Some pirate cassette producers created brands such as Cumbre y Cuatro that have in retrospect received praise for their contributions to popular music. Armed groups such as Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR) and
10146-527: The past'). Cros was a poet of meager means, not in a position to pay a machinist to build a working model, and largely content to bequeath his ideas to the public domain free of charge and let others reduce them to practice, but after the earliest reports of Edison's presumably independent invention crossed the Atlantic he had his sealed letter of April 30 opened and read at the December 3, 1877 meeting of
10260-496: The phonograph in 1877, the fame bestowed on him for this invention was not due to its efficiency. Recording with his tinfoil phonograph was too difficult to be practical, as the tinfoil tore easily, and even when the stylus was properly adjusted, its reproduction of sound was distorted, and good for only a few playbacks; nevertheless Edison had discovered the idea of sound recording . However immediately after his discovery he did not improve it, allegedly because of an agreement to spend
10374-563: The phrase "cassette player" from its 12th edition Concise version, which prompted some media sources to mistakenly report that the term "cassette tape" was being removed. In India, music continued to be released on the cassette format due to its low cost until 2009. Although portable digital recorders are most common today, analog tape remains a desirable option for certain artists and consumers. Underground and DIY communities release regularly, and sometimes exclusively, on cassette format, particularly in experimental music circles and to
10488-483: The platter, either underneath it or entirely outside of it, and is connected to the platter or counter-platter by a drive belt made from elastomeric material. The direct-drive turntable was invented by Shuichi Obata, an engineer at Matsushita (now Panasonic). In 1969, Matsushita released it as the Technics SP-10, the first direct-drive turntable on the market. The most influential direct-drive turntable
10602-593: The pop acts Seiko Matsuda , SHINee , and NCT 127 released their material on limited-run cassettes. In Reiwa era Japan, the revived popularity of cassette tapes is an example of Showa retro . In the mid-to-late 2010s, cassette sales saw a modest resurgence concurrent with the vinyl revival . As early as 2015, the retail chain Urban Outfitters , which had long sold LPs , started selling new pre-recorded cassettes (both new and old albums), blank cassettes, and players. In 2016, cassette sales increased,
10716-548: The popularity of cassettes and the rise of the compact disc . However, records have undergone a revival since the late 2000s . This resurgence has much to do with vinyl records' sparing use of audio processing, resulting in a more natural sound on high-quality replay equipment, compared to many digital releases that are highly processed for portable players in high-noise environmental conditions. However, unlike "plug-and-play" digital audio, vinyl record players have user-serviceable parts, which require attention to tonearm alignment and
10830-415: The sound and equalization systems. The disc phonograph record was the dominant commercial audio distribution format throughout most of the 20th century, and phonographs became the first example of home audio that people owned and used at their residences. In the 1960s, the use of 8-track cartridges and cassette tapes were introduced as alternatives. By 1987, phonograph use had declined sharply due to
10944-482: The sound quality of vinyl records . Cobalt - adsorbed iron oxide (Avilyn) was introduced by TDK in 1974 and proved very successful. "Type IV" tapes using pure metal particles (as opposed to oxide formulations) were introduced in 1979 by 3M under the trade name Metafine. The tape coating on most cassettes sold as of 2024 are either "normal" or "chrome" consists of ferric oxide and cobalt mixed in varying ratios (and using various processes); there are very few cassettes on
11058-543: The stylus, which thus described a spiral, recording 150 grooves to the inch. The basic distinction between the Edison's first phonograph patent and the Bell and Tainter patent of 1886 was the method of recording. Edison's method was to indent the sound waves on a piece of tin foil, while Bell and Tainter's invention called for cutting, or "engraving", the sound waves into a wax record with a sharp recording stylus. In 1885, when
11172-470: The tape; one stereo pair or one monophonic track is played or recorded when the tape is moving in one direction and the second (pair) when moving in the other direction. This reversal is achieved either by manually flipping the cassette when the tape comes to an end, or by the reversal of tape movement, known as "auto-reverse", when the mechanism detects that the tape has ended. After the Second World War , magnetic tape recording technology proliferated across
11286-531: The terms "gramophone" and "graphophone" have roots in the Greek words γράμμα (gramma, meaning 'letter') and φωνή (phōnē, meaning 'voice'). In British English , "gramophone" may refer to any sound-reproducing machine that utilizes disc records . These were introduced and popularized in the UK by the Gramophone Company . Initially, "gramophone" was a proprietary trademark of the company, and any use of
11400-518: The user. Although other tape cassette formats have also existed—for example the Microcassette —the generic term cassette tape is normally used to refer to the Compact Cassette because of its ubiquity. Compact Cassettes contain two miniature spools, between which the magnetically coated, polyester -type plastic film (magnetic tape) is passed and wound —essentially miniaturizing reel-to-reel audio tape and enclosing it, with its reels, in
11514-585: The wear and choice of stylus, the most critical component affecting turntable sound. The terminology used to describe record-playing devices is not uniform across the English-speaking world. In modern contexts, the playback device is often referred to as a "turntable", "record player", or " record changer ". Each of these terms denotes distinct items. When integrated into a DJ setup with a mixer , turntables are colloquially known as "decks". In later versions of electric phonographs, commonly known since
11628-559: The world, independent of region, climate, religion, culture, race, sex, age and education: the desire to enjoy music at any time, at any place, in any desired sound quality and almost at any wanted price". Critic Robert Palmer , writing in The New York Times in 1981, cited the proliferation of personal stereos as well as extra tracks not available on LP as reasons for the surge in popularity of cassettes. Cassettes' ability to allow users to record content in public also led to
11742-513: The world. In the United States, Ampex , using equipment obtained in Germany as a starting point, began commercial production of tape recorders . First used in studios to record radio programs, tape recorders quickly found their way into schools and homes. By 1953, 1 million US homes had tape machines. In 1958, following four years of development, RCA Victor introduced the stereo, quarter-inch, reversible, reel-to-reel RCA tape cartridge . In
11856-548: Was a comparatively simple matter. I had to keep my mouth about six inches away from the horn and remember not to make my voice too loud if I wanted anything approximating to a clear reproduction; that was all. When it was played over to me and I heard my own voice for the first time, one or two friends who were present said that it sounded rather like mine; others declared that they would never have recognised it. I daresay both opinions were correct." The Argus newspaper from Melbourne, Australia, reported on an 1878 demonstration at
11970-441: Was a horizontal seven inch turntable. The machine, although made in 1886, was a duplicate of one made earlier but taken to Europe by Chichester Bell . Tainter was granted U.S. patent 385,886 on July 10, 1888. The playing arm is rigid, except for a pivoted vertical motion of 90 degrees to allow removal of the record or a return to starting position. While recording or playing, the record not only rotated, but moved laterally under
12084-413: Was caused by the repetition of the convivial song of 'He's a jolly good fellow,' which sounded as if it was being sung by an old man of 80 with a cracked voice." Edison's early phonographs recorded onto a thin sheet of metal, normally tinfoil , which was temporarily wrapped around a helically grooved cylinder mounted on a correspondingly threaded rod supported by plain and threaded bearings . While
12198-605: Was invented on March 25, 1857, by Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville , an editor and typographer of manuscripts at a scientific publishing house in Paris. One day while editing Professor Longet's Traité de Physiologie , he happened upon that customer's engraved illustration of the anatomy of the human ear, and conceived of "the imprudent idea of photographing the word." In 1853 or 1854 (Scott cited both years) he began working on "le problème de la parole s'écrivant elle-même" ("the problem of speech writing itself"), aiming to build
12312-413: Was mediocre, but it improved dramatically by the early 1970s when it caught up with the quality of 8-track tape and kept improving. The Compact Cassette went on to become a popular (and re-recordable ) alternative to the 12-inch vinyl LP during the late 1970s. As with prerecorded reel-to-reel and 8-track, sales were slow to start, but picked up rapidly to tie with the 8-track before superseding it by
12426-501: Was not considered a serious drawback in mobile use. With the introduction of electronic skip protection it became possible to use portable CD players on the go, and automotive CD players became viable. CD-R drives and media also became affordable for consumers around the same time. By 1993, annual shipments of CD players had reached 5 million, up 21% from the year before; while cassette player shipments had dropped 7% to approximately 3.4 million. Sales of pre-recorded music cassettes in
12540-592: Was only a transcription of sound waves into graphic form on paper for visual study. Recently developed optical scanning and image processing techniques have given new life to early recordings by making it possible to play unusually delicate or physically unplayable media without physical contact. A recording made on a sheet of tinfoil at an 1878 demonstration of Edison's phonograph in St. Louis, Missouri, has been played back by optical scanning and digital analysis. A few other early tinfoil recordings are known to survive, including
12654-443: Was practical and their machines were durable. But it would take several more years and the renewed efforts of Edison and the further improvements of Emile Berliner and many others, before the recording industry became a major factor in home entertainment . Discs are not inherently better than cylinders at providing audio fidelity. Rather, the advantages of the format are seen in the manufacturing process: discs can be stamped, and
12768-601: Was president of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Co., and his organization, which had purchased the Edison patent, was financially troubled because people did not want to buy a machine that seldom worked well and proved difficult for the average person to operate. The sound vibrations had been indented in the wax that had been applied to the Edison phonograph. The following was the text of one of their recordings: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. I am
12882-669: Was the Technics SL-1200 , which, following the spread of turntablism in hip hop culture, became the most widely-used turntable in DJ culture for several decades. In some high quality equipment the arm carrying the pickup, known as a tonearm, is manufactured separately from the motor and turntable unit. Companies specialising in the manufacture of tonearms include the English company SME . More sophisticated turntables were (and still are) frequently manufactured so as to incorporate
12996-399: Was used for the popular 78-rpm V-discs issued to US soldiers during World War II . This significantly reduced breakage during transport. The first commercial vinylite record was the set of five 12" discs " Prince Igor " (Asch Records album S-800, dubbed from Soviet masters in 1945). Victor began selling some home-use vinyl 78s in late 1945; but most 78s were made of a shellac compound until
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