The history of sound recording - which has progressed in waves, driven by the invention and commercial introduction of new technologies — can be roughly divided into four main periods:
* The Acoustic era (1877–1925)
* The Electrical era (1925–1945)
* The Magnetic era (1945–1975)
* The Digital era (1975–present)
Experiments in capturing sound on a recording medium for preservation and reproduction began in earnest during the
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution, sometimes divided into the First Industrial Revolution and Second Industrial Revolution, was a transitional period of the global economy toward more widespread, efficient and stable manufacturing processes, succee ...
of the 1800s. Many pioneering attempts to record and reproduce sound were made during the latter half of the 19th century – notably
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's
phonautograph of 1857 – and these efforts culminated in the invention of the
phonograph
A phonograph, later called a gramophone, 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 Waveform, waveforms are recorded as correspond ...
by
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison (February11, 1847October18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventions, ...
in 1877. Digital recording emerged in the late 20th century and has since flourished with the popularity of digital music and online streaming services.
Overview
The Acoustic Era (1877–1925)

The earliest practical recording technologies were entirely mechanical devices. These recorders typically used a large conical horn to collect and focus the physical air pressure of the sound waves produced by the human voice or musical instruments. A sensitive membrane or diaphragm, located at the apex of the cone, was connected to an articulated scriber or stylus, and as the changing air pressure moved the diaphragm back and forth, the stylus scratched or incised an
analog of the sound waves onto a moving recording medium, such as a roll of coated paper, or a
cylinder or disc coated with a soft material such as
wax or a soft metal.
These early recordings were necessarily of low
fidelity
Fidelity is the quality of faithfulness or loyalty. Its original meaning regarded duty in a broader sense than the related concept of '' fealty''. Both derive from the Latin word , meaning "faithful or loyal". In the City of London financial m ...
and volume and captured only a narrow segment of the
audible sound spectrum — typically only from around 250 Hz up to about 2,500 Hz — so musicians and engineers were forced to adapt to these sonic limitations. Musical ensembles of the period often favored louder instruments such as
trumpet
The trumpet is a brass instrument commonly used in classical and jazz musical ensemble, ensembles. The trumpet group ranges from the piccolo trumpet—with the highest Register (music), register in the brass family—to the bass trumpet, pitche ...
,
cornet, and
trombone
The trombone (, Italian, French: ''trombone'') is a musical instrument in the Brass instrument, brass family. As with all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player's lips vibrate inside a mouthpiece, causing the Standing wave, air c ...
; lower-register brass instruments such as the
tuba
The tuba (; ) is the largest and lowest-pitched musical instrument in the brass instrument, brass family. As with all brass instruments, the sound is produced by lip vibrationa buzzinto a mouthpiece (brass), mouthpiece. It first appeared in th ...
and the
euphonium doubled or replaced the
double bass
The double bass (), also known as the upright bass, the acoustic bass, the bull fiddle, or simply the bass, is the largest and lowest-pitched string instrument, chordophone in the modern orchestra, symphony orchestra (excluding rare additions ...
, and blocks of wood stood in for
bass drum
The bass drum is a large drum that produces a note of low definite or indefinite pitch. The instrument is typically cylindrical, with the drum's diameter usually greater than its depth, with a struck head at both ends of the cylinder. The head ...
s. Performers also had to arrange themselves strategically around the horn to balance the sound, and to play as loudly as possible. The reproduction of domestic phonographs was similarly limited in both frequency-range and volume.
By the end of the acoustic era, the disc had become the standard medium for sound recording, and its dominance in the domestic audio market lasted until the end of the 20th century.
The Electrical Era (1925–1945) (including sound on film)

The second wave of sound recording history was ushered in by the introduction of
Western Electric
Western Electric Co., Inc. was an American electrical engineering and manufacturing company that operated from 1869 to 1996. A subsidiary of the AT&T Corporation for most of its lifespan, Western Electric was the primary manufacturer, supplier, ...
's integrated system of electrical
microphone
A microphone, colloquially called a mic (), or mike, is a transducer that converts sound into an electrical signal. Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, hearing aids, public address systems for concert halls and publi ...
s, electronic signal amplifiers and electromechanical recorders, which was adopted by major US record labels in 1925. Sound recording now became a
hybrid process — sound could now be captured,
amplified,
filtered, and
balanced electronically, and the disc-cutting head was now electrically powered, but the actual recording process remained essentially mechanical – the signal was still physically inscribed into a wax master disc, and consumer discs were mass-produced mechanically by stamping a metal
electroform made from the wax master into a suitable substance, originally a
shellac
Shellac () is a resin secreted by the female Kerria lacca, lac bug on trees in the forests of India and Thailand. Chemically, it is mainly composed of aleuritic acid, jalaric acid, shellolic acid, and other natural waxes. It is processed and s ...
-based compound and later
polyvinyl plastic.
The Western Electric system greatly improved the fidelity of sound recording, increasing the reproducible frequency range to a much wider band (between 60 Hz and 6000 Hz) and allowing a new class of professional – the
audio engineer
An audio engineer (also known as a sound engineer or recording engineer) helps to produce a recording or a live performance, balancing and adjusting sound sources using equalization, dynamics processing and audio effects, mixing, reproduc ...
– to capture a fuller, richer, and more detailed and balanced sound on record, using multiple microphones connected to multi-channel electronic amplifiers, compressors, filters and
mixers. Electrical microphones led to a dramatic change in the performance style of singers, ushering in the age of the
crooner, while electronic amplification had a wide-ranging impact in many areas, enabling the development of broadcast radio, public address systems, and electronically amplified home record players.
In addition, the development of electronic amplifiers for musical instruments now enabled quieter instruments such as the
guitar
The guitar is a stringed musical instrument that is usually fretted (with Fretless guitar, some exceptions) and typically has six or Twelve-string guitar, twelve strings. It is usually held flat against the player's body and played by strumming ...
and the string bass to compete on equal terms with the naturally louder wind and horn instruments, and musicians and composers also began to experiment with entirely new electronic musical instruments such as the
Theremin
The theremin (; originally known as the ætherphone, etherphone, thereminophone or termenvox/thereminvox) is an electronic musical instrument controlled without physical contact by the performer (who is known as a thereminist). It is named aft ...
, the
Ondes Martenot
The ondes Martenot ( ; , ) or ondes musicales () is an early electronic musical instrument. It is played with a lateral-vibrato Keyboard instrument, keyboard or by moving a ring tied to a wire, creating "wavering" sounds similar to a theremin. D ...
, the
electronic organ
An electric organ, also known as electronic organ, is an electronic keyboard instrument which was derived from the pump organ, harmonium, pipe organ and theatre organ. Originally designed to imitate their sound, or orchestral sounds, it has si ...
, and the Hammond
Novachord
The Novachord is the world's first commercial polyphonic synthesizer, polyphonic synthesizer. Incorporating many circuit and control elements found in modern synthesizers, and using subtractive synthesis to generate tones, it was designed by Joh ...
, the world's first analog polyphonic
synthesizer
A synthesizer (also synthesiser or synth) is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis a ...
.
Contemporaneous with these developments, several inventors were engaged in a race to develop practical methods of providing synchronised sound with films. Some early
sound film
A sound film is a Film, motion picture with synchronization, synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, bu ...
s — such as the landmark 1927 film ''
The Jazz Singer'' – used
large soundtrack records which were played on a turntable mechanically interlocked with the
projector
A projector or image projector is an optical device that projects an image (or moving images) onto a surface, commonly a projection screen. Most projectors create an image by shining a light through a small transparent lens, but some newer type ...
. By the early 1930s, the movie industry had almost universally adopted
sound-on-film
Sound-on-film is a class of sound film processes where the sound accompanying a picture is recorded on photographic film, usually, but not always, the same strip of film carrying the picture. Sound-on-film processes can either record an Analog s ...
technology, in which the audio signal to be recorded was used to modulate a light source that was imaged onto the moving film through a narrow slit, allowing it to be photographed as variations in the density or width of a
soundtrack
A soundtrack is a recorded audio signal accompanying and synchronised to the images of a book, drama, motion picture, radio program, television show, television program, or video game; colloquially, a commercially released soundtrack album of m ...
running along a dedicated area of the film. The projector used a steady light and a
photoelectric cell to convert the variations back into an electrical signal, which was amplified and sent to
loudspeaker
A loudspeaker (commonly referred to as a speaker or, more fully, a speaker system) is a combination of one or more speaker drivers, an enclosure, and electrical connections (possibly including a crossover network). The speaker driver is an ...
s behind the screen.
The adoption of sound-on-film also helped movie-industry audio engineers to make rapid advances in the process we now know as
multi-tracking, by which multiple separately-recorded audio sources (such as voices, sound effects and background music) can be replayed simultaneously, mixed together, and synchronized with the action on film to create new blended audio tracks of great sophistication and complexity. One of the best-known examples of a constructed composite sound from that era is the famous "
Tarzan yell" created for the series of Tarzan movies starring
Johnny Weissmuller.
Among the vast and often rapid changes that have taken place over the last century of audio recording, it is notable that there is one crucial audio device, invented at the start of the Electrical Era, which has survived virtually unchanged since its introduction in the 1920s: the electro-acoustic
transducer
A transducer is a device that Energy transformation, converts energy from one form to another. Usually a transducer converts a signal in one form of energy to a signal in another.
Transducers are often employed at the boundaries of automation, M ...
, or
loudspeaker
A loudspeaker (commonly referred to as a speaker or, more fully, a speaker system) is a combination of one or more speaker drivers, an enclosure, and electrical connections (possibly including a crossover network). The speaker driver is an ...
. The most common form is the
dynamic loudspeaker – effectively a
dynamic microphone
A microphone, colloquially called a mic (), or mike, is a transducer that converts sound into an electrical signal. Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, hearing aids, public address systems for concert halls and publ ...
in reverse. This device typically consists of a shallow conical diaphragm, usually of a stiff paper-like material concentrically pleated to make it more flexible, firmly fastened at its perimeter, with the coil of a moving-coil electromagnetic driver attached around its apex. When an audio signal from a recording, a microphone, or an electrified instrument is fed through an amplifier to the loudspeaker, the varying electromagnetic field created in the coil causes it and the attached cone to move backwards and forward, and this movement generates the audio-frequency pressure waves that travel through the air to our ears, which hear them as sound.
Although there have been numerous refinements to the technology, and other related technologies have been introduced (e.g. the
electrostatic loudspeaker), the basic design and function of the dynamic loudspeaker has not changed substantially in 90 years, and it remains overwhelmingly the most common, sonically accurate and reliable means of converting electronic audio signals back into audible sound.
The Magnetic Era (1945–1975)

The third wave of development in audio recording began in 1945 when the allied nations gained access to a new German invention:
magnetic tape
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use magnetic ...
recording. The technology was invented in the 1930s but remained restricted to Germany (where it was widely used in broadcasting) until the end of World War II. Magnetic tape provided another dramatic leap in audio fidelity—indeed, Allied observers first became aware of the existence of the new technology because they noticed that the audio quality of obviously pre-recorded programs was practically indistinguishable from live broadcasts.
From 1950 onwards, magnetic tape quickly became the standard medium of audio master recording in the radio and music industries and led to the development of the first hi-fi
stereo
Stereophonic sound, commonly shortened to stereo, is a method of sound reproduction that recreates a multi-directional, 3-dimensional audible perspective. This is usually achieved by using two independent audio channels through a configurat ...
recordings for the domestic market, the development of multi-track tape recording for music, and the demise of the disc as the primary mastering medium for sound. Magnetic tape also brought about a radical reshaping of the recording process—it made possible recordings of far longer duration and much higher fidelity than ever before, and it offered recording engineers the same exceptional plasticity that film gave to cinema editors—sounds captured on tape could now easily be manipulated sonically, edited, and combined in ways that were simply impossible with disc recordings.
These experiments reached an early peak in the 1950s with the recordings of
Les Paul
Lester William Polsfuss (June 9, 1915 – August 12, 2009), known as Les Paul, was an American jazz guitarist, jazz, country guitarist, country, and blues guitarist, songwriter, luthier, and inventor. He was one of the pioneers of the solid body ...
and
Mary Ford, who pioneered the use of tape editing and multi-tracking to create large virtual ensembles of voices and instruments, constructed entirely from multiple taped recordings of their own voices and instruments. Magnetic tape fueled a rapid and radical expansion in the sophistication of popular music and other genres, allowing composers, producers, engineers and performers to realize previously unattainable levels of complexity. Other concurrent advances in audio technology led to the introduction of a range of new consumer audio formats and devices, on both disc and tape, including the development full-frequency-range disc reproduction, the change from shellac to polyvinyl plastic for disc manufacture, the invention of the
33 rpm, long-playing (LP) disc and the
45 rpm single, the introduction of domestic and professional portable tape recorders (which enabled high-fidelity recordings of live performances), the popular
4-track cartridge and
compact cassette
The Compact Cassette, also commonly called 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 ...
formats, and even the world's first
sampling keyboards, the pioneering tape-based keyboard instrument the
Chamberlin, and its more famous successor, the
Mellotron
The Mellotron is an electro-mechanical musical instrument developed in Birmingham, England, in 1963. It is played by pressing its keys, each of which causes a length of magnetic tape to contact a Capstan (tape recorder), capstan, which pulls i ...
.
The Digital Era (1975–present)

The fourth and current phase, the digital era, has seen rapid, dramatic and far-reaching series of changes. In a period of fewer than 20 years, all previous recording technologies were rapidly superseded by digital sound encoding, and the Japanese electronics corporation
Sony
is a Japanese multinational conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered at Sony City in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. The Sony Group encompasses various businesses, including Sony Corporation (electronics), Sony Semiconductor Solutions (i ...
in the 1970s was instrumental with the first consumer PCM encoder PCM-F1, introduced in 1981. Unlike all previous technologies, which captured a continuous analog of the sounds being recorded, digital recording captured sound by means of a very dense and rapid series of discrete samples of the sound. When played back through a
digital-to-analog converter
In electronics, a digital-to-analog converter (DAC, D/A, D2A, or D-to-A) is a system that converts a digital signal into an analog signal. An analog-to-digital converter (ADC) performs the reverse function.
DACs are commonly used in musi ...
, these audio samples are recombined to form a continuous flow of sound. The first all-digitally-recorded popular music album,
Ry Cooder's ''
Bop Till You Drop'', was released in 1979, and from that point,
digital sound recording and reproduction quickly became the new standard at every level, from the professional recording studio to the home hi-fi.
Although a number of short-lived hybrid studio and consumer technologies appeared in this period (e.g. Digital Audio Tape or DAT, which recorded digital signal samples onto standard magnetic tape), Sony assured the preeminence of its new digital recording system by introducing, together with
Philips
Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), simply branded Philips, is a Dutch multinational health technology company that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, its world headquarters have been situated in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarter ...
, the digital
compact disc (CD). The compact disc rapidly replaced both the album and the single as the new standard consumer format and ushered in a new era of high-fidelity consumer audio.

CDs are small, portable and durable, and they could reproduce the entire audible sound spectrum, with a large dynamic range (~96 dB), perfect clarity and no distortion. Because CDs were encoded and read optically, using a
laser
A laser is a device that emits light through a process of optical amplification based on the stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. The word ''laser'' originated as an acronym for light amplification by stimulated emission of radi ...
beam, there was no physical contact between the disc and the playback mechanism, so a well-cared-for CD could be played over and over, with absolutely no degradation or loss of fidelity. CDs also represented a considerable advance in both the physical size of the medium and its storage capacity. LPs could only practically hold about 20–25 minutes of audio per side because they were physically limited by the size of the disc itself and the density of the grooves that could be cut into it — the longer the recording, the closer together the grooves and thus the lower the overall fidelity. CDs, on the other hand, were less than half the overall size of the old LP format, but offered about double the duration of the average LP, with up to 80 minutes of audio.
The compact disc almost totally dominated the consumer audio market by the end of the 20th century, but within another decade, rapid developments in computing technology saw it rendered virtually redundant in just a few years by the most significant new invention in the history of audio recording — the
digital audio file
An audio file format is a file format for storing digital audio data on a computer system. The bit layout of the audio data (excluding metadata) is called the audio coding format and can be uncompressed, or compressed to reduce the file size, ...
(.wav, .mp3 and other formats). When combined with newly developed digital signal compression algorithms, which greatly reduced file sizes, digital audio files came to dominate the domestic market, thanks to commercial innovations such as Apple's
iTunes
iTunes is a media player, media library, and mobile device management (MDM) utility developed by Apple. It is used to purchase, play, download and organize digital multimedia on personal computers running the macOS and Windows operating s ...
media application, and their popular
iPod
The iPod is a series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices that were designed and marketed by Apple Inc. from 2001 to 2022. The iPod Classic#1st generation, first version was released on November 10, 2001, about mon ...
portable media player.
However, the introduction of digital audio files, in concert with the rapid developments in home computing, soon led to an
unforeseen consequence — the widespread unlicensed distribution of audio and other digital media files. The uploading and downloading of large volumes of digital media files at high speed was facilitated by
freeware
Freeware is software, often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the free ...
file-sharing technologies such as
Napster
Napster was an American proprietary peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Audio shared ...
and
BitTorrent
BitTorrent is a Protocol (computing), communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P), which enables users to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet in a Decentralised system, decentralized manner. The protocol is d ...
.
Although infringement remains a significant issue for copyright owners, the development of digital audio has had considerable benefits for consumers and labels. In addition to facilitating the high-volume, low-cost transfer and storage of digital audio files, this new technology has also powered an explosion in the availability of so-called ''back-catalog'' titles stored in the archives of recording labels, thanks to the fact that labels can now convert old recordings and distribute them digitally at a fraction of the cost of physically reissuing albums on LP or CD. Digital audio has also enabled dramatic improvements in the restoration and remastering of acoustic and pre-digital electric recordings, and even freeware consumer-level digital software can very effectively eliminate scratches,
surface noise and other unwanted sonic artifacts from old 78rpm and vinyl recordings and greatly enhance the sound quality of all but the most badly damaged records. In the field of consumer-level digital data storage, the continuing trend towards increasing capacity and falling costs means that consumers can now acquire and store vast quantities of high-quality digital media (audio, video, games and other applications), and build up media libraries consisting of tens or even hundreds of thousands of songs, albums, or videos — collections which, for all but the wealthiest, would have been both physically and financially impossible to amass in such quantities if they were on 78 or LP, yet which can now be contained on storage devices no larger than the average hardcover book.
The digital audio file marked the end of one era in recording and the beginning of another. Digital files effectively eliminated the need to create or use a discrete, purpose-made physical recording medium (a disc, or a reel of tape, etc.) as the primary means of capturing, manufacturing and distributing commercial sound recordings. Concurrent with the development of these digital file formats, dramatic advances in home computing and the rapid expansion of the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...
mean that digital sound recordings can now be captured, processed, reproduced, distributed and stored entirely electronically, on a range of magnetic and optical recording media, and these can be distributed anywhere in the world, with no loss of fidelity, and crucially, without the need to first transfer these files to some form of permanent recording medium for shipment and sale.
Music streaming services have gained popularity since the late 2000s.
Streaming
Streaming media refers to multimedia delivered through a network for playback using a media player. Media is transferred in a ''stream'' of packets from a server to a client and is rendered in real-time; this contrasts with file downl ...
audio does not require the listener to own the audio files. Instead, they listen over the internet. Streaming services offer an alternative method of consuming music and some follow a
freemium business model. The freemium model many music streaming services use, such as
Spotify
Spotify (; ) is a List of companies of Sweden, Swedish Music streaming service, audio streaming and media service provider founded on 23 April 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon. , it is one of the largest providers of music streaming services ...
and
Apple Music
Apple Music is an audio and video streaming service developed by Apple Inc. Users can select music to stream to their device on-demand, or listen to existing playlists. The service also includes the sister internet radio stations Apple Musi ...
, provide a limited amount of content for free, and then premium services for payment. There are two categories in which streaming services are categorized, radio or on-demand. Streaming services such as
Pandora
In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first human woman created by Hephaestus on the instructions of Zeus. As Hesiod related it, each god cooperated by giving her unique gifts. Her other name—inscribed against her figure on a white-ground '' ky ...
use the radio model, allowing users to select playlists but not specific songs to listen to, while services such as Apple Music allow users to listen to both individual songs and pre-made playlists.
Acoustical recording
The earliest method of
sound recording and reproduction
Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical, Mechanical system, mechanical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of ...
involved the live recording of a performance directly to a
recording medium
Data storage is the recording (storing) of information (data) in a storage medium. Handwriting, phonographic recording, magnetic tape, and optical discs are all examples of storage media. Biological molecules such as RNA and DNA are cons ...
by an entirely mechanical process, often called ''acoustical recording''. In the standard procedure used until the mid-1920s, the
sound
In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid.
In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by the br ...
s generated by the performance vibrated a
diaphragm with a recording
stylus
A stylus is a writing utensil or tool for scribing or marking into softer materials. Different styluses were used to write in cuneiform by pressing into wet clay, and to scribe or carve into a wax tablet. Very hard styluses are also used to En ...
connected to it while the stylus cut a groove into a soft recording medium rotating beneath it. To make this process as efficient as possible, the diaphragm was located at the apex of a hollow cone that served to collect and focus the acoustical energy, with the performers crowded around the other end. Recording balance was achieved empirically. A performer who recorded too strongly or not strongly enough would be moved away from or nearer to the mouth of the cone. The number and kind of instruments that could be recorded were limited. Brass instruments, which recorded well, often substituted instruments such as cellos and bass fiddles, which did not. In some early
jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, h ...
recordings, a block of wood was used in place of the
snare drum
The snare drum (or side drum) is a percussion instrument that produces a sharp staccato sound when the head is struck with a drum stick, due to the use of a series of stiff wires held under tension against the lower skin. Snare drums are often u ...
, which could easily overload the recording diaphragm.
Phonautograph
In 1857,
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville invented the
phonautograph, the first device that could record sound waves as they passed through the air. It was intended only for visual study of the recording and could not play back the sound. The recording medium was a sheet of soot-coated paper wrapped around a rotating cylinder carried on a threaded rod. A
stylus
A stylus is a writing utensil or tool for scribing or marking into softer materials. Different styluses were used to write in cuneiform by pressing into wet clay, and to scribe or carve into a wax tablet. Very hard styluses are also used to En ...
, attached to a diaphragm through a series of levers, traced a line through the soot, creating a graphic record of the motions of the diaphragm as it was minutely propelled back and forth by the audio-frequency variations in air pressure.
In the spring of 1877 another inventor,
Charles Cros, suggested that the process could be reversed by using
photoengraving
Photoengraving is a process that uses a light-sensitive photoresist applied to the surface to be engraved to create a mask that protects some areas during a subsequent operation which etches, dissolves, or otherwise removes some or all of the ma ...
to convert the traced line into a groove that would guide the stylus, causing the original stylus vibrations to be recreated, passed on to the linked diaphragm, and sent back into the air as sound. Edison's invention of the phonograph soon eclipsed this idea, and it was not until 1887 that yet another inventor,
Emile Berliner
Emile Berliner (May 20, 1851 – August 3, 1929) originally Emil Berliner, was a German-American inventor. He is best known for inventing the lateral-cut flat disc gramophone record, record (called a "gramophone record" in British and American En ...
, actually photoengraved a phonautograph recording into metal and played it back.
Scott's early recordings languished in French archives until 2008 when scholars keen to resurrect the sounds captured in these and other types of early experimental recordings tracked them down. Rather than using rough 19th-century technology to create playable versions, they were scanned into a computer and software was used to convert their sound-modulated traces into digital audio files. Brief excerpts from two French songs and a recitation in Italian, all recorded in 1860, are the most substantial results.
Phonograph/Gramophone

The
phonograph
A phonograph, later called a gramophone, 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 Waveform, waveforms are recorded as correspond ...
, invented by
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison (February11, 1847October18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventions, ...
in 1877, could both record sound and play it back. The earliest type of phonograph sold recorded on a thin sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a grooved metal cylinder. A stylus connected to a sound-vibrated diaphragm indented the foil into the groove as the cylinder rotated. The stylus vibration was at a right angle to the recording surface, so the depth of the indentation varied with the audio-frequency changes in air pressure that carried the sound. This arrangement is known as
vertical or ''hill-and-dale'' recording. The sound could be played back by tracing the stylus along the recorded groove and acoustically coupling its resulting vibrations to the surrounding air through the diaphragm and a so-called ''amplifying'' horn.
The crude tinfoil phonograph proved to be of little use except as a novelty. It was not until the late 1880s that an improved and much more useful form of the phonograph was marketed. The new machines recorded on easily removable
hollow wax cylinders and the groove was engraved into the surface rather than indented. The targeted use was business communication, and in that context, the cylinder format had some advantages. When entertainment use proved to be the real source of profits, one seemingly negligible disadvantage became a major problem: the difficulty of making copies of a recorded cylinder in large quantities.
At first, cylinders were copied by acoustically connecting a playback machine to one or more recording machines through flexible tubing, an arrangement that degraded the audio quality of the copies. Later, a
pantograph
A pantograph (, from their original use for copying writing) is a Linkage (mechanical), mechanical linkage connected in a manner based on parallelograms so that the movement of one pen, in tracing an image, produces identical movements in a se ...
mechanism was used, but it could only produce about 25 fair copies before the original was too worn down. During a recording session, as many as a dozen machines could be arrayed in front of the performers to record multiple originals. Still, a single take would ultimately yield only a few hundred copies at best, so performers were booked for marathon recording sessions in which they had to repeat their most popular numbers over and over again. By 1902, successful molding processes for manufacturing prerecorded cylinders had been developed.
The wax cylinder got a competitor with the advent of the Gramophone, which was
patent
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...
ed by
Emile Berliner
Emile Berliner (May 20, 1851 – August 3, 1929) originally Emil Berliner, was a German-American inventor. He is best known for inventing the lateral-cut flat disc gramophone record, record (called a "gramophone record" in British and American En ...
in 1887. The vibration of the Gramophone's recording stylus was horizontal, parallel to the recording surface, resulting in a zig-zag groove of constant depth. This is known as lateral recording. Berliner's original patent showed a lateral recording etched around the surface of a cylinder, but in practice, he opted for the disc format. The Gramophones he soon began to market were intended solely for playing prerecorded entertainment discs and could not be used to record. The spiral groove on the flat surface of a disc was relatively easy to replicate: a negative metal
electrotype of the original record could be used to stamp out hundreds or thousands of copies before it wore out. Early on, the copies were made of
hard rubber, and sometimes of
celluloid
Celluloids are a class of materials produced by mixing nitrocellulose and camphor, often with added dyes and other agents. Once much more common for its use as photographic film before the advent of safer methods, celluloid's common present-day ...
, but soon a
shellac
Shellac () is a resin secreted by the female Kerria lacca, lac bug on trees in the forests of India and Thailand. Chemically, it is mainly composed of aleuritic acid, jalaric acid, shellolic acid, and other natural waxes. It is processed and s ...
-based compound was adopted.
''Gramophone'', Berliner's trademark name, was abandoned in the US in 1900 because of legal complications, with the result that in
American English
American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the Languages of the United States, most widely spoken lang ...
Gramophones and Gramophone records, along with disc records and players made by other manufacturers, were long ago brought under the umbrella term ''phonograph'', a word which Edison's competitors avoided using but which was never his trademark, simply a generic term he introduced and applied to cylinders, discs, tapes and any other formats capable of carrying a sound-modulated groove. In the UK, proprietary use of the name Gramophone continued for another decade until, in a court case, it was adjudged to have become
genericized and so could be used freely by competing disc record makers, with the result that in
British English
British English is the set of Variety (linguistics), varieties of the English language native to the United Kingdom, especially Great Britain. More narrowly, it can refer specifically to the English language in England, or, more broadly, to ...
a disc record is called a ''gramophone record'' and ''phonograph record'' is traditionally assumed to mean a cylinder.
Not all cylinder records are alike. They were made of various soft or hard waxy formulations or early plastics, sometimes in unusual sizes; did not all use the same groove pitch; and were not all recorded at the same speed. Early brown wax cylinders were usually cut at about 120
rpm, whereas later cylinders ran at 160 rpm for clearer and louder sound at the cost of reduced maximum playing time. As a medium for entertainment, the cylinder was already losing the format war with the disc by 1910, but the production of entertainment cylinders did not entirely cease until 1929 and use of the format for business dictation purposes persisted into the 1950s.
Disc records, too, were sometimes made in unusual sizes, or from unusual materials, or otherwise deviated from the format norms of their eras in some substantial way. The speed at which disc records were rotated was eventually standardized at about 78 rpm, but other speeds were sometimes used. Around 1950, slower speeds became standard: 45, , and the rarely used rpm. The standard material for discs changed from shellac to
vinyl
Vinyl may refer to:
Chemistry
* Polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a particular vinyl polymer
* Vinyl cation, a type of carbocation
* Vinyl group, a broad class of organic molecules in chemistry
* Vinyl polymer, a group of polymers derived from vinyl ...
, although vinyl had been used for some special-purpose records since the early 1930s and some 78 rpm shellac records were still being made in the late 1950s.
Electrical recording
Until the mid-1920s records were played on purely mechanical record players usually powered by a wind-up spring motor. The sound was amplified by an external or internal horn that was coupled to the
diaphragm and
stylus
A stylus is a writing utensil or tool for scribing or marking into softer materials. Different styluses were used to write in cuneiform by pressing into wet clay, and to scribe or carve into a wax tablet. Very hard styluses are also used to En ...
, although there was no real amplification: the horn simply improved the efficiency with which the diaphragm's vibrations were transmitted into the open air. The recording process was, in essence, the same non-electronic setup operating in reverse, but with a recording, stylus engraving a groove into a soft waxy master disc and carried slowly inward across it by a feed mechanism.
The advent of electrical recording in 1925 made it possible to use sensitive
microphone
A microphone, colloquially called a mic (), or mike, is a transducer that converts sound into an electrical signal. Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, hearing aids, public address systems for concert halls and publi ...
s to capture the sound and greatly improved the audio quality of records. A much wider range of frequencies could be recorded, the balance of high and low frequencies could be controlled by elementary electronic filters, and the signal could be amplified to the optimum level for driving the recording stylus. The leading
record label
"Big Three" music labels
A record label or record company is a brand or trademark of Sound recording and reproduction, music recordings and music videos, or the company that owns it. Sometimes, a record label is also a Music publisher, ...
s switched to the electrical process in 1925 and the rest soon followed, although one straggler in the US held out until 1929.
There was a period of nearly five years, from 1925 to 1930 when the top
audiophile
An audiophile (from + ) is a person who is enthusiastic about high-fidelity sound reproduction. The audiophile seeks to achieve high sound quality in the audio reproduction of recorded music, typically in a quiet listening space in a room with ...
technology for home sound reproduction consisted of a combination of electrically recorded records with the specially-developed
Victor Orthophonic Victrola, an acoustic phonograph that used
waveguide engineering and a
folded horn to provide a reasonably flat
frequency response
In signal processing and electronics, the frequency response of a system is the quantitative measure of the magnitude and Phase (waves), phase of the output as a function of input frequency. The frequency response is widely used in the design and ...
. The first electronically amplified record players reached the market only a few months later, around the start of 1926, but at first, they were much more expensive and their audio quality was impaired by their primitive
loudspeaker
A loudspeaker (commonly referred to as a speaker or, more fully, a speaker system) is a combination of one or more speaker drivers, an enclosure, and electrical connections (possibly including a crossover network). The speaker driver is an ...
s; they did not become common until the late 1930s.
Electrical recording increased the flexibility of the process, but the performance was still cut directly to the recording medium, so if a mistake was made the whole recording was spoiled. Disc-to-disc editing was possible, by using multiple turntables to play parts of different takes and recording them to a new master disc, but switching sources with split-second accuracy was difficult and lower sound quality was inevitable, so except for use in editing some
early sound films and
radio recordings it was rarely done.
Electrical recording made it more feasible to record one part to disc and then play that back while playing another part, recording both parts to a second disc. This and conceptually related techniques, known as ''
overdubbing
Overdubbing (also known as layering) is a technique used in audio recording in which audio Music track, tracks that have been pre-recorded are then played back and monitored, while simultaneously recording new, doubled, or augmented tracks onto o ...
'', enabled studios to create recorded performances that feature one or more artists each singing multiple parts or playing multiple instrument parts and that therefore could not be duplicated by the same artist or artists performing live. The first commercially issued records using overdubbing were released by the
Victor Talking Machine Company
The Victor Talking Machine Company was an American recording company and phonograph manufacturer, incorporated in 1901. Victor was an independent enterprise until 1929 when it was purchased by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) and became ...
in the late 1920s. However, overdubbing was of limited use until the advent of
audio tape. Use of tape overdubbing was pioneered by
Les Paul
Lester William Polsfuss (June 9, 1915 – August 12, 2009), known as Les Paul, was an American jazz guitarist, jazz, country guitarist, country, and blues guitarist, songwriter, luthier, and inventor. He was one of the pioneers of the solid body ...
in the 1940s.
Magnetic recording
Magnetic wire recording
Wire recording or magnetic wire recording is an analog type of audio storage in which a magnetic recording is made on thin steel or stainless steel wire.
The wire is pulled rapidly across a recording head, which magnetizes each point along the wire in accordance with the intensity and polarity of the electrical audio signal being supplied to the recording head at that instant. By later drawing the wire across the same or a similar head while the head is not being supplied with an electrical signal, the varying magnetic field presented by the passing wire induces a similarly varying electric current in the head, recreating the original signal at a reduced level.
Magnetic wire recording was replaced by magnetic tape recording, but devices employing one or the other of these media had been more or less simultaneously under development for many years before either came into widespread use. The principles and electronics involved are nearly identical. Wire recording initially had the advantage that the recording medium itself was already fully developed, while tape recording was held back by the need to improve the materials and methods used to manufacture the tape.
Magnetic recording was demonstrated in principle as early as 1898 by
Valdemar Poulsen in his
telegraphone. Magnetic wire recording, and its successor,
magnetic tape recording, involve the use of a magnetized medium that moves with a constant speed past a
recording head. An electrical signal, which is analogous to the sound that is to be recorded, is fed to the recording head, inducing a pattern of magnetization similar to the signal. A playback head can then pick up the changes in the magnetic field from the tape and convert it into an electrical signal.
With the addition of electronic amplification developed by Curt Stille in the 1920s, the telegraphone evolved into
wire recorders which were popular for voice recording and
dictation during the 1940s and into the 1950s. The reproduction quality of wire recorders was significantly lower than that achievable with phonograph disk recording technology. There were also practical difficulties, such as the tendency of the wire to become tangled or snarled. Splicing could be performed by knotting together the cut wire ends, but the results were not very satisfactory.
On Christmas Day, 1932 the
British Broadcasting Corporation
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public broadcasting, public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved in ...
first used a steel tape recorder for their broadcasts. The device used was a Marconi-Stille recorder, a huge and dangerous machine which used steel tape that had sharp edges. The tape was wide and thick running at past the recording and reproducing heads. This meant that the length of tape required for a half-hour program was nearly and a full reel weighed .
Magnetic tape sound recording

Engineers at
AEG The initials AEG are used for or may refer to:
Common meanings
* AEG (German company)
; AEG) was a German producer of electrical equipment. It was established in 1883 by Emil Rathenau as the ''Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft für angewandte El ...
, working with the chemical giant
IG Farben
I. G. Farbenindustrie AG, commonly known as IG Farben, was a German Chemical industry, chemical and Pharmaceutical industry, pharmaceutical conglomerate (company), conglomerate. It was formed on December 2, 1925 from a merger of six chemical co ...
, created the world's first practical magnetic tape recorder, the 'K1', which was first demonstrated in 1935. During
World War II
World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...
, an engineer at the
Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft discovered the
AC biasing technique. With this technique, an inaudible high-frequency signal, typically in the range of 50 to 150 kHz, is added to the audio signal before being applied to the recording head. Biasing radically improved the sound quality of magnetic tape recordings. By 1943 AEG had developed stereo tape recorders.
During the war, the
Allies became aware of radio broadcasts that seemed to be transcriptions (much of this due to the work of
Richard H. Ranger), but their audio quality was indistinguishable from that of a live broadcast and their duration was far longer than was possible with 78 rpm discs. At the end of the war, the Allies captured a number of German
Magnetophon recorders from Radio Luxembourg which aroused great interest. These recorders incorporated all of the key technological features of analog magnetic recording, particularly the use of high-frequency bias.
American audio engineer
John T. Mullin served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and was posted to Paris in the final months of World War II. His unit was assigned to find out everything they could about German radio and electronics, including the investigation of claims that the Germans had been experimenting with high-energy directed radio beams as a means of disabling the electrical systems of aircraft. Mullin's unit soon amassed a collection of hundreds of low-quality magnetic dictating machines, but it was a chance visit to a studio at
Bad Neuheim near
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main () is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Hesse. Its 773,068 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the List of cities in Germany by population, fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located in the forela ...
while investigating radio beam rumors that yielded the real prize.
Mullin was given two suitcase-sized AEG 'Magnetophon' high-fidelity recorders and fifty reels of recording tape. He had them shipped home and over the next two years, he worked on the machines constantly, modifying them and improving their performance. His major aim was to interest Hollywood studios in using magnetic tape for movie soundtrack recording.
Mullin gave two public demonstrations of his machines, and they caused a sensation among American audio professionals—many listeners could not believe that what they were hearing was not a live performance. By luck, Mullin's second demonstration was held at
MGM
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. (also known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, commonly shortened to MGM or MGM Studios) is an American Film production, film and television production and film distribution, distribution company headquartered ...
studios in
Hollywood and in the audience that day was
Bing Crosby's technical director, Murdo Mackenzie. He arranged for Mullin to meet Crosby and in June 1947 he gave Crosby a private demonstration of his magnetic tape recorders.
Crosby was stunned by the amazing sound quality and instantly saw the huge commercial potential of the new machines. Live music was the standard for American radio at the time and the major
radio network
There are two types of radio network currently in use around the world: the one-to-many (simplex communication) broadcast network commonly used for public information and mass media, mass-media entertainment, and the two-way radio (Duplex (teleco ...
s did not permit the use of disc recording in many programs because of their comparatively poor sound quality. But Crosby disliked the regimentation of live broadcasts, preferring the relaxed atmosphere of the
recording studio
A recording studio is a specialized facility for Sound recording and reproduction, recording and Audio mixing, mixing of instrumental or vocal musical performances, spoken words, and other sounds. They range in size from a small in-home proje ...
. He had asked
NBC to let him pre-record his 1944–45 series on
transcription discs, but the network refused, so Crosby had withdrawn from live radio for a year, returning for the 1946–47 season only reluctantly.
Mullin's tape recorder came along at precisely the right moment. Crosby realized that the new technology would enable him to pre-record his radio show with a sound quality that equaled live broadcasts and that these tapes could be replayed many times with no appreciable loss of quality. Mullin was asked to tape one show as a test and was immediately hired as Crosby's chief engineer to pre-record the rest of the series.
Crosby became the first major American music star to use tape to pre-record radio broadcasts and the first to master commercial recordings on tape. The taped Crosby radio shows were painstakingly edited through tape-splicing to give them a pace and flow that was wholly unprecedented in radio. Mullin even claims to have been the first to use
canned laughter; at the insistence of Crosby's head writer, Bill Morrow, he inserted a segment of raucous laughter from an earlier show into a joke in a later show that had not worked well.
Keen to make use of the new recorders as soon as possible, Crosby invested $50,000 of his own money into
Ampex
Ampex Data Systems Corporation is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff as a spin-off of Dalmo-Victor. The name ''AMPEX'' is an acronym, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excell ...
, and the tiny six-man concern soon became the world leader in the development of tape recording, revolutionizing radio and recording with its famous Ampex Model 200 tape deck, issued in 1948 and developed directly from Mullin's modified Magnetophones.
Development of magnetic tape recorders in the late 1940s and early 1950s is associated with the
Brush Development Company and its licensee,
Ampex
Ampex Data Systems Corporation is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff as a spin-off of Dalmo-Victor. The name ''AMPEX'' is an acronym, created by its founder, which stands for Alexander M. Poniatoff Excell ...
; the equally important development of magnetic tape media itself was led by
Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing corporation (now known as 3M).
Multitrack recording
The next major development in the magnetic tape was
multitrack recording
Multitrack recording (MTR), also known as multitracking, is a method of sound recording developed in 1955 that allows for the separate recording of multiple sound sources or of sound sources recorded at different times to create a cohesive who ...
, in which the tape is divided into multiple tracks parallel with each other. Because they are carried on the same medium, the tracks stay in perfect synchronization. The first development in multitracking was
stereo
Stereophonic sound, commonly shortened to stereo, is a method of sound reproduction that recreates a multi-directional, 3-dimensional audible perspective. This is usually achieved by using two independent audio channels through a configurat ...
sound, which divided the recording head into two tracks. First developed by German audio engineers ca. 1943, two-track recording was rapidly adopted for modern music in the 1950s because it enabled signals from two or more microphones to be recorded separately at the same time (while the use of several microphones to record on the same track had been common since the emergence of the
electrical era in the 1920s), enabling stereophonic recordings to be made and edited conveniently. (The first stereo recordings, on disks, had been made in the 1930s, but were never issued commercially.) Stereo (either true, two-microphone stereo or multi mixed) quickly became the norm for commercial classical recordings and radio broadcasts, although many
pop music
Pop music is a genre of popular music that originated in its modern form during the mid-1950s in the United States and the United Kingdom.S. Frith, W. Straw, and J. Street, eds, ''iarchive:cambridgecompani00frit, The Cambridge Companion to Pop ...
and
jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, h ...
recordings continued to be issued in
monophonic sound until the mid-1960s.
Much of the credit for the development of multitrack recording goes to guitarist, composer and technician
Les Paul
Lester William Polsfuss (June 9, 1915 – August 12, 2009), known as Les Paul, was an American jazz guitarist, jazz, country guitarist, country, and blues guitarist, songwriter, luthier, and inventor. He was one of the pioneers of the solid body ...
, who also helped design the famous
electric guitar
An electric guitar is a guitar that requires external electric Guitar amplifier, sound amplification in order to be heard at typical performance volumes, unlike a standard acoustic guitar. It uses one or more pickup (music technology), pickups ...
that
bears his name. His experiments with tapes and recorders in the early 1950s led him to order the first custom-built eight-track recorder from Ampex, and his pioneering recordings with his then-wife, singer
Mary Ford, were the first to make use of the technique of multitracking to record separate elements of a musical piece asynchronously — that is, separate elements could be recorded at different times. Paul's technique enabled him to listen to the tracks he had already taped and record new parts in time alongside them.
Multitrack recording was immediately taken up in a limited way by Ampex, who soon produced a commercial 3-track recorder. These proved extremely useful for popular music since they enabled backing music to be recorded on two tracks (either to allow the overdubbing of separate parts or to create a full stereo backing track) while the third track was reserved for the lead vocalist. Three-track recorders remained in widespread commercial use until the mid-1960s and much famous pop recordings — including many of
Phil Spector
Harvey Phillip Spector (December 26, 1939 – January 16, 2021) was an American record producer and songwriter who is best known for pioneering recording practices in the 1960s, followed by his trials and conviction for murder in the 2000s. S ...
's so-called
Wall of Sound productions and early
Motown
Motown is an American record label owned by the Universal Music Group. Founded by Berry Gordy, Berry Gordy Jr. as Tamla Records on January 12, 1959, it was incorporated as Motown Record Corporation on April 14, 1960. Its name, a portmanteau ...
hits — were taped on Ampex 3-track recorders. Engineer
Tom Dowd
Thomas John Dowd (October 20, 1925 – October 27, 2002) was an American recording engineer and producer for Atlantic Records. He was credited with innovating the multitrack recording method. Dowd worked on a veritable "who's who" of recordings ...
was among the first to use the multitrack recording for popular music production while working for
Atlantic Records
Atlantic Recording Corporation (simply known as Atlantic Records) is an American record label founded in October 1947 by Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson. Over the course of its first two decades, starting from the release of its first recor ...
during the 1950s.
The next important development was 4-track recording. The advent of this improved system gave recording engineers and musicians vastly greater flexibility for recording and overdubbing, and 4-track was the studio standard for most of the later 1960s. Many of the most famous recordings by
The Beatles
The Beatles were an English Rock music, rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960. The core lineup of the band comprised John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. They are widely regarded as the Cultural impact of the Beatle ...
and
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones are an English Rock music, rock band formed in London in 1962. Active for over six decades, they are one of the most popular, influential, and enduring bands of the Album era, rock era. In the early 1960s, the band pione ...
were recorded on 4-track, and the engineers at London's
Abbey Road Studios
Abbey Road Studios (formerly EMI Recording Studios) is a music recording studio at 3 Abbey Road, London, Abbey Road, St John's Wood, City of Westminster, London. It was established in November 1931 by the Gramophone Company, a predecessor of ...
became particularly adept at a technique called ''reduction mixes'' in the UK and ''bouncing down'' in the United States, in which several tracks were recorded onto one 4-track machine and then mixed together and transferred (bounced down) to one track of a second 4-track machine. In this way, it was possible to record literally dozens of separate tracks and combine them into finished recordings of great complexity.
All of the Beatles classic mid-1960s recordings, including the albums ''
Revolver
A revolver is a repeating handgun with at least one barrel and a revolving cylinder containing multiple chambers (each holding a single cartridge) for firing. Because most revolver models hold six cartridges before needing to be reloaded, ...
'' and ''
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band'', were recorded in this way. There were limitations, however, because of the build-up of noise during the bouncing-down process, and the Abbey Road engineers are still famed for their ability to create dense multitrack recordings while keeping background noise to a minimum.
4-track tape also enabled the development of
sound, in which each of the four tracks was used to simulate a complete 360-degree surround sound. A number of albums were released both in stereo and quadrophonic format in the 1970s, but 'quad' failed to gain wide commercial acceptance. Although it is now considered a gimmick, it was the direct precursor of the surround sound technology that has become standard in many modern
home theatre systems.
In a professional setting today, such as a studio,
audio engineer
An audio engineer (also known as a sound engineer or recording engineer) helps to produce a recording or a live performance, balancing and adjusting sound sources using equalization, dynamics processing and audio effects, mixing, reproduc ...
s may use 24 tracks or more for their recordings, using one or more tracks for each instrument played.
The combination of the ability to edit via tape splicing and the ability to record multiple tracks revolutionized studio recording. It became common studio recording practice to record on multiple tracks and bounce down afterward. The convenience of tape editing and multitrack recording led to the rapid adoption of magnetic tape as the primary technology for commercial musical recordings. Although rpm and 45 rpm
vinyl record
A phonograph record (also known as a gramophone record, especially in British English) or a vinyl record (for later varieties only) is an analog signal, analog sound Recording medium, storage medium in the form of a flat disc with an inscribed, ...
s were the dominant consumer format, recordings were customarily made first on tape, then transferred to disc, with Bing Crosby leading the way in the adoption of this method in the United States.
Further developments
Analog magnetic tape recording introduces noise, usually called
tape hiss
Tape hiss is the high frequency noise present on analogue magnetic tape recordings caused by the size of the magnetic particles used to make the tape. Effectively it is the noise floor of the recording medium. It can be reduced by the use of fine ...
, caused by the finite size of the magnetic particles in the tape. There is a direct tradeoff between noise and economics.
Signal-to-noise ratio
Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR or S/N) is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. SNR is defined as the ratio of signal power to noise power, often expressed in deci ...
is increased at higher speeds and with wider tracks, and decreased at lower speeds and with narrower tracks.
By the late 1960s, disk reproducing equipment became so good that audiophiles soon became aware that some of the noise audible on recordings was not surface noise or deficiencies in their equipment, but reproduced tape hiss. A few specialist companies started making
direct to disc recording
Direct-to-disc recording refers to sound recording methods that bypass the use of magnetic tape recording and record audio directly onto analog disc masters.
Professional analog sound recording
Most sound recordings for gramophone records, recor ...
s, made by feeding microphone signals directly to a disk cutter (after amplification and mixing), in essence reverting to the pre-War direct method of recording. These recordings never became popular, but they dramatically demonstrated the magnitude and importance of the tape hiss problem.

Before 1963, when
Philips
Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), simply branded Philips, is a Dutch multinational health technology company that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, its world headquarters have been situated in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarter ...
introduced the
Compact audio cassette, almost all tape recording had used the
reel-to-reel
Reel-to-reel audio tape recording, also called open-reel recording, is magnetic tape audio recording in which the recording tape is spooled between reels. To prepare for use, the ''supply reel'' (or ''feed reel'') containing the tape is plac ...
format. Previous attempts to package the tape in a convenient cassette that required no threading met with limited success; the most successful was
8-track cartridge used primarily in automobiles for playback only. The Philips Compact audio cassette added much-needed convenience to the tape recording format and a decade or so later had begun to dominate the consumer market, although it was to remain lower in quality than open-reel formats.
In the 1970s, advances in solid-state electronics made the design and marketing of more sophisticated analog circuitry economically feasible. This led to a number of attempts to reduce tape hiss through the use of various forms of volume compression and expansion, the most notable and commercially successful being several systems developed by
Dolby Laboratories
Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (Dolby Labs or simply Dolby) is a British-American technology corporation specializing in audio noise reduction, audio data compression, audio encoding/compression, spatial audio, and high-dynamic-range television (H ...
. These systems divided the frequency spectrum into several bands and applied volume
compression/expansion independently to each band (Engineers now often use the term ''compansion'' to refer to this process). The Dolby systems were very successful at increasing the effective dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratio of analog audio recording; to all intents and purposes, audible tape hiss could be eliminated. The original
Dolby A was only used in professional recording. Successors found use in both professional and consumer formats;
Dolby B
A Dolby noise-reduction system (Dolby NR) is one of a series of noise reduction systems developed by Dolby Laboratories for use in analog audio tape recording. The first was Dolby A, a professional broadband noise reduction system for recordin ...
became almost universal for prerecorded music on cassette. Subsequent forms, including
Dolby C, (and the short-lived
Dolby S) were developed for home use.
In the 1980s,
digital recording
In digital recording, an audio signal, audio or video signal is converted into a stream of discrete numbers representing the changes over time in air pressure for audio, or Color, chroma and luminance values for video. This number stream is s ...
methods were introduced, and analog tape recording was gradually displaced, although it has not disappeared by any means. (Many professional studios, particularly those catering to big-budget clients, use analog recorders for multitracking and/or mixdown.) The digital audio tape never became important as a consumer recording medium partially due to legal complications arising from
piracy
Piracy is an act of robbery or criminal violence by ship or boat-borne attackers upon another ship or a coastal area, typically with the goal of stealing cargo and valuable goods, or taking hostages. Those who conduct acts of piracy are call ...
fears on the part of the record companies. They had opposed magnetic tape recording when it first became available to consumers, but the technical difficulty of juggling recording levels, overload distortion, and residual tape hiss was sufficiently high that unlicensed reproduction of magnetic tape never became an insurmountable commercial problem. With digital methods, copies of recordings could be exact, and copyright infringement might have become a serious commercial problem. Digital tape is still used in professional situations and the
DAT variant has found a home in computer data backup applications. Many professional and home recordists now use hard-disk-based systems for recording, burning the final mixes to recordable
CDs (CD-R's).
Most Police forces in the United Kingdom (and possibly elsewhere) still use analog compact cassette systems to record Police Interviews as it provides a medium less prone to accusations of tampering.
Recording on film
The first attempts to record sound to an optical medium occurred around 1900. Prior to the use of recorded sound in film, theatres would have live orchestras present during silent films. The musicians would sit in the pit below the screen and would provide the background noise and set the mood for whatever was occurring in the movie. In 1906,
Eugene Augustin Lauste applied for a patent to record
Sound-on-film
Sound-on-film is a class of sound film processes where the sound accompanying a picture is recorded on photographic film, usually, but not always, the same strip of film carrying the picture. Sound-on-film processes can either record an Analog s ...
, but was ahead of his time. In 1923,
Lee de Forest #REDIRECT Lee de Forest
{{redirect category shell, {{R from move{{R from other capitalisation ...
applied for a patent to record to film; he also made a number of short experimental films, mostly of
vaudeville
Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment which began in France in the middle of the 19th century. A ''vaudeville'' was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a drama ...
performers.
William Fox began releasing sound-on-film newsreels in 1926, the same year that
Warner Bros. released ''
Don Juan
Don Juan (), also known as Don Giovanni ( Italian), is a legendary fictional Spanish libertine who devotes his life to seducing women.
The original version of the story of Don Juan appears in the 1630 play (''The Trickster of Seville and t ...
'' with music and
sound effects
A sound effect (or audio effect) is an artificially created or enhanced sound, or sound process used to emphasize artistic or other content of films, television shows, live performance, animation, video games, music, or other media.
In m ...
recorded on discs, as well as a series of short films with fully-
synchronized sound
Synchronized may refer to:
* Synchronization (US) or ''synchronisation'' (UK), the coordination of events to operate a system in unison
* ''Synchronized'' (album), a 2002 album by Sheavy
* Synchronised (horse) (2003–2012), a racehorse
*, a progra ...
on discs. In 1927, the sound film ''
The Jazz Singer'' was released; while not the first sound film, it made a tremendous hit and made the public and the film industry realize that sound film was more than a mere novelty.
''The Jazz Singer'' used a process called
Vitaphone
Vitaphone was a sound film system used for feature films and nearly 1,000 short subjects made by Warner Bros. and its sister studio First National Pictures, First National from 1926 to 1931. Vitaphone is the last major analog sound-on-disc sys ...
that involved synchronizing the projected film to sound recorded on a disc. It essentially amounted to playing a phonograph record, but one that was recorded with the best electrical technology of the time. Audiences used to acoustic phonographs and recordings would, in the theatre, have heard something resembling 1950s
high fidelity
High fidelity (hi-fi or, rarely, HiFi) is the high-quality reproduction of sound. It is popular with audiophiles and home audio enthusiasts. Ideally, high-fidelity equipment has inaudible noise and distortion, and a flat (neutral, uncolored) ...
.
However, in the days of analog technology, no process involving a separate disk could hold synchronization precisely or reliably. Vitaphone was quickly supplanted by technologies that recorded an optical
soundtrack
A soundtrack is a recorded audio signal accompanying and synchronised to the images of a book, drama, motion picture, radio program, television show, television program, or video game; colloquially, a commercially released soundtrack album of m ...
directly onto the side of the strip of motion picture
film
A film, also known as a movie or motion picture, is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, emotions, or atmosphere through the use of moving images that are generally, sinc ...
. This was the dominant technology from the 1930s through the 1960s and is still in use although the analog soundtrack is being replaced by
digital sound on film formats.
There are two types of synchronized film soundtrack, optical and magnetic. Optical soundtracks are visual renditions of
sound wave
In physics, sound is a vibration that propagates as an acoustic wave through a transmission medium such as a gas, liquid or solid.
In human physiology and psychology, sound is the ''reception'' of such waves and their ''perception'' by the ...
forms and provide sound through a light beam and optical sensor within the projector. Magnetic soundtracks are essentially the same as used in conventional analog tape recording.
Magnetic soundtracks can be joined with the moving image but it creates an abrupt discontinuity because of the offset of the audio track relative to the picture. Whether optical or magnetic, the audio pickup must be located several inches ahead of the projection lamp,
shutter and drive
sprocket
A sprocket, sprocket-wheel or chainwheel is a profiled wheel
A wheel is a rotating component (typically circular in shape) that is intended to turn on an axle Bearing (mechanical), bearing. The wheel is one of the key components of the whe ...
s. There is usually a
flywheel
A flywheel is a mechanical device that uses the conservation of angular momentum to store rotational energy, a form of kinetic energy proportional to the product of its moment of inertia and the square of its rotational speed. In particular, a ...
as well to smooth out the film moves to eliminate the flutter that would otherwise result from the
negative pulldown mechanism. If you have films with a magnetic track, you should keep them away from strong magnetic sources, such as televisions. These can weaken or wipe the magnetic sound signal.

For optical recording on film there are two methods utilized. Variable density recording uses changes in the darkness of the soundtrack side of the film to represent the soundwave. Variable area recording uses changes in the width of a dark strip to represent the soundwave.
In both cases, a light that is sent through the part of the film that corresponds to the soundtrack changes in intensity, proportional to the original sound, and that light is not projected on the screen but converted into an electrical signal by a light-sensitive device.
Optical soundtracks are prone to the same sorts of degradation that affect the picture, such as scratching and copying.
Unlike the film image that creates the illusion of continuity, soundtracks are continuous. This means that if film with a combined soundtrack is cut and spliced, the image will cut cleanly but the soundtrack will most likely produce a cracking sound. Fingerprints on the film may also produce cracking or interference.
In the late 1950s, the cinema industry, desperate to provide a theatre experience that would be overwhelmingly superior to television, introduced
widescreen
Widescreen images are displayed within a set of aspect ratio (image), aspect ratios (relationship of image width to height) used in film, television and computer screens. In film, a widescreen film is any film image with a width-to-height aspect ...
processes such as
Cinerama,
Todd-AO
Todd-AO is an American post-production company founded in 1953 by Mike Todd and Robert Naify, providing sound-related services to the motion picture and television industries. The company retains one facility, in the Los Angeles area.
Todd-AO ...
and
CinemaScope
CinemaScope is an anamorphic format, anamorphic lens series used, from 1953 to 1967, and less often later, for shooting widescreen films that, crucially, could be screened in theatres using existing equipment, albeit with a lens adapter.
Its cr ...
. These processes at the same time introduced technical improvements in sound, generally involving the use of multitrack ''magnetic sound'', recorded on an oxide stripe laminated onto the film. In subsequent decades, a gradual evolution occurred with more and more theatres installing various forms of magnetic-sound equipment.
In the 1990s,
digital
Digital usually refers to something using discrete digits, often binary digits.
Businesses
*Digital bank, a form of financial institution
*Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) or Digital, a computer company
*Digital Research (DR or DRI), a software ...
audio systems were introduced and began to prevail. In some of them, the sound recording is again recorded on a separate disk, as in Vitaphone; others use a digital,
optical sound track on the film itself. Digital processes can now achieve reliable and perfect synchronization.
Digital recording

The first
digital audio
Digital audio is a representation of sound recorded in, or converted into, digital signal (signal processing), digital form. In digital audio, the sound wave of the audio signal is typically encoded as numerical sampling (signal processing), ...
recorders were reel-to-reel decks introduced by companies such as Denon (1972), Soundstream (1979) and Mitsubishi. They used a digital technology known as
PCM recording. Within a few years, however, many studios were using devices that encoded the digital audio data into a standard video signal, which was then recorded on a
U-matic or other videotape recorder, using the rotating-head technology that was standard for video. A similar technology was used for a consumer format, known as
Digital Audio Tape
Digital Audio Tape (DAT or R-DAT) is a signal recording and playback medium developed by Sony and introduced in 1987. In appearance it is similar to a Compact Cassette, using 3.81 mm / 0.15" (commonly referred to as 4 mm) magnetic t ...
(DAT) which used rotating heads on a narrow tape contained in a cassette. DAT records at sampling rates of 48 kHz or 44.1 kHz, the latter being the same rate used on compact discs. Bit depth is 16 bits, also the same as compact discs. DAT was a failure in the consumer-audio field (too expensive, too finicky, and crippled by anti-copying regulations), but it became popular in studios (particularly home studios) and radio stations. A failed digital tape recording system was the
Digital Compact Cassette
Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) is a magnetic tape sound recording format introduced by Philips and Matsushita Electric in late 1992 and marketed as the successor to the standard analog Compact Cassette. It was also a direct competitor to Son ...
(DCC).
Within a few years after the introduction of digital recording, multitrack recorders (using stationary heads) were being produced for use in professional studios. In the early 1990s, relatively affordable multitrack digital recorders were introduced for use in home studios; they returned to recording on videotape. The most notable of this type of recorder is the
ADAT
Alesis Digital Audio Tape, commonly referred to as ADAT, is a magnetic tape format used for the Sound recording and reproduction, recording of eight digital audio tracks onto the same S-VHS tape used by consumer VCRs, and the basis of a serie ...
. Developed by
Alesis and first released in 1991, the ADAT machine is capable of recording 8 tracks of digital audio onto a single
S-VHS
S-VHS, the common initialism for Super VHS, is an analog video cassette format introduced by JVC in 1987 as an improved version of the VHS (Video Home System) format. S-VHS improved image quality by increasing the bandwidth of the luminance ...
video cassette. The ADAT machine, followed by the Tascam equivalent, the DA-88, using a smaller Hi-8 video cassette, was a common fixture in professional and home studios around the world until approximately 2000 when it was supplanted by various interfaces and 'DAWs' (digital audio workstations) which allowed a computer's hard drive to be the recording medium..
In the consumer market, tapes and gramophones were largely displaced by the
compact disc
The compact disc (CD) is a Digital media, digital optical disc data storage format co-developed by Philips and Sony to store and play digital audio recordings. It employs the Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) standard and was capable of hol ...
(CD) and a lesser extent the
minidisc. These recording media are fully digital and require complex electronics to play back. Digital recording has progressed towards higher fidelity, with formats such as
DVD-A offering sampling rates of up to 192 kHz.

Digital sound
files can be stored on any
computer storage
Computer data storage or digital data storage is a technology consisting of computer components and Data storage, recording media that are used to retain digital data. It is a core function and fundamental component of computers.
The cent ...
medium. The development of the
MP3 audio file format, and legal issues involved in copying such files, has driven most of the innovation in music distribution since their introduction in the late 1990s.
As
hard disk
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...
capacities and computer
CPU speeds increased at the end of the 1990s,
hard disk recording became more popular. As of early 2005 hard disk recording takes two forms. One is the use of standard desktop or laptop computers, with adapters for encoding audio into two or many tracks of digital audio. These adapters can either be in-the-box soundcards or external devices, either connecting to in-box interface cards or connecting to the computer via USB or Firewire cables. The other common form of hard disk recording uses a dedicated recorder which contains analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters as well as one or two removable hard drives for data storage. Such recorders, packing 24 tracks in a few units of rack space, are actually single-purpose computers, which can in turn be connected to standard computers for editing.
The revival of vinyl
Vinyl records, or long-playing (LP) records, have become popular again as a way to consume music despite the rise of digital media. Over 15 thousand units were sold between 2008 and 2012, their sales reaching the highest level in 2012 since 1993. Popular artists have begun releasing their albums on vinyl, and stores such as
Urban Outfitters
Urban Outfitters, Inc. (URBN) is a multinational lifestyle retail corporation headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Operating in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, select Western European countries, Poland, the United Arab Em ...
and
Whole Foods Market have started selling them. Popular music corporations, such as Sony, have started manufacturing LP for the first time since 1989 as this medium becomes more popular. However, some companies are facing production problems as there are only 16 record plants currently functioning in the United States.
Technique
The analog
tape recorder
An audio tape recorder, also known as a tape deck, tape player or tape machine or simply a tape recorder, is a sound recording and reproduction device that records and plays back sounds usually using magnetic tape for storage. In its present ...
made it possible to erase or record over a previous recording so that mistakes could be fixed. Another advantage of recording on tape is the ability to cut the tape and join it back together. This allows the recording to be edited. Pieces of the recording can be removed, or rearranged. See also
audio editing,
audio mixing,
multitrack recording
Multitrack recording (MTR), also known as multitracking, is a method of sound recording developed in 1955 that allows for the separate recording of multiple sound sources or of sound sources recorded at different times to create a cohesive who ...
.
The advent of
electronic instruments (especially
keyboards and
synthesizer
A synthesizer (also synthesiser or synth) is an electronic musical instrument that generates audio signals. Synthesizers typically create sounds by generating waveforms through methods including subtractive synthesis, additive synthesis a ...
s), effects and other instruments has led to the importance of
MIDI
Musical Instrument Digital Interface (; MIDI) is an American-Japanese technical standard that describes a communication protocol, digital interface, and electrical connectors that connect a wide variety of electronic musical instruments, ...
in recording. For example, using
MIDI timecode
MIDI time code (MTC) embeds the same timing information as standard SMPTE timecode as a series of small 'quarter-frame' MIDI messages. There is no provision for the user bits in the standard MIDI time code messages, and SysEx messages are use ...
, it is possible to have different equipment 'trigger' without direct human intervention at the time of recording.
In more recent times, computers (
digital audio workstation
A digital audio workstation (DAW ) is an electronic device or application software used for Sound recording and reproduction, recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software pr ...
s) have found an increasing role in the
recording studio
A recording studio is a specialized facility for Sound recording and reproduction, recording and Audio mixing, mixing of instrumental or vocal musical performances, spoken words, and other sounds. They range in size from a small in-home proje ...
, as their use eases the tasks of
cutting
Cutting is the separation or opening of a physical object, into two or more portions, through the application of an acutely directed force.
Implements commonly used for wikt:cut, cutting are the knife and saw, or in medicine and science the sca ...
and
looping, as well as allowing for instantaneous changes, such as duplication of parts, the addition of effects and the rearranging of parts of the recording.
See also
*
Binaural recording
Binaural recording is a method of Sound recording and reproduction, recording Sound recording, sound that uses two microphones, arranged with the intent to create a Three-dimensional space, 3D stereo sound sensation for the listener of actuall ...
*
Bootleg recording
*
High fidelity
High fidelity (hi-fi or, rarely, HiFi) is the high-quality reproduction of sound. It is popular with audiophiles and home audio enthusiasts. Ideally, high-fidelity equipment has inaudible noise and distortion, and a flat (neutral, uncolored) ...
*
Microphone technique
*
Timeline of audio formats
An audio format is a medium for sound recording and reproduction. The term is applied to both the physical recording media and the recording formats of the audio frequency, audio content—in computer science it is often limited to the audio file ...
*
Volta Laboratory-Sound recording
*
References
Further reading
* Bennett, H. Stith, ''On Becoming a Rock Musician'', Amherst :
University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.
* Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). ''Studying Popular Music''. Philadelphia: Open University Press. .
* Milner, Greg
"Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music" Faber & Faber; 1 edition (June 9, 2009) . Cf. p. 14 on H. Stith Bennett and "
recording consciousness".
"Recording Technology History: notes revised July 6, 2005, by Steven Schoenherr" San Diego University (archived 2010)
External links
First Sounds(audio files of the earliest recorded sound, dating back to the 1850s)
Recording History – The History of Sound Recording Technology* Listen t
''The Hen Convention''- Australia's oldest surviving piece of recorded sound (1897) on the
National Film and Sound Archive
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA), known as ScreenSound Australia from 1999 to 2004, is Australia's audiovisual archive, responsible for developing, preserving, maintaining, promoting, and providing access to a national c ...
'
''australianscreen online''* Sound recording history
Museum of Magnetic Sound Recording
{{DEFAULTSORT:History Of Sound Recording
Audio engineering
Sound recording
Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical, Mechanical system, mechanical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of ...
History of sound recording
Sound recording
Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical, Mechanical system, mechanical, electronic, or digital inscription and re-creation of sound waves, such as spoken voice, singing, instrumental music, or sound effects. The two main classes of ...
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