Digital audio recording technology was invented. History of recording

Yes, and there is still no such device that could convey the spirit of a live concert. You can meticulously accurately record sound, decompose it into many channels and transmit it over gigantic distances in seconds, but still reproduce the charisma of the musician, the mass ecstasy of the performance popular group or the echo of organ sounds carried away under the dome is as difficult as creating the Earth anew. But modern music players can still do something.

Edison and his followers

Most people know that Thomas Alva Edison is the first inventor of the phonograph, but not everyone has heard that mechanical sound recording had already been invented before this invention. Thus, in 1857, 20 years before the phonograph, Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville patented a “phonautograph”, which could record sound on paper, but could not reproduce it - for the first time it was possible to play these first recordings only in 2008 using a computer .

Thomas Edison managed not only to record it, but also to play it back. It is interesting that he did not intend to invent the phonograph, but only wanted to automate and speed up the process of receiving telegrams, so that in the future it would be possible to do without a person altogether. But as a result of his work, he received a device whose operating principle is still used in sound recording.

And the principle is quite simple: when you say something into a microphone, its membrane vibrates and somehow transmits the resulting vibrations to the stylus, which in turn draws sound wave on a carrier - in Edison's case it was a rotating roller covered with thin foil. During playback, the reverse process occurs - the stylus transfers all vibrations from the roller to the membrane, which is amplified by a horn, and we hear the recorded sound.

Ten years after the invention of the phonograph, the American inventor Emil Berliner patented the gramophone - a device quite similar to the operating principle of Edison's phonograph, but Berliner slightly improved it, just replacing the rollers with disks. A mechanism for the gramophone that evenly rotates discs was invented by the owner of a small store in New Jersey, Eldridge Johnson, a talented engineer of that time. The result of their work became known as the gramophone.

After working quite a bit, Johnson and Berliner quarreled with each other. The subject of the quarrel was the rights to patents, which could only be distributed in court. The court appointed Johnson as the copyright holder, and he received the rights to produce gramophones in America. Berliner, wasting no time, went to Canada and organized his own company there, the Berliner Gramophone Company, and soon became a partner in the British Gramophone Company (later renamed EMI) and created a similar one in Germany - Deutsche Grammophon. The latter still exists and records popular and classical music. Johnson organized his own Victor Talking Machine Company, which became a manufacturer of gramophones for the Volta Graphophone Company.

In general, the history of all inventions of music players is inextricably linked with record companies, which now own many patents in this area. And it is inextricably linked with commerce: Emil Berliner realized that you can make good money selling music. Although his commercial enthusiasm did not last long - very soon his attraction to music replaced the desire to invent a helicopter.

Radio is replacing sound recording

In the 20s of the twentieth century all over the world, including in America, radio broadcasting gained particular popularity. The reason for this was the cost of radios, which was significantly lower than the cost of gramophones and, no less important, there was no need to buy discs. The decline in interest in gramophones led to the collapse of most companies involved in the production of gramophones. Only a few managed to “survive”, having worried in advance about expanding their activities by getting involved with sound recording, and even then, not all of them survived. Thus, the French Pathe Freres Phonograph Company, which filled the Russian market with its gramophones (slightly modernized versions of the Berliner gramophone), had its own recording studios in London, London and Moscow, was nevertheless forced in 1928 to sell its assets to the English branch of Columbia (but it succeeded to preserve part of the company involved in the film industry, which still exists today). Perhaps surprisingly, Eldridge Johnson was also forced to sell his company to a banking syndicate that was lending to Victor Talking Machine Co. The Great Depression finally destroyed the last remnants of gramophone manufactories.

At the peak of the collapse of the gramophone era, the American company Western Electric had already invented a new method of sound recording - electronic, which was licensed by RCA. She also bought out Victor Talking Machine Co in 1929. RCA/Victor quickly launched production and released a whole line of devices, the most a prominent representative became the 11-tube Automatic Electrola-Radiola, which cost unrealistic amounts at that time - $1350, which can be compared with the cost of a car - for example, a Ford would have cost only $650. In the new devices, the pickups were electromagnetic, the motor was electric, and not a winding type, like its predecessors. The pickup converts vibrations into an electrical signal, which is fed to a tube amplifier and played through a diaphragm speaker.

The first company to release a vinyl disc was RCA/Victor in 1931. With the release of the disc, a new speed standard was immediately approved - 33 revolutions per minute. At this speed, a disk with a diameter of 12 inches (30 centimeters) could hold ten minutes of recording on each side. In 1949, it also released 7-inch discs with a large hole in the middle, which was necessary for the disc changing mechanism built into the first changers, which are still widely used today.

Tape recorders destroy copyright

The principle of tape recording was first invented and demonstrated at Volta Laboratories by Alexander Bell in 1886. A paper tape coated with wax was wound from one reel to another, and along the way it was scratched by a stylus - according to the Edison principle. The device did not receive commercial distribution.

In the 1890s, the method of magnetic recording on metal wire became widespread, and the first Magnetophon, manufactured by AEG, was demonstrated in Germany in 1935. Magnetic tape based on iron oxide was produced for it by the German company BASF. The Magnetophon K1 and K2 models were already quite similar to those we know as “reel-to-reel tape recorders”. They were able to both record and play back, although their sound quality left much to be desired. When in 1936 the conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Thomas Beecham, heard his performance recorded on a German miracle of technology, he was horrified, the sound was so unbearably terrible.

During World War II, the Germans successfully used tape recorders complete with radio stations, thus automating the process of transmitting encrypted radiograms. In 1943, AEG created the first stereo tape recorder, and German officers could enjoy Strauss and Furtwangler - about 250 concerts of classical and popular music were recorded in stereo during the war.

In the USA, the first tape recorders appeared only after the war; their authorship belongs to the Amrekh company, which borrowed technology from the defeated Germans. The magnetic tape for them was produced by the ZM company. Amrekh tape recorders quickly became popular among radio stations and began to be used in films.

The famous American jazz guitarist Lester William Polsfuss, better known as Les Paul, inventor of the all-wood electric guitar, in 1948, based on one of the early Ampex models - Model 200A - invented the world's first multi-track recording system. The tape recorder was given to him by another famous musician, Bing Crosby, who invested a huge sum for those times - $50,000 - in Amrekh, thus becoming practically its co-owner. Les Paul's ideas were subsequently used in the production of the commercial eight-track tape recorder Ampex Sel-Sync. He also received the first Sel-Sync model, which became the basis of his new studio.

In 1966, Amrex produced the first studio 16-track tape recorder. The MM-1000 model worked with 5 cm wide tape and produced much higher quality sound than any other tape recorder. 16-track tape recorders were used in recording studios until the late 1990s, when they were replaced by computers.

Reel-to-reel tape recorders were initially used only for professional purposes, but over time they became cheaper and became widespread in everyday life. However, not everyone was satisfied with their enormous size and lack of transportability. In 1962, the Dutch company Philips introduced the world to a new magnetic sound recording format - the compact cassette.

In 1963, the first compact cassette recorder, the Philips EL 3300, was produced, and in 1964, Philips released the Carry-Corder 150 cassette player in America under the Norelco brand and, under pressure from Sony, allowed any companies to use the compact cassette format without a license. In the 70s, cassette recorders gradually improved and quickly caught up with reel-to-reel recorders in terms of quality. One of the first Hi-Fi tape recorders was the Japanese cassette deck Nakamichi 1000, whose frequency range extended from 20 to 20,000 Hz, and for the first time different magnetic heads were used for recording and playback. As a result, the new format quickly became popular and displaced reel-to-reel tape recorders from the consumer market.

A significant role in this was played by the model of the compact cassette player Sony Walkman (1979), the dimensions of which were slightly larger than the cassette itself. The sound quality of mini-players was significantly worse than what reel-to-reel stationary tape recorders and cassette decks could provide by that time, but for the first time in the history of sound recording, quality gave way to convenience. This factor later manifested itself in the field of audio more than once, and we still feel its consequences in our own skin today. But then, in the 80s, compact cassette players became so popular that their number even exceeded the sales of vinyl players, something that reel-to-reel tape recorders could not achieve.

It was compact cassettes that first made record companies think about copyright issues. And it was the 70-80s that became the heyday of the musical underground in many countries, including ours.

Digital recording and heydayCD

Sony introduced the first Audio CD back in 1976, before it invented the Walkman. The CD evolved from laser video discs and revolutionized consumer audio technology as a whole.

However, the first commercial series of CDs was released only in 1982. This was already a joint development of eternal competitors Sony and Philips, who would never have become friends if not for the need to standardize the format. It was initially planned that the CD would replace gramophone records, but it soon became clear that the format was quite suitable for recording and playing back both video and digital data - the first CD-ROM was released in 1985.

With the release of the first Audio CDs, Sony introduced the first player for them - it was the CDP-101 model. Philips a little later released the CD 100 model, where the disc had to be inserted, like in vinyl players - from the top, and closed with a lid. Later, slide loaders were invented, which made it possible not only to make the design of players more compact and user-friendly, but also to subsequently create CD changers. By analogy with the Walkman, Sony released the Discman, which further strengthened the position of the CD - now in the field of portable audio equipment.

Cassettes have been in their death throes for a long time, and you can still find cassette radios in some new cars. There were also attempts to transfer “digital” to magnetic tape - DAT and DCC technologies. And if DAT cassettes produced by Sony were still somehow in demand on the market (they were popular with journalists who used them in voice recorders and on radio), then no one understood the DCC format invented by Philips at all.

The quality of CD recording, convenience and size of both media and players surpassed anything that had been released before, and the new technology was doomed to success. And so it happened: CDs replaced both cassettes and vinyl discs, remaining a monopolist in the audio recording market. Copyright owners could finally breathe easy. But not for long.

RevolutionMP3

As soon as the first CD-ROM came out, it became clear that sooner or later digital dubbing would destroy not only the concept of copyright, but also all audio formats (and video too). In 1993, within the community of Fraunhofer Institutes, the most powerful virus, which has ever hit the music industry, is the MPEG-1 Audio Layer III audio recording format, MP3 for short. The horror was that this format did not care about the type of media - be it a CD, hard drive, flash memory or Internet server. It could reproduce indefinitely, as quickly as possible and without any loss of quality. At the same time, the sound quality in this format, although inferior to CD, was quite acceptable - so much so that most users did not notice any difference.

At first, MP3 could only be listened to on a computer, but it was clear that the release of commercial MP3 players was a matter of time. The first of them was in 1996 a player called Listen Up produced by the American company Audio Highway (and not the Korean Saehan MPMan or Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300, which were introduced only in 1998). The player was released in limited quantities, but nevertheless managed to win several awards for innovation, and three patents were assigned to it. But the first commercial player was indeed Saehan MPMan. It had 32 MB of flash memory, which could hold about six songs with a bitrate of 128 kbps. As for the Diamond Multimedia Rio PMP300, this player from the Californian company became the first to feel the full power of American justice - the RIAA association sued Diamond Multimedia demanding a ban on sales of the player that violated the Home Audio Recording Act, but the lawsuit was dismissed and the player Because of this story, it became a wild success.

Many companies rushed to produce MP3 CD players, which initially enjoyed some popularity, but were then replaced by flash memory-based devices. But the format was truly popularized by the MP3 player Apple iPod (2001) with a 5-gigabyte 1.8-inch hard drive inside. It was comfortable, ergonomic, sounded good and contained as much music as you could have ever dreamed of.

Back in 2001, the first mobile phones appeared that could play audio. And today, in 2012, there is probably not a single mobile device(including tablets and readers e-books), which would not be equipped with a software MP3 player. Stationary equipment is not far behind them: all decks, receivers, audio systems and televisions can play MP3 and other audio formats. Even night alarm clocks and microspeakers can do this.

Music is everywhere now, and this has paradoxically had a bad effect on people. It would seem that today, more than ever, music is available to anyone, at any time and almost anywhere. Not even a golden - a platinum age of music should have come. But all we see around us are closing recording studios, musicians playing for beer, and the total indifference of listeners. Who is interested in music today besides the musicians themselves? Only the most ardent fans (mostly girls of puberty and post-puberty). Yes, big concerts of famous performers and festivals are still gathering their audience, but something tells me that this will also end soon.

History of sound recording. Five eras of sound.

Nowadays, in the days of digital technology, sound recording is no longer the preserve of the elite. Sound recording techniques and technologies have gradually progressed. How have we achieved a completely different sound by now? Let’s take a closer look at the process of changing technologies and sound recording methods over the course of five decades. Let's divide time into five eras. It is known that mechanical sound recording is the first attempt to record sound and then reproduce it. And the first device for recording and reproducing sound was the phonograph, invented by T. Edison in 1877. According to British sound engineer Andy Jones, during the first decades, the concept of “sound image” was of less interest to sound engineers. Due to the very low sound quality, they concentrated on simpler and more obvious tasks, such as transmitting an acceptable musical balance using the “correct” placement of performers around the sound receiver, the technical quality of the phonogram in terms of noise, interference, and distortion. However, with the advent of stereo standards in the 1960s and HI-FI, with the invention of the first multi-track tape recorders, sound engineers had the opportunity to interfere with the sound after the recording stage, find each instrument its place in the stereo base, etc. It is this period that interests us in to a greater extent.

The first era is 1960 - 1969. First experiments. Stereo. This decade can be characterized as a time of musical experiments, with the help of which modern technologies sound recordings. The ways and means by which music was recorded changed beyond recognition from the early to late 1960s. years. The transition from mono to multi-channel sound recording had a significant impact. Analog 4-track machines appeared in studios, and they were designed to work on 2-inch tape. Speaking of recording technologies, record companies had strict principles for the recording process. Studios of the time used sequential recording with overdubbing. Despite this, many musicians began to leave their mark on their own unique sound, styles. To prove this, let us turn to the work of the legendary group The Beatles. They broke new ground with each release, pushing audio engineers to develop new recording techniques to stay ahead of other artists. For example, in 1965, British producer George Martin, while working with The Beatles, used a pair of famous Studer J37s tape recorders when recording, and thus he increased the number of tracks and edited the recorded material later. Thus, the decade progressed continuously. All recordings of the 60s were analog and based on tube sound. The sound of tube equipment created a blurred sound and added “musical” distortion. This is what became the defining element in the sound of the 60s. From this we can assume that the use of tube equipment is one of the ways to “warm up” the sound. Sound effects such as chorus and delay are also rapidly developing. For example, the chorus effect can be seen on the backing vocals of The Beatles “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds”. Interest in stereo recording soon appeared. Early stereo recordings of pop music feature extreme panning techniques, such as placing the drums in the left channel and reverbing them in the right channel. If you listen to JimiHendrix's ElectricLadyland, which was one of the first rock records recorded specifically for stereo playback, you can hear a lot of movement across the stereo base. This album was released in 1968, when professional studios already had 8-track recorders. Such technical innovations marked the 60s and contributed to the development of the audio industry.

Second era 1970 - 1979s. The birth of multi-channel recording. Thanks to the advent of 16-channel recorders, visible changes in multi-channel recording occurred at the dawn of the decade. Now sound engineers could assign each sound source to a separate track. This recording method allowed the sound engineer, when mixing, to adjust the levels of individual channels, adjust frequency characteristics, apply artificial reverberation and other effects. This recording technology is becoming standard in professional studios. Sequential recording with overdubbing remained predominant. This recording method was used by Mike Oldfield on his 1973 album TubularBells, which was released by Virgin Records. It is interesting to note that there was a significant drawback to sequential overdubbing - the tape wore out during the next recording. But there was one more difficulty - when mixing and recording to tape, the noise of all the tracks was summed up and in the mixed phonogram their level was unacceptable. Therefore, as a mandatory measure, separate compander noise reduction systems such as Telcom or Dolby-SR were used. Gradually, during the 70s, the number of tracks increased. And already in 1974, the first 24-track tape recorder brought innovation to art. 8-, 16- and 24-track recorders from Studer and Telefunken were popular in professional studios. At that time in the development of studio technology, these devices fully satisfied the technological needs of studios. However, despite the increase in the number of tracks, many recording engineers believed that 16-channel recorders sounded better. Throughout this decade, experienced engineers learned to create crystal-clear recordings with excellent stereo imaging and enhanced frequency range. And thanks to numerous trials and experiments, multi-track recording was actively improved during these years.

The transition from analogue to digital audio recording ushered in the third era of the audio industry. These were the years from 1980 to 1989. During the transition from traditional analogue audio technology to a digital method of transmitting messages and to recording an audio signal in digital form, new approaches to the development of equipment were necessary. During these years, digital tape recorders began to appear. And the main purpose of their creation was to improve the sound quality of phonograms. As is known, attempts to use the technique of discrete (pulse) signals for processing and transmitting sound were made many times, but until the 1980s they did not have much success. With the advent of digital tape recorders in recording studios, it became possible to save all kinds of parameters and settings. The advantage of digital tape recorders is their high sound quality, and their parameters are completely unattainable for analog equipment. During this era, digital cassette recorders in the DAT (DigitalAudioTape) format became the most widespread in recording studios. There are many advantages of digital sound recording. One of the key factors in the figure is the low cost of digital media. An important point in digital recording is that the sound quality does not depend on the number of consecutive copies made and remains the same as it should be in the original, unlike analog recording. Steve Hillage once remarked: "Digital recording on tape is like photocopying on papyrus." Digital recording opened up new advantages and vast opportunities for improving signal processing and recording methods. In addition, much attention in the early 80s was given to the creation of such a device as a drum machine. She played an important role in shaping the sound of the 80s. It is known that the Roland TR-808 drum machine has become a cult favorite. released by Roland in 1980. It was easy to program, had analog synthesis and a recognizable sound. In electronic devices there was also a transition from analog to digital. The first drum machine to use digital samples was the Linn LM-1, created by Roger Lynn in 1979. With the advent of the LM-1, professional musicians received a decent instrument for making drum parts. It should be noted that the advent of drum machines greatly influenced a large number of styles of music, their rhythm was an integral part of all electronic dance styles, hip-hop, and rap. These innovations marked the 80s.

The next era in the development of sound recording was the years from 1990 to 1999. This decade went from simple sequencers to full-blown professional instruments. Already at the dawn of the 90s, recording studio technology began to evolve beyond hardware. At the beginning of the decade, many recordings were based on MIDI sequencers, as computers were not sufficiently tested in studios. And the real breakthrough was the appearance of the first digital synthesizer, KorgM1, in 1988. Its arrival signaled the beginning of the life of DAWs, or audio workstations. DAWs such as Cubase and Notator (later Logic) appeared, and ProTools was released in its original incarnation. At this time, a lot of techno, house and other electronic music were born. In the 90s, software was actively developing. Already in 1996, the VST plug-in format was created. With their help, it was possible to change even the smallest details in the sound fabric. In the second half of this decade, hard disk recording was actively developed, which soon reached perfection thanks to more powerful computers and DAWs such as ProTools. The sound of the music has also changed. Throughout the 90s, there was a trend towards powerful compression and rigidly limiting sound, thanks to which producers achieved competitiveness of the phonogram. That is why in the 90s such a concept as the “loudness war” appeared. To understand what it is, just listen to any record from the 80s or earlier, such as DavidBowie's 1983 "Let's Dance." Recordings from the early years have a fairly large dynamic range. Music from the 90s, such as Portishead's "Dummy" (1994), will sound much louder. This is due to the use of high compression, both during mixing and mastering. Compression during mastering could make the track sound even louder. Hence the belief that louder music sells better and therefore can be competitive. The advent of DAWs, software for audio engineers, has opened up new possibilities for shaping sound throughout the decade. But these innovations continued to evolve over the next decade.

2000-2010 is the era of software, a decade in which almost everything became possible. These years, computers are gaining more and more popularity. The capabilities of ProTools, Cubase, Logic, Live, FLStudio, Sonar, Reason are being improved. Virtual instruments NativeInstruments have proven themselves. These innovations allowed us to move away from large and expensive studio equipment. Sound engineers now carried out the editing and mixing process using software. This technology was relatively new, but was becoming very popular. This was confirmed in a convenient way moving sessions from one computer to another, as well as the ability to run several projects simultaneously. Now digital music can be created entirely on a computer. Despite the rapid development of software, and digital recording in general, there have been statements that the “soul” of music is lost when using software. These opinions still exist today. Many argue that a recording made with software can sound different - clean, sterile, or like an old soulful recording. It all depends on the goal. And yet, despite different beliefs, the sound of the 2000s was the sound of software for many people. Of course, there has been a lot of technical progress in the field of sound recording over fifty years. The sound of the music itself has changed. Sound engineers got rid of noise and learned to create crystal clear recordings. Along with this, technological progress occurred in many other areas of activity.

St. Petersburg State University Film and Television

ABSTRACT

by discipline

" Filming equipment "

"History and modern development sound recordings"

completed:

student of group 7751

Alferov I.V..

St. Petersburg 2008

Plan

Introduction

Background

Magnetic sound recording

Optical discs

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

Sound recording is the process of storing air vibrations in the range of 20-20000 Hz (music, speech or other sounds) on any medium using special devices.

Recordings, audio cassettes, CDs, mini-discs, DVDs, Flash cards: What kind of information carriers has humanity come up with to leave a memory of itself - first of all, of its voice - for centuries! However, the history of sound recording began with a not very pleasant episode: 130 years ago, the American engineer Thomas Edison severely pricked his finger:

“Once I was working with a new model of my phone. The mood was simply wonderful, and I started singing in between. I don’t remember what exactly, because at that very moment a needle, soldered to the diaphragm of the phone, stuck into my finger - so thin the steel plate trembled under the influence of my voice. And then I thought: is it possible to somehow record these vibrations of the needle? For example, on a plate. After all, logically, if, after recording, you move the needle along the tracks made earlier, it should reproduce the same sound! " - this is how Thomas Edison himself, the inventor of the phonograph, described the moment of insight.

Background

Attempts to create devices that reproduce sounds were made back in Ancient Greece. In the IV-II centuries BC. there were theaters of self-moving figures - androids. The movements of some of them were accompanied by mechanically produced sounds that formed melodies.

During the Renaissance, a whole range of various mechanical musical instruments were created that reproduced a particular melody at the right moment: barrel organs, music boxes, boxes, snuff boxes.

The musical organ works as follows. Sounds are created using thin steel plates of varying lengths and thicknesses placed in an acoustic box. To extract sound, a special drum with protruding pins is used, the location of which on the surface of the drum corresponds to the intended melody. When the drum rotates evenly, the pins touch the plates in a given sequence. By moving the pins to other places in advance, you can change the melodies. The organ grinder himself operates the organ grinder by rotating the handle.

Music boxes use a metal disc with a deep spiral groove to pre-record the melody. In certain places of the groove, pinpoint depressions are made - pits, the location of which corresponds to the melody. When the disk rotates, driven by a clock spring mechanism, a special metal needle slides along the groove and “reads” the sequence of dots. The needle is attached to a membrane, which produces a sound each time the needle enters a groove.

In the Middle Ages, chimes were created - tower or large room clocks with a musical mechanism, striking in a certain melodic sequence of tones or performing small musical pieces. Such are the Kremlin chimes and Big Ben in London.

Mechanical musical instruments are just automata that reproduce artificially created sounds. The problem of preserving the sounds of living life for a long time was solved much later.

Many centuries before the invention of mechanical sound recording, musical notation appeared - a graphic way of depicting musical works on paper. In ancient times, melodies were written in letters, and modern musical notation (with the designation of pitches, durations of tones, tonality and musical lines) began to develop in the 12th century. At the end of the 15th century, music printing was invented, when notes began to be printed from type, like books.

It was possible to record and then play back recorded sounds in the second half of the 19th century after the invention of sound recording.

Mechanical sound recording

The first person to express the idea of sound recording and sound reproduction was the Frenchman Charles Cros.

Cros was born in 1842 in Fabrezan (France). His family was talented: his brother was a painter and sculptor, his son was a poet. Kro himself was exceptionally talented. He studied physics, chemistry, philology, and medicine. In 1867 he invented the "autographic telegraph". He is also credited with inventing the telephone and the three-color photography process. Cro even dealt with issues of interplanetary communications and wrote a brochure on this subject. He is also known as a talented poet and science fiction writer.

Cro was a poor man and did not have the opportunity to experiment and even pay the patent fee.

sound recording melody device instrument

Leon Scott's phonautograph 1857 - the first recording apparatus with a membrane

On October 10, 1877, Cro's friend posted a note in La semaine du Clerge that detailed Cro's invention. In this description, by the way, it was proposed to call the device a “phonograph”. This device is described with a roller, and not with a disk, i.e. in the form that Edison soon after gave his phonograph.

Cros himself sent a letter to the French Academy of Sciences on April 30, 1877, in which he not only outlined the essence of the phenomenon of sound reproduction, but pointed out the method of reproduction both using a roller and using a disk, which is recorded in a spiral. In fact, this is what we call today a gramophone record, and Cro justly deserves the title of its inventor.

On December 1877, Cro's letter was opened and read out at a meeting of the Academy of Sciences. But there the idea did not receive support, and his name was almost forgotten. Cros died in Paris at the age of 45 in 1887, the year of the practical implementation of the gramophone, which he never saw.

Of the great many inventions of Thomas Edison, the phonograph is the main one.

Edison's application was made on December 24, 1877, and the patent, contrary to all the rules on the deadlines for determining novelty and for filing claims by others, was issued to him already on February 19, 1878. These dates cannot but be compared with the dates of the announcement of Cro's ideas. Charles Cros's son, Guy, wrote in 1927, not without a direct hint, that the magazine "La semaine du Clerge", which contained a detailed description of Cros' phonograph on October 10, 1877, enjoyed significant distribution and fame in America at that time.

Edison phonograph

However, even 10 years later, when Berliner received a patent for the gramophone, experts at the American Patent Office still did not know about any of Cro’s works.

Today, historians believe that Edison came to the invention of the phonograph independently and that it happened by accident. He wanted to create a transmitter for the telephone to increase the range of telephone conversations many times over.

In Edison's phonograph, recording was carried out along a helical line by pressing a fairly thick tin foil wrapped around a copper cylinder, rotated by hand at a speed of about 1 rpm, and the pitch of the screw on the cylinder was about 3 mm. For reproduction, a membrane located on the other side of the cylinder, equipped with a steel tip, was used. The membrane itself consisted of vegetable parchment. A horn cone made of cardboard was placed on the membrane. Edison made design changes to the phonograph many times, but never achieved a pure sound.

Many inventors tried to improve the phonograph. The greatest successes were achieved by Alexander Bell and Charles Tinter, who in 1886 took out a patent for a device they called graphonon. They proposed using transverse recording, cutting instead of extrusion, and wax with the addition of paraffin and other substances as a recording medium. But it was not possible to overcome the shortcomings of the phonograph. The time has come to implement Cro's idea of a gramophone record.

In June 1887, Emil Berliner received a patent in the United States, and then in England and Germany, for a gramophone, which was manufactured in 1888 and demonstrated on May 16 of the same year at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.

Berliner first used transverse recording on a roller, as in a phonograph, and then began recording on a disk using the Cro method. He applied carbon black and paraffin to a glass substrate. The substrate was placed on the machine in an inverted position, so that the removed chips could fall down without interfering with the recording. After recording, the phonogram was varnished and served to produce a relief photographic print on a chromium-gelatin layer. Then Berliner began to try chemical treatment methods, namely acid etching. Subsequently, he used zinc as a substrate and wax as a protective layer. After recording was completed, the zinc was etched in 25% chromic acid. Only the areas marked with the cutter were etched. Berliner used this zinc as an original and made galvanoplastic copies from it.

Berliner did not hide his familiarity with Cro's work, but said that he learned about Cro's ideas three months after he filed his patent application. Berliner's merit is that he organized the production of gramophones.

Gramophone and record

At the beginning of the 20th century. Many gramophone companies tried electrical recording, but the lack of electrical amplifiers prevented this method from being implemented. With the invention of the vacuum tube this became possible.

In 1918, the Gaumont Society took out a patent for “reading phonograms with an electromagnetic player,” that is, for an adapter. In 1924, several companies took out a patent for improved electrical recording conditions. Since 1925, the electrical method of recording using microphones has replaced mechanical-acoustic recording through a horn from production.

The first apparatus for playing records, created by Berliner in 1888, already contained the basic elements of a horn gramophone. Further work Various authors to improve the design led to the appearance of a model, which was released to the public in 1902. It had a spring drive and a rigid connection between the horn and the membrane. This model is depicted in a painting by the artist F. Barrot, who depicted a dog recognizing the voice of its owner transmitted by a gramophone. The company made this picture its trademark, and the name of the recording company HMV (His Master's Voice) became the most popular among record lovers for decades.

Further development of gramophones led to the creation of portable models with a sound duct inside the box, known as a gramophone. This name was first given to the apparatus of the French company Pathé. Subminiature gramophones with a sliding tonearm in the form of a nickel-plated metal can with a diameter of 18 cm and a height of 8 cm were produced.

Gramophone

With the development of radio technology, the acoustic recording method was completely replaced by the electrical method, which significantly improved the quality of recordings.

Radios, players (attachments to receivers) and electrophones appeared.

The spring motor was replaced by an electric motor, and the membrane was replaced by a pickup (adapter).

Gramophone with electromagnetic adapter and player

Until the end of 1948, recording was made with a groove width of 140-180 microns, with a recording density of an average of 38 grooves per 1 cm. The rotation speed was 78 rpm, and the diameter of the records was 25-30 cm. At the same time, the duration of the sound of one side of the record was 3-5 minutes, which is enough for short pieces of music.

With the introduction of electric playback, a speed of 331/3 rpm was introduced for the same record sizes. Smallest diameter at 331/3 rpm was set to 19 cm in order to obtain fairly good playback quality at the end of the recording. The groove width was chosen to be at least 100 μm. However, this did not ensure continuous recording of symphonic works. This problem was solved only with the advent of long-playing records.

In 1948, the American company Columbia announced the production of records with a groove width of up to 70 microns. The recording density has increased by approximately two and a half times, and the sound duration has become almost 6 times longer than 78 rpm records of the same format.

In 1949, the American company RCA Victor released 45 rpm records with a diameter of 17.5 cm and a player for them with an automatic record changer. The recording time for one side of the record was 5 minutes 5 seconds, which was later increased to 9 minutes using a variable recording step.

In 1954, 16 rpm records called “talking books” appeared. The long recording time (with a diameter of 25 cm, about an hour for one side) made them convenient as teaching aids and for people with poor vision.

Back in 1928, Columbia proposed choosing the distance between grooves depending on the amplitude, as described in a patent published in 1933. However, this idea was forgotten. The issue was raised again by Rhine, who tried his system in 1942 and completed it in 1950.

The use of re-recording from tape recorders instead of direct recording to disk from microphones made it possible to obtain a time-preemptive signal to control the groove shift. Rhine's circuit turned out to be complex, and variable pitch recorders offered by Columbia and Teldec were used in practice.

When recording with a variable pitch on records with a wide groove, the gain in playing time was 15%, and for long-playing records - 25%. Variable pitch records were released in 1951 by Deutsche Grammofon, at the end of 1952 by Teldec, and since 1956 they have been produced in the USSR. Variable pitch records do not require special reproducing equipment.

In addition to mechanical recording on disk, mechanical recording on tape is known. In 1931, in Germany, the Tefifon company manufactured devices with mechanical recording on an endless tape.

During this period of time A.F. Shorin proposed using film as a medium for mechanical sound recording. He designed the shorinophone apparatus, first used for dubbing films, and then for recording music and speech in radio broadcasting, which increased the recording duration to several hours.

Sound recording and playback in this device was carried out electromechanically on a used film strip. The shorinophone carried out a multi-track mechanical transverse recording, which was reproduced on the same device. When using film with a width of 35 mm, more than 50 grooves were placed on it. With a roll of film of 300 m, this made it possible to obtain a recording lasting eight hours in a shorinophone. The role of the recording and reproducing element in the shorinophone was performed by a special head, into which a cutter was inserted to cut a groove, and a corundum needle was inserted for playback.

As soon as cinema became sound, it became necessary to make the sound follow the movements of the actors along the screen. In 1930, French film director Abel Gans carried out spatial reproduction of sound in a cinema hall, for which he installed loudspeakers not only behind the screen, but also in the hall itself.

After the advent of the telephone, the phonograph, radio broadcasting and sound films, people began to notice the disadvantages of monophonic sound transmission. In 1881, at the World Exhibition in Paris, inventor Clement Ader first realized two-channel sound transmission from opera house. The transmission was carried out over telephone wires connected to two groups of microphones, one of which was located to the right and the other to the left of the stage. You could listen to the program on the phone using a pair of headphones. In 1912, similar experiments were repeated in Berlin.

Until 1957, recording on records was only monophonic. But experiments were also carried out in the field of stereophonic recording. In 1931, the English inventor A. Blumlein proposed a method of stereophonic recording on a disc, in which the signals of both channels were simultaneously recorded with one cutter in the same groove. In his patent application, Blumlein proposes two methods of stereo recording: one is a combination of transverse and depth recording, the other is two mutually perpendicular components of the cutter vibration directed at an angle of 45° to the surface of the disk. The insufficient level of recording and playback technology did not allow Blumlein's ideas to be realized at that time.

The American engineer Cook proposed a “binaural record”, each side of which contained “right” and “left” recordings. Both recordings were played back with one tonearm with two heads (adapters). Uneconomical use of disk space and the complexity of synchronization prevented this method from practical application.

The Decca Records laboratory in London developed an electrical method for separating channels using filters, provided that one of the channels was recorded at a subcarrier frequency. In the USA, a similar method is known as Minter systems. The carrier frequency method turned out to be complex and expensive.

Finally, the Blumlein 45/45 method received recognition. In the USA, Vestrex developed such a system, and already in 1958 the method was recommended as a unified international method for recording stereophonic records. Stereo records are produced in the same formats and at the same speeds as monophonic long-playing records.

As experience and theoretical understanding have accumulated, some disadvantages and limitations inherent in two-channel stereophony have emerged: the effect of sound failure in the middle between the speakers, a narrow zone in which the stereo effect is felt, distortion in the localization of the sound source. Experiments began on three- and four-channel sound reproduction.

In 1969-1971 The first samples of four-channel (quadraphonic) equipment appeared on the world market: tape recorders, electrophones. Gramophone records. Quadraphony was perceived as a novelty that was unlikely to become widespread: at too high a price - doubling the number of channels - the stereophonic effect was improved.

The first gramophone records were pressed from a mixture based on shellac, which is a naturally occurring resin; later shellac was replaced by synthetic resins. Vinylite resin is widely used. The exact composition of each brand of gramophone records was protected as a trade secret.

Recording of gramophone records was carried out only in special recording studios. In the 1940-1950s in Moscow on Gorky Street there was a studio where for a small fee you could record a small record with a diameter of 15 centimeters - a sound “hello” to your family or friends. In those same years, clandestine recordings of records of jazz music and thieves' songs, which were persecuted in those years, were carried out using homemade recording devices. The material for them was spent X-ray film. These plates were called “on the ribs” because bones were visible on them when held up to light. The sound quality on them was terrible, but in the absence of other sources they were extremely popular, especially among young people. For the manufacture of gramophone records, however, not only plastic masses were proposed, but also a number of other materials. For example, gramophone records made of glass were not only patented in 1909, but also produced (by Carl Pivoda in Prague). According to reviews, these records hissed less than usual. Even gramophone records made of chocolate appeared on sale, including in Russia.

Magnetic sound recording

In 1898, Danish engineer Woldemar Paulsen (1869-1942) invented an apparatus for magnetically recording sound on steel wire. He called it "telegraph". However, the disadvantage of using wire as a carrier was the problem of connecting individual pieces of it. It was impossible to tie them with a knot, since it did not go through the magnetic head. In addition, steel wire gets tangled easily, and thin steel tape cuts your hands. In general, it was not suitable for use.

Subsequently, Paulsen invented a method of magnetic recording on a rotating steel disk, where information was recorded in a spiral by a moving magnetic head. Here it is, the prototype of the floppy disk and hard drive (hard drive), which are so widely used in modern computers! In addition, Paulsen proposed and even implemented the first answering machine using his telegraph.

In 1927, F. Pfleimer developed a technology for producing magnetic tape on a non-magnetic basis. Based on this development, in 1935 the German electrical engineering company AEG and the chemical company IG Farbenindustri demonstrated at the German Radio Exhibition a magnetic tape on a plastic base coated with iron powder. Mastered in industrial production, it cost 5 times less than steel, was much lighter, and most importantly, made it possible to connect the pieces by simple gluing. To use the new magnetic tape, a new sound recording device was developed, which received the brand name "Magnetofon". It became the general name for such devices.

In 1941, German engineers Braunmuell and Weber created a ring magnetic head in combination with ultrasonic bias to record sound. This made it possible to significantly reduce noise and obtain recordings of significantly higher quality than mechanical and optical (developed by that time for sound films).

Magnetic tape is suitable for repeated sound recording. The number of such records is practically unlimited. It is determined only by the mechanical strength of the new information carrier - magnetic tape.

Thus, the owner of a tape recorder, in comparison with a gramophone, not only got the opportunity to reproduce sound recorded once and for all on a gramophone record, but could now record sound himself on magnetic tape, not in a recording studio, but at home or in a concert. hall It was this remarkable property of magnetic sound recording that ensured the widespread dissemination of songs by Bulat Okudzhava, Vladimir Vysotsky and Alexander Galich during the years of the communist dictatorship. It was enough for one amateur to record these songs at their concerts in some club, and this recording spread with lightning speed among many thousands of fans. After all, with the help of two tape recorders you can copy a recording from one magnetic tape to another. The first tape recorders were reel-to-reel tape recorders, in which magnetic film was wound on reels. During recording and playback, the film was rewound from a full reel to an empty one. Before starting recording or playback, it was necessary to “load” the tape, i.e. Pull the free end of the film past the magnetic heads and secure it onto the empty reel.

Reel-to-reel tape recorder with magnetic tape on reels

After the end of World War II, starting in 1945, magnetic recording became widespread throughout the world. On American radio, magnetic recording was first used in 1947 to broadcast a concert by the popular singer Bing Crosby. In this case, parts of a captured German device were used, which was brought to the USA by an enterprising American soldier demobilized from occupied Germany. Bing Crosby then invested in the production of tape recorders. In 1950, 25 models of tape recorders were already sold in the United States.

The first two-track tape recorder was released by the German company AEG in 1957, and in 1959 this company released the first four-track tape recorder.

At first, tape recorders were tube-based, and only in 1956 the Japanese company Sony created the first all-transistor tape recorder.

Later, reel-to-reel tape recorders were replaced by cassette tape recorders. The first such device was developed by Philips in 1961-1963. In it, both miniature reels - with magnetic film and empty - are placed in a special compact cassette and the end of the film is pre-fixed to the empty reel. Thus, the process of charging the tape recorder with film is significantly simplified. The first compact cassettes were released by Philips in 1963. And even later, two-cassette tape recorders appeared, in which the process of dubbing from one cassette to another was simplified as much as possible. Recording on compact cassettes is two-sided. They are released for recording times of 60, 90 and 120 minutes (on both sides).

Cassette tape recorder and compact cassette

Based on a standard compact cassette, Sony has developed a portable player the size of a postcard (Fig. 5.11)<#"117" src="/wimg/14/doc_zip11.jpg" />

Cassette player

The compact cassette took root not only on the street, but also in cars for which the car radio was produced. It is a combination of a radio and a cassette recorder.

In addition to the compact cassette, a matchbox-sized microcassette was created for portable voice recorders and telephones with answering machines.

A dictaphone (from the Latin dicto - I say, I dictate) is a type of tape recorder for recording speech for the purpose, for example, of subsequent printing of its text.

Micro cassette

All mechanical cassette voice recorders contain more than 100 parts, some of which are movable. The recording head and electrical contacts wear out over several years. The hinged lid also breaks easily. Cassette recorders use an electric motor to pull magnetic tape past recording heads.

Digital voice recorders differ from mechanical voice recorders in the complete absence of moving parts. They use solid-state flash memory as a storage medium instead of magnetic film.

Digital voice recorders convert an audio signal (such as a voice) into digital code and write it to the memory chip. The operation of such a voice recorder is controlled by a microprocessor. The absence of a tape mechanism, recording and erasing heads greatly simplifies the design of digital voice recorders and makes it more reliable. For ease of use, they are equipped with a liquid crystal display. The main advantages of digital voice recorders are the almost instantaneous search for the desired recording and the ability to transfer the recording to a personal computer, in which you can not only store these recordings, but also edit them, re-record them without the help of a second voice recorder, etc.

Optical discs

In 1979, Philips and Sony created a completely new storage medium that replaced the gramophone record - an optical disc (Compact Disk - CD) for recording and playing back sound. In 1982, mass production of CDs began at a plant in Germany. Microsoft and Apple Computer made significant contributions to the popularization of the CD.

A CD can store a huge amount of information in a small physical volume. Of no small importance is the ability to repeatedly read recorded data without wearing out the media, which is associated with the absence of any mechanical contact of the reading device with the surface carrying information. To this should be added the relatively low cost of the disks themselves and the devices needed to work with them. These advantages cannot but attract everyone who has to store huge amounts of data with minimal risk their losses. And there are more and more of them. Wherever there are computers, there will definitely be powerful programs, archives and databases, images and sounds converted into digital form. It is convenient to store all this on a CD.

A modern CD is a plastic disk with a diameter of about 120 and a thickness of approximately 1 mm, having a hole with a diameter of 15 mm in the center. Around the hole there is an area about 10 mm wide for clamping in the spindle that rotates the disk. One side of the CD is usually beautifully designed and has brief information about the contents of the records.

The other one glitters and shimmers with all the colors of the rainbow. It has another visually distinguishable ring around the clamping area, which is stamped with a serial number in a barcode or other code, often understandable only to the manufacturer of the disc.

The most common CDs have the structure shown in Fig:

A thin reflective layer 2 of aluminum is applied to the acrylic plastic base 1. The metal is covered with a transparent protective polycarbonate film 3. The data is read by a laser beam 4. The usual CD manufacturing process consists of several stages: preparing data for recording, making a master disc (original) and matrices (negatives of the master disc), CD replication.

Information is applied to the smooth surface of an aluminum master disk with a laser beam, which, by changing the structure of the metal (in other words, burning it out), creates microscopic depressions on it. The alternation of differently reflective depressions and flat areas represents the data in the binary form familiar to computers. Note that the dimensions of the cavities formed by the laser beam are very small - several dozen of them can fit on a segment whose length does not exceed the thickness of a human hair.

What follows is reminiscent of making ordinary gramophone records. Negative copies of the master disc serve as matrices for pressing information-carrying depressions on the surface of the CD itself, which remain to be coated with aluminum, a protective layer to be applied, and the necessary inscriptions to be provided. It is worth noting that there are other CD production technologies, including rewritable and re-writable, some of which will be discussed below.

Under the CD, inserted into the drive with the shiny side down and secured in a rotating spindle, the reading device moves along a radius using a servomotor.

It consists of a semiconductor laser 1, a beam splitting prism 2 with a lens 3 that focuses the beam on the surface of the disk 4, and a photodetector 5. The lens is equipped with drives for fine-tuning the position of the beam on the information track. It is clear that a laser of much lower power is used for reading than the one used to burn depressions on the surface of the master disk.

The prism directs the beam reflected by the aluminum surface to the photodetector. If it is reflected from a shiny island between the depressions, an electric current appears in the photodetector circuit, the presence of which is interpreted as a logical 1. The beam entering the depression is mostly scattered, as a result, the illumination of the photodetector and the current generated by it decrease - a logical 0 is recorded.

The sensitive surface of the photodetector is divided into four sectors. This allows the microprocessor controlling the drive to determine whether the beam is positioned correctly. If the beam deviates from the desired position (and this, as a rule, happens due to errors in the manufacture of the CD and the drive), the spot it creates on the surface of the photodetector will also shift, as a result of which its sectors will be illuminated unequally. By comparing the currents generated by each element of the receiver, the microprocessor generates commands that correct the position of the lens, and, consequently, the beam on the surface of the reflective layer.

As already mentioned, data is recorded on a CD as a sequence of notches and intervals between them, forming one physical information track. Exactly one, in contrast to the usual method of recording on magnetic disks. This single track is a spiral, starting at the center of the disk and unwinding towards its edge. In this way, a CD is a little reminiscent of a traditional gramophone record, differing from it in the direction of the spiral and the contactless method of reading data. The track begins with a service area necessary for synchronizing the drive: the reader must “know” when to expect the arrival of each of the written bits of information. A physical track can be divided into several logical ones.

The continuous stream of bits read from a CD is divided into eight-bit bytes, logically combined into sectors. Each sector consists of 12 bytes of synchronization, four bytes of a header containing the sector number and information about the type of record in it, 2048 bytes of the main data area and 288 bytes of additional information.

Several types of sectors are used. The first one is intended only for digital audio recording. The second one is the main one for all CDs. Its header is extended to 12 bytes due to the additional information area. The remaining part of this area is occupied by a code for detecting data reading errors (four bytes) and two codes that allow them to be corrected: P-parity (172 bytes) and Q-parity (104 bytes). In sectors of the third type, an area of additional information is placed at the user's disposal. So each of them can contain up to 2336 bytes of data, but without the ability to control the correctness of reading and error correction. Each logical track consists of only one type of sector.

The first sectors of a CD contain its contents (Volume Table of Contents, VTOC) - something like a file allocation table (FAT) on magnetic disks. In general, the basic CD format according to the HSG standard (see below) is in many ways reminiscent of the format of a floppy disk, on the zero track of which not only its main parameters are indicated (number of tracks, sectors, etc.), but also information about the placement of data is stored (directories and files).

The system area contains directories with pointers or addresses of areas where data is stored. A significant difference from a floppy disk is that the root directory of a CD contains direct addresses of files located in subdirectories, which greatly facilitates their search.

The classic “single” data read speed, which only audio disc players operate at today, is 175 KB/s or approximately 75 sectors per second. Each logical track containing 300 sectors is played back at this speed in 4 s. The entire CD, if it consists only of type 2 sectors, contains 663.5 MB of data.

Computers use CD drives that provide much faster data reading speeds by increasing the spindle speed and correspondingly changing a number of other technical characteristics.

Optical music CDs replaced mechanically recorded vinyl CDs in 1982, almost simultaneously with the advent of the first IBM personal computers. This was the result of cooperation between two giants of the electronics industry - the Japanese company Sony and the Dutch Philips.

The history of choosing CD capacity is interesting. Sony CEO Akio Morita decided that new products should meet the requirements of classical music lovers. After conducting a survey, it turned out that the most popular classical work in Japan - Beethoven's ninth symphony - lasts about 73 minutes. Apparently, if the Japanese had been more fond of Haydn's short symphonies or Wagner's operas, performed entirely over two evenings, the development of the CD could have taken a different path. But the fact remains a fact. It was decided that the CD should have a playing time of 74 minutes and 33 seconds.

Thus was born the standard known as the Red Book. Not all music lovers were satisfied with the chosen sound duration, but compared to 45 minutes of short-lived vinyl records this was a significant step forward. When 74 minutes of music were converted into information capacity, the result was about 640 MB.

At the end of 1999, Sony announced the creation of a new media, Super Audio CD (SACD). In this case, the technology of the so-called “direct digital stream” DSD (Direct Stream Digital) is used. The 0 to 100 kHz frequency response and 2.8224 MHz sampling rate provide a significant improvement in sound quality compared to conventional CDs. Thanks to the much higher sampling rate, filters are unnecessary during recording and playback, since the human ear perceives this step signal as a “smooth” analogue signal. At the same time, compatibility with the existing CD format is ensured. New single-layer HD discs, dual-layer HD discs, and hybrid dual-layer HD discs and CDs are being released.

Storing audio recordings in digital form on optical discs is much better than storing audio recordings in analog form on gramophone records or cassette tapes. First of all, the durability of recordings increases disproportionately. After all, optical discs are practically eternal - they are not afraid of small scratches, and a laser beam does not damage them when playing recordings. Thus, Sony provides a 50-year warranty on data storage on disks. In addition, CDs are not affected by the interference typical of mechanical and magnetic recording, so the sound quality of digital optical discs is incomparably better. In addition, with digital recording, there is the possibility of computer sound processing, which allows, for example, to restore the original sound of old mono recordings, remove noise and distortion from them, and even turn them into stereo.

Optical CD-ROMs (Compact Disk Read Only Memory - i.e. read-only memory on a CD) are used as storage media in such multimedia computers. Externally, they do not differ from audio CDs used in players and music centers. The information in them is also recorded in digital form.

The existing CDs are being replaced by a new media standard - DVD (Digital Versatil Disc or general purpose digital disk). They look no different from CDs. Their geometric dimensions are the same. The main difference between a DVD disc is its much higher recording density. It holds 7-26 times more information. This is achieved thanks to a shorter laser wavelength and a smaller spot size of the focused beam, which made it possible to halve the distance between tracks. Additionally, DVDs may have one or two layers of information. These can be accessed by adjusting the position of the laser head. On a DVD, each layer of information is twice as thin as on a CD. Therefore, it is possible to connect two disks with a thickness of 0.6 mm into one with a standard thickness of 1.2 mm. In this case, the capacity doubles. In total, the DVD standard provides 4 modifications: single-sided, single-layer 4.7 GB (133 minutes), single-sided, double-layer 8.8 GB (241 minutes), double-sided, single-layer 9.4 GB (266 minutes) and double-sided, dual-layer 17 GB (482 minutes). The minutes shown in parentheses are the playing time of high quality digital video programs with digital multilingual surround sound. The new DVD standard is defined in such a way that future reader models will be designed to be able to play all previous generations of CDs, i.e. in compliance with the principle of "backwards compatibility". The DVD standard allows for significantly longer playback times and improved quality of video movies compared to existing CD-ROMs and LD Video CDs.

The DVD-ROM and DVD-Video formats appeared in 1996, and later the DVD-audio format was developed to record high-quality audio.

DVD drives are slightly improved versions of CD-ROM drives.

CD and DVD optical discs became the first digital media and storage devices for recording and reproducing sound and images.

Conclusion

Throughout the history of the development of the art and science of sound recording, man strives to achieve the highest technical parameters and excellent aesthetic qualities of sound recording and reproduction, which one way or another come down to a simple definition: how close it is to the natural perception of sound by a person with his own ears in a natural environment.

Sound recording today is not only a developed branch of show business with a multi-million dollar turnover, but also (what is much more important) part of the musical and social culture that shapes the aesthetic and ethical positions of the world's youth. The fact that 97 percent of listeners are familiar with classical works not in live concert performances, but in recordings, does not surprise anyone. Interdisciplinary conferences and seminars are held annually, devoted to both the problems of standardization and the problems of preserving and restoring recordings, and the creation of international audio archival resources. Experts are engaged in endless debate about the advantages and disadvantages of various signal conversion methods in audio engineering, and the rate of obsolescence of sound recording and reproducing equipment beyond the sound barrier. All this makes the task of historical and technical analysis of the development of sound technology more than relevant.

(fde_message_value)

About the history of sound recording

Today, the main sound recording methods include:
- mechanical
- magnetic
- optical and magneto-optical sound recording
- recording to solid-state semiconductor flash memory

Attempts to create devices that could reproduce sounds were made back in Ancient Greece. In the IV-II centuries BC. e. there were theaters of self-moving figures - androids. The movements of some of them were accompanied by mechanically produced sounds that formed melodies.

During the Renaissance, a number of different mechanical musical instruments were created that reproduced this or that melody at the right moment: barrel organs, music boxes, boxes, snuff boxes.

In the Middle Ages, chimes were created - tower or large room clocks with a musical mechanism that chime in a certain melodic sequence of tones or perform small musical pieces. Such are the Kremlin chimes and Big Ben in London.

Mechanical musical instruments are just automata that reproduce artificially created sounds. The problem of preserving the sounds of living life for a long time was solved much later.

Many centuries before the invention of mechanical sound recording, musical notation appeared - a graphic way of depicting musical works on paper (Fig. 1). In ancient times, melodies were written in letters, and modern musical notation (with the designation of pitches, durations of tones, tonality and musical lines) began to develop in the 12th century. At the end of the 15th century, music printing was invented, when notes began to be printed from type, like books.

Rice. 1. Musical writing

It was possible to record and then play back recorded sounds only in the second half of the 19th century after the invention of mechanical sound recording.

Mechanical sound recording

In 1877, the American scientist Thomas Alva Edison invented a sound recording device - the phonograph, which for the first time made it possible to record the sound of the human voice. For mechanical recording and playback of sound, Edison used rollers covered with tin foil (Fig. 2). Such foils were hollow cylinders with a diameter of about 5 cm and a length of 12 cm.

Edison Thomas Alva (1847-1931), American inventor and entrepreneur.

Author of more than 1000 inventions in the field of electrical engineering and communications. He invented the world's first sound recording device - the phonograph, improved the incandescent lamp, telegraph and telephone, built the world's first public power station in 1882, and in 1883 discovered the phenomenon of thermionic emission, which subsequently led to the creation of electronic or radio tubes.

In the first phonograph, a metal roller was rotated using a crank, moving axially with each revolution due to the screw threads on the drive shaft. Tin foil (staniol) was placed on the roller. A steel needle connected to a membrane of parchment touched it. A metal cone horn was attached to the membrane. When recording and playing back sound, the roller had to be rotated manually at a speed of 1 revolution per minute. When the roller rotated in the absence of sound, the needle extruded a spiral groove (or groove) of constant depth into the foil. When the membrane vibrated, the needle was pressed into the tin in accordance with the perceived sound, creating a groove of variable depth. This is how the “deep recording” method was invented.

During the first test of his apparatus, Edison pulled the foil tightly onto the cylinder, brought the needle to the surface of the cylinder, carefully began to rotate the handle and sang the first stanza of the children's song "Mary Had a Little Lamb" into a megaphone. Then he retracted the needle, returned the cylinder to its original position with the handle, inserted the needle into the drawn groove and began to rotate the cylinder again. And from the megaphone a children's song sounded quietly but clearly.

In 1885, American inventor Charles Tainter (1854-1940) developed the graphophone - a foot-operated phonograph (like a foot-operated sewing machine) - and replaced the tin sheets of the rollers with a wax paste. Edison bought Tainter's patent, and removable wax rollers began to be used for recording instead of foil rollers. The pitch of the sound groove was about 3 mm, so the recording time per roller was very short.

To record and reproduce sound, Edison used the same device - the phonograph.

Rice. 2. Edison's phonograph

Rice. 3. T.A. Edison with his phonograph

The main disadvantages of wax rollers are their fragility and the impossibility of mass replication. Each entry existed in only one copy.

The phonograph existed in almost unchanged form for several decades. It ceased production as a device for recording musical works at the end of the first decade of the 20th century, but was used as a voice recorder for almost 15 years. Rollers for it were produced until 1929.

Ten years later, in 1887, the inventor of the gramophone, E. Berliner, replaced the rollers with disks, from which copies can be made - metal matrices. With their help, the familiar gramophone records were pressed (Fig. 4 a.). One matrix made it possible to print an entire edition - at least 500 records. This was the main advantage of Berliner's records compared to Edison's wax rollers, which could not be replicated. Unlike Edison's phonograph, Berliner developed one device for recording sound - a recorder, and another for reproducing sound - a gramophone.

Instead of deep recording, transverse recording was used, i.e. the needle left a sinuous trail of constant depth. Subsequently, the membrane was replaced by highly sensitive microphones that convert sound vibrations into electrical vibrations, and electronic amplifiers.

Rice. 4(a). Gramophone and record

Rice. 4(b). American inventor Emil Berliner

Emil Berliner (1851-1929) - American inventor German origin. Immigrated to the USA in 1870. In 1877, after Alexander Bell invented the telephone, he made several inventions in the field of telephony, and then turned his attention to the problems of sound recording. He replaced the wax roller used by Edison with a flat disk - the gramophone record - and developed the technology for its mass production. Edison responded to Berliner’s invention as follows: “This machine has no future,” and until the end of his life he remained an implacable opponent of the disk sound carrier.

Berliner first demonstrated a prototype of the gramophone record matrix at the Franklin Institute. It was a zinc circle with an engraved soundtrack. The inventor coated a zinc disk with wax paste, recorded sound on it in the form of sound grooves, and then etched it with acid. The result was a metal copy of the recording. Later, a layer of copper was built up on the wax-coated disk using electroplating. This copper "mold" keeps the sound grooves convex. Copies are made from this galvanic disk - positive and negative. Negative copies are matrices from which up to 600 gramophone records can be printed. The record obtained in this way had greater volume and better quality. Berliner demonstrated such records in 1888, and this year can be considered the beginning of the era of recordings.

Five years later, a method of galvanic replication from the positive of a zinc disk was developed, as well as a technology for pressing gramophone records using a steel printing matrix. Initially, Berliner made records from celluloid, rubber, and ebonite. Soon, ebonite was replaced by a composite mass based on shellac, a wax-like substance produced by tropical insects. The records became better and cheaper, but their main drawback was their low mechanical strength. Shellac records were produced until the middle of the 20th century, in recent years - in parallel with long-playing records.

Until 1896, the disc had to be rotated manually, and this was the main obstacle to the widespread use of gramophones. Emil Berliner announced a competition for a spring motor - inexpensive, technologically advanced, reliable and powerful. And such an engine was designed by mechanic Eldridge Johnson, who came to Berliner’s company. From 1896 to 1900 About 25,000 of these engines were produced. Only then did Berliner's gramophone become widespread.

The first records were single-sided. In 1903, a 12-inch disc with recording on two sides was first released. It could be “played” in a gramophone using a mechanical pickup - a needle and a membrane. Sound amplification was achieved using a bulky bell. Later, a portable gramophone was developed: a gramophone with a bell hidden in the body (Fig. 5).

Rice. 5. Gramophone

The gramophone (from the name of the French company "Pathe") had the shape of a portable suitcase. The main disadvantages of gramophone records were their fragility, poor sound quality and short playing time - only 3-5 minutes (at a speed of 78 rpm). In the pre-war years, stores even accepted “broken” records for recycling. The gramophone needles had to be changed frequently. The plate rotated using a spring motor, which had to be “started” with a special handle. However, due to its modest size and weight, simplicity of design and independence from the electrical network, the gramophone has become very widespread among lovers of classical, pop and dance music. Until the middle of our century, it was an indispensable accessory for home parties and country trips. The records were produced in three standard sizes: minion, grand and giant.

The gramophone was replaced by an electrophone, better known as a record player (Fig. 7). Instead of a spring motor, it uses an electric motor to rotate the record, and instead of a mechanical pickup, first a piezoelectric one was used, and later a better one - a magnetic one.

Rice. 6. Gramophone with electromagnetic adapter

Rice. 7. Player

These pickups convert the vibrations of a stylus running along the sound track of a record into an electrical signal, which, after amplification in an electronic amplifier, is sent to a loudspeaker. And in 1948-1952, fragile gramophone records were replaced by so-called “long play” records - more durable, practically unbreakable, and most importantly, providing much longer playing time. This was achieved by narrowing and bringing the sound tracks closer together, as well as by reducing the number of revolutions from 78 to 45, and more often to 33 1/3 revolutions per minute. The quality of sound reproduction during playback of such records has improved significantly. In addition, since 1958, stereophonic records began to be produced, creating a surround sound effect. The turntable's needles are also significantly more durable. They began to be made from solid materials, and they completely replaced the short-lived gramophone needles. The recording of gramophone records was carried out only in special recording studios. In the 1940-1950s in Moscow on Gorky Street there was a studio where for a small fee you could record a small record with a diameter of 15 centimeters - a sound “hello” to your family or friends. In those same years, clandestine recordings of records of jazz music and thieves' songs, which were persecuted in those years, were carried out using homemade recording devices. The material for them was spent X-ray film. These plates were called “on the ribs” because bones were visible on them when held up to light. The sound quality on them was terrible, but in the absence of other sources they were extremely popular, especially among young people.

Magnetic sound recording

Rice. 8. Waldemar Paulsen

Vladimir Vysotsky recalled that when he first arrived in Togliatti and walked along its streets, he heard his hoarse voice from the windows of many houses.

The first tape recorders were reel-to-reel tape recorders - in them the magnetic film was wound on reels (Fig. 9). During recording and playback, the film was rewound from a full reel to an empty one. Before starting recording or playback, it was necessary to “load” the tape, i.e. Pull the free end of the film past the magnetic heads and secure it onto the empty reel.

Rice. 9. Reel-to-reel tape recorder with magnetic tape on reels

After the end of World War II, beginning in 1945, magnetic recording became widespread throughout the world. On American radio, magnetic recording was first used in 1947 to broadcast a concert by the popular singer Bing Crosby. In this case, parts of a captured German device were used, which was brought to the USA by an enterprising American soldier demobilized from occupied Germany. Bing Crosby then invested in the production of tape recorders. In 1950, 25 models of tape recorders were already sold in the United States.

The first two-track tape recorder was released by the German company AEG in 1957, and in 1959 this company released the first four-track tape recorder.

At first, tape recorders were tube-based, and only in 1956 the Japanese company Sony created the first all-transistor tape recorder.

Later, reel-to-reel tape recorders were replaced by cassette tape recorders. The first such device was developed by Philips in 1961-1963. In it, both miniature reels - with magnetic film and empty - are placed in a special compact cassette and the end of the film is pre-fixed to the empty reel (Fig. 10). Thus, the process of charging the tape recorder with film is significantly simplified. The first compact cassettes were released by Philips in 1963. And even later, two-cassette tape recorders appeared, in which the process of dubbing from one cassette to another was simplified as much as possible. Recording on compact cassettes is two-sided. They are released for recording times of 60, 90 and 120 minutes (on both sides).

Rice. 10. Cassette tape recorder and compact cassette

Based on a standard compact cassette, Sony developed a portable player the size of a postcard (Fig. 11). You can put it in your pocket or attach it to your belt and listen to it while walking or on the subway. It was called Walkman, i.e. “a walking man”, relatively cheap, was in great demand on the market and for some time was the favorite “toy” of young people.

Rice. 11. Cassette player

The compact cassette took root not only on the street, but also in cars for which the car radio was produced. It is a combination of a radio and a cassette recorder.

In addition to the compact cassette, a microcassette (Fig. 12) the size of a matchbox was created for portable voice recorders and telephones with answering machines.

A dictaphone (from the Latin dicto - I say, I dictate) is a type of tape recorder for recording speech for the purpose, for example, of subsequent printing of its text.

Rice. 12. Microcassette

Digital voice recorders differ from mechanical voice recorders in the complete absence of moving parts. They use solid-state flash memory as a storage medium instead of magnetic film.

Digital voice recorders convert an audio signal (for example, voice) into a digital code and record it into a memory chip. The operation of such a voice recorder is controlled by a microprocessor. The absence of a tape mechanism, recording and erasing heads greatly simplifies the design of digital voice recorders and makes it more reliable. For ease of use, they are equipped with a liquid crystal display. The main advantages of digital voice recorders are the almost instantaneous search for the desired recording and the ability to transfer the recording to a personal computer, in which you can not only store these recordings, but also edit them, re-record them without the help of a second voice recorder, etc.

Optical discs (optical recording)

Compared to mechanical sound recording, it has a number of advantages - very high recording density and complete absence mechanical contact between the media and the reading device during recording and playback. Using a laser beam, the signals are digitally recorded on a rotating optical disk.

As a result of recording, a spiral track is formed on the disk, consisting of depressions and smooth areas. In playback mode, a laser beam focused on a track moves across the surface of a rotating optical disk and reads the recorded information. In this case, depressions are read as zeros, and areas that evenly reflect light are read as ones. The digital recording method ensures almost complete absence of interference and high sound quality. High recording density is achieved due to the ability to focus the laser beam into a spot smaller than 1 micron. This provides big time recording and playback.

Rice. 13. Optical CD

To play CDs, you can use players (the so-called CD players), stereos, and even laptop computers equipped with a special drive (the so-called CD-ROM drive) and sound speakers. To date, there are more than 600 million CD players and more than 10 billion CDs in the hands of users around the world! Portable portable CD players, like magnetic compact cassette players, are equipped with headphones (Fig. 14).

Rice. 14. CD player

Rice. 15. Radio with CD player and digital tuner

Rice. 16. Music center

Music CDs are recorded at the factory. Like gramophone records, they can only be listened to. However, in recent years, optical CDs have been developed for single (so-called CD-R) and multiple (so-called CD-RW) recording on a personal computer equipped with a special disk drive. This makes it possible to make recordings on them in amateur conditions. You can record on CD-R discs only once, but on CD-RW - many times: like on a tape recorder, you can erase the previous recording and make a new one in its place.

The digital recording method made it possible to combine text and graphics with sound and moving images on the personal computer. This technology is called "multimedia".

Optical CD-ROMs (Compact Disk Read Only Memory - i.e. read-only memory on a CD) are used as storage media in such multimedia computers. Outwardly, they do not differ from audio CDs used in players and music centers. The information in them is also recorded in digital form.

The DVD-ROM and DVD-Video formats appeared in 1996, and later the DVD-audio format was developed to record high-quality audio.

DVD drives are slightly improved versions of CD-ROM drives.

CD and DVD optical discs became the first digital media and storage devices for recording and reproducing sound and images

History of Flash Memory

The history of flash memory cards is connected with the history of mobile digital devices that can be carried with you in a bag, in the breast pocket of a jacket or shirt, or even as a keychain around your neck.

These are miniature MP3 players, digital voice recorders, photo and video cameras, smartphones and pocket personal computers - PDAs, modern cell phone models. Small in size, these devices needed to expand the built-in memory capacity to write and read information.

Such memory should be universal and used to record any type of information in digital form: sound, text, images - drawings, photographs, video information.

The first company to manufacture flash memory and put it on the market was Intel. In 1988, 256 kbit flash memory was demonstrated, which had the dimensions shoe box. It was built according to the logical scheme NOR (in Russian transcription - NOT-OR).

NOR flash memory has relatively slow write and erase speeds, and the number of write cycles is relatively low (about 100,000). Such flash memory can be used when almost permanent storage of data with very infrequent overwriting is required, for example, to store the operating system of digital cameras and mobile phones.

Intel NOR Flash Memory

The second type of flash memory was invented in 1989 by Toshiba. It is built according to the NAND logic circuit (in Russian transcription Ne-I). The new memory was supposed to be a less expensive and faster alternative to NOR flash. Compared to NOR, NAND technology provided ten times more write cycles, as well as higher speeds for both writing and erasing data. And NAND memory cells are half the size of NOR memory, which leads to the fact that a certain area The crystal can accommodate more memory cells.

The name "flash" was introduced by Toshiba, since it is possible to instantly erase the contents of memory (English: "in a flash"). Unlike magnetic, optical and magneto-optical memory, it does not require the use of disk drives using complex precision mechanics and does not contain any moving parts at all. This is its main advantage over all other information carriers and therefore the future lies with it. But the most important advantage of such memory, of course, is storing data without supplying energy, i.e. energy independence.

Flash memory is a chip on a silicon chip. It is built on the principle of maintaining an electrical charge in the memory cells of a transistor for a long time using the so-called “floating gate” in the absence of electrical power. Its full name is Flash Erase EEPROM (Electronically Erasable Programmable ROM). Its elementary cell, in which one bit of information is stored, is not an electrical capacitor, but a field-effect transistor with a specially electrically isolated region - a “floating gate”. An electrical charge placed in this area can be maintained for an indefinitely long time. When one bit of information is written, the unit cell is charged by placing an electrical charge on the floating gate. When erased, this charge is removed from the gate and the cell discharges. Flash memory is non-volatile memory that allows you to save information in the absence of electrical power. It does not consume energy when storing information.

The four most well-known flash memory formats are CompactFlash, MultiMediaCard (MMC), SecureDigital and Memory Stick.

CompactFlash appeared in 1994. It was released by SanDisk. Its dimensions were 43x36x3.3 mm, and the capacity was 16 MB of flash memory. In 2006, the release of 16 GB CompactFlash cards was announced.

MultiMediaCard appeared in 1997. It was developed by Siemens AG and Transcend. Compared to CompactFlash, MMC cards had smaller dimensions - 24x32x1.5 mm. They were used in mobile phones (especially in models with a built-in MP3 player). In 2004, the RS-MMC standard (i.e. “Reduced size MMC”) appeared. RS-MMC cards had a size of 24x18x1.5 mm and could be used with an adapter where old MMC cards had previously been used. .

There are MMCmicro card standards (dimensions only 12x14x1.1 mm) and MMC+, characterized by increased information transfer speed. Currently, MMC cards with a capacity of 2 GB have been released.

Matsushita Electric Co, SanDick Co and Toshiba Co have developed SD - Secure Digital Memory Cards. The association with these companies includes such giants as Intel and IBM. This SD memory is produced by Panasonic, part of the Matsushita concern.

Like the two standards described above, SecureDigital (SD) is open. It was created based on the MultiMediaCard standard, adopting the electrical and mechanical components from the MMC. There is a difference in the number of contacts: MultiMediaCard had 7, and SecureDigital now has 9. However, the similarity of the two standards allows you to use MMC cards instead of SD (but not vice versa, since SD cards have a different thickness - 32x24x2.1 mm).

Along with the SD standard, miniSD and microSD appeared. Cards of this format can be installed both in the miniSD standard slot and in the SD standard slot, however, using a special adapter that allows you to use the mini-card in the same way as a regular SD card. The dimensions of the miniSD card are 20x21.5x1.4 mm.

miniSD cards

microSD cards are currently one of the smallest flash cards - their dimensions are 11x15x1 mm. The main areas of application of these cards are multimedia mobile phones and communicators. Through an adapter, microSD cards can be used in devices with slots for miniSD and SecureDigital flash media.

microSD card

The capacity of SD flash cards has increased to 8 GB or more.

Memory Stick is a typical example of a closed standard developed by Sony in 1998. The developer of a closed standard takes care of promoting it and ensuring compatibility with portable devices. This means a significant narrowing of the distribution of the standard and its further development, since Memory Stick slots (that is, places for installation) are only available in products under the Sony and Sony Ericsson brands.

In addition to Memory Stick cards, the family includes Memory Stick PRO, Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick PRO Duo, Memory Stick PRO-HG and Memory Stick Micro (M2).

The dimensions of the Memory Stick are 50x21.5x2.8 mm, weight - 4 grams, and the memory capacity - technologically could not exceed 128 MB. The appearance of Memory Stick PRO in 2003 was dictated by Sony's desire to give users more memory (the theoretical maximum for cards of this type is 32 GB).

Memory Stick Duo cards are distinguished by their reduced size (20x31x1.6 mm) and weight (2 grams); They are focused on the PDA and mobile phone market. The version with increased capacity is called Memory Stick PRO Duo - a card with a capacity of 8 GB was announced in January 2007.

Memory Stick Micro (size - 15x12.5x1.2 mm) are designed for modern models of mobile phones. The memory size can reach (theoretically) 32 GB, and the maximum data transfer speed is 16 MB/s. M2 cards can be connected to devices that support Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick PRO Duo and SecureDigital using a special adapter. There are already models with 2 GB of memory.

xD-Picture Card is another representative of a closed standard. Introduced in 2002. Actively supported and promoted by Fuji and Olympus, whose digital cameras use the xD-Picture Card. xD stands for extreme digital. The capacity of cards of this standard has already reached 2 GB. xD-Picture Cards do not have a built-in controller, unlike most other standards. This has a positive effect on the size (20 x 25 x 1.78 mm), but gives a low data transfer speed. In the future, it is planned to increase the capacity of this media to 8 GB. Such a significant increase in the capacity of a miniature media became possible thanks to the use of multilayer technology.

In today's highly competitive market for removable flash memory cards, it is necessary to ensure that new media are compatible with existing equipment that supports other flash memory formats. Therefore, simultaneously with flash memory cards, the release of adapters and external reading devices, so-called card readers, connected to the USB input of a personal computer. Individual cards are produced (for a specific type of flash memory card, as well as universal card readers for 3, 4, 5 and even 8 different types of flash memory cards). They are a USB drive - a miniature box that has slots for one or several types of cards at once, and a connector for connecting to the USB input of a personal computer.

Universal card reader for reading several types of flash cards

Sony has released a USB drive with a built-in fingerprint scanner to protect against unauthorized access.

Along with flash cards, flash drives, so-called “flash drives,” are also produced. They are equipped with a standard USB connector and can be directly connected to the USB input of a computer or laptop.

Flash drive with USB-2 connector

Their capacity reaches 1, 2, 4, 8, 10 or more gigabytes, and the price is Lately decreased sharply. They have almost completely replaced standard floppy disks, which require a drive with rotating parts and have a capacity of only 1.44 MB.

Digital photo frames, which are digital photo albums, are created on the basis of flash cards. They are equipped with a liquid crystal display and allow you to view digital photographs, for example, in slide movie mode, in which photographs replace each other at certain intervals, as well as enlarge photographs and examine their individual details. They are equipped with remote controls and speakers that allow you to listen to music and voice explanations of photos. With a memory capacity of 64 MB, they can store 500 photos.

History of MP3 players

The impetus for the emergence of MP3 players was the development of an audio compression format in the mid-80s at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. In 1989, Fraunhofer received a patent for the MP3 compression format in Germany and a few years later it was introduced by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). MPEG (Moving Pictures Experts Group) is the name of an ISO expert group that works to create standards for encoding and compressing video and audio data. Standards prepared by the committee are given the same name. MP3 received the official name MPEG-1 Layer3. This format made it possible to store audio information compressed tens of times, without noticeable loss of playback quality.

The second most important impetus for the advent of MP3 players was the development of portable flash memory. The Fraunhofer Institute also developed the first MP3 player in the early 90s. Then a player from Eiger Labs MPMan F10 and a player Rio PMP300 from Diamond Multimedia appeared. All early players used built-in flash memory (32 or 64 MB) and were connected via a parallel port rather than USB.

MP3 became the first widely accepted audio storage format after CD-Audio. MP3 players were also developed based on hard drives, including the miniature IBM MicroDrive hard drive. One of the pioneers in the use of hard drives (HDD) was Apple. In 2001, it released the first MP3 player, the iPod, with a 5 GB hard drive that could store about 1,000 songs.

It provided 12 hours of battery life thanks to its lithium polymer battery. The dimensions of the first iPod were 100x62x18 mm, weight was 184 grams. The first iPod was only available to Macintosh users. the next version of the iPod, which appeared six months after the release of the first, already included two options - iPod for Windows and iPod for Mac OS. The new iPods received a touch-sensitive scroll wheel instead of a mechanical one and became available in 5GB, 10GB and a little later 20GB versions.

Several generations of iPods have changed, in each of them the characteristics gradually improved, for example, the screen became color, but the hard drive was still used.

Later, flash memory began to be used for MP3 players. They have become smaller, more reliable, durable and cheaper, and have taken the form of miniature keychains that can be worn around the neck, in the breast pocket of a shirt, or in a handbag. Many models of cell phones, smartphones, and PDAs began to perform the function of an MP3 player.

Apple has introduced a new MP3 player, the iPod Nano. It replaces the hard drive with flash memory.

It allowed:

Make the player much more compact - flash memory is smaller in size than a hard drive;
- Reduce the risk of failures and breakdowns by completely eliminating moving parts in the player mechanism;
- Save on battery life, because flash memory consumes significantly less electricity than a hard drive;
- Increase the speed of information transfer.

The player has become much lighter (42 grams instead of 102) and more compact (8.89 x 4.06 x 0.69 versus 9.1 x 5.1 x 1.3 cm), a color display has appeared that allows you to view photos and show an image of the album during playback. Memory capacity is 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB.

At the end of 2007, Apple introduced a new line of iPod players:

iPod nano, iPod classic, iPod touch.
- iPod nano with flash memory can now play video on a 2-inch display with a resolution of 320x204 mm.
- iPod classic with a hard drive has a memory capacity of 80 or 160 GB, allowing you to listen to music for 40 hours and show movies for 7 hours.
- iPod touch with a 3.5-inch widescreen touch screen allows you to control the player with finger movements (English touch) and watch movies and TV shows. With this player you can go online and download music and videos. For this purpose, it has a built-in Wi-Fi module.

Permanent address of the article: About the history of sound recording. History of recording

In the section on the question the first sound recording device? given by the author Marly Hope the best answer is The first device was developed by Thomas Alva Edison, but he had no idea that thanks to his invention the modern recording industry would be created, bringing in multimillion-dollar revenues.
Edison's voice had a metallic tone and was accompanied by a lot of background noise, but the words to the nursery rhyme about Mary and her lamb sounded clear enough. The year was 1877, and an American inventor was producing the first sound recording in history. He called his simple device a phonograph.
The phonograph consisted of a brass roller with a helical groove on the outer surface, covered with tin foil, and a thin disk (membrane) with a steel needle in the center. A manually rotated roller moved along a threaded guide, the sound caused the membrane to vibrate, and the needle left indentations of varying depths in the foil. As a result, the groove of the roller was a recording of sound vibrations. The same device was also used to play the recording: due to the heterogeneity of the grooves on the sound track, the needle “jumped” up and down, causing the membrane to vibrate and reproduce the original sound. Subsequent models used a wax-coated roller, which provided higher sound quality. In 1877, Emil Berliner improved this invention, creating a flat gramophone record and a new way to record a sound track. The sound caused the needle to oscillate from side to side and cut a path in the acid-etched zinc disk. Around 1890, zinc was replaced by wax. Recording quality improved and gramophones increased in popularity. To meet the growing demand for gramophone records, wax master copies began to be made, they were recorded on metal discs, and they were then used to replicate hard rubber or shellac records.

Answer from Eurovision[guru]
Phonograph, invented by Thomas Edison

Answer from Kirill Gribkov[guru]
The first device was developed by Thomas Alva Edison and Tesla Nikola began to invent the device shown in the photo by Vyacheslav Vedin.
Tesla Nikola made a device that would show sound waves.
Nor Thomas Edison refused to use such a device for nothing, and decided to continue development alone after he had a falling out with Tesla Nikola.
and now everyone knows that the gramophone was invented by Thomas Ellison, although as you have already read this is completely untrue.
just type in a search engine:
invention of the gramophone by Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.
everything will become clear there.