Information about Audio

Sound recording and reproduction is the electrical or mechanical inscription and re-creation of sound waves, usually used for the voice or for music.



The two main classes of sound recording technology are analog recording and digital recording.

Early developments

The automatic reproduction of music can be traced back as far as the 14th century, when Flanders introduced a mechanical bell-ringer controlled by a rotating cylinder. Similar designs appeared in barrel organs (15th century), musical clocks (1598), barrel pianos (1805), and musical boxes (1815). All of these machines could play stored music, but they could not play arbitrary sounds, could not record a live performance, and were limited by the physical size of the medium. The first device that could record sound mechanically (but could not play it back) was the phonautograph, developed in 1857 by Edouard-Leon Scott.

The player piano, first demonstrated in 1876, used a punched paper scroll that could store an arbitrarily long piece of music. This piano roll moved over a device known as the 'tracker bar', which first had 58 holes, was expanded to 65 and then was upgraded to 88 holes (generally, one for each piano key). When a perforation passed over the hole, the note sounded. Piano rolls were the first stored music medium that could be mass-produced, although the hardware to play them was much too expensive for personal use. Technology to record a live performance onto a piano roll was not developed until 1904. Piano rolls have been in continuous mass production since around 1898.[1] They began to decline in the 1920's although one type is still being made today. The fairground organ, developed in 1892, used a similar system of accordion-folded punched cardboard books.

Cylinder phonograph

The first practical sound recording and reproduction device was the mechanical cylinder phonograph, invented by Thomas Edison in 1877 and patented in 1878. The invention soon spread across the globe and over the next two decades the commercial recording, distribution and sale of sound recordings became a growing new international industry, with the most popular titles selling millions of units by the early 1900s. The development of mass-production techniques enabled cylinder recordings to become a major new consumer item in industrial countries and the cylinder was the main consumer format from the late 1880s until around 1910.

Disk phonograph

The next major technical development was the invention of the gramophone disk, generally credited to Emile Berliner and commercially introduced in the United States in 1889.

Discs were easier to manufacture, transport and store, and they had the additional benefit of being louder (marginally) than cylinders, which by necessity, were single-sided. Sales of the Gramophone record overtook the cylinder ca. 1910, and by the end of World War I the disc had become the dominant commercial recording format. In various permutations, the audio disc format became the primary medium for consumer sound recordings until the end of the 20th century, and the double-sided 78rpm shellac disc was the standard consumer music format from the early 1910s to the late 1950s.

Although there was no universally accepted speed, and various companies offered discs that played at several different speeds, the major recording companies eventually settled on a de facto industry standard of 78.26 revolutions per minute, which gave the disc format its common nickname, the "seventy-eight". Discs were made of shellac or similar brittle plastic like materials, played with metal needles, and had a distinctly limited playing life.

Electrical recording

Sound recording began as a mechanical process and remained so until the 1920s (with the exception of the 1898 Telegraphone) when a string of groundbreaking inventions in the field of electronics revolutionised sound recording and the young recording industry. These included sound transducers such as microphones and loudspeakers, and various electronic devices such as the mixing desk, designed for the amplification and modification of electrical sound signals.

After the Edison phonograph itself, arguably the most significant advances in sound recording were the electronic systems invented by two American scientists between 1900 and 1924.

In 1906 Lee De Forest invented the "Audion" triode vacuum-tube, electronic valve, which could greatly amplify weak electrical signals, (one early use was to amplify long distance telephone in 1915) which became the basis of all subsequent electrical sound systems until the invention of the transistor. The valve was quickly followed by the invention of the Regenerative circuit, Super-Regenerative circuit and the Superheterodyne receiver circuit, all of which were invented and patented by the young electronics genius Edwin Armstrong between 1914 and 1922. Armstrong's inventions made higher fidelity electrical sound recording and reproduction a practical reality, facilitating the development of the electronic amplifier and many other devices; after 1925 these systems had become standard in the recording and radio industry.

While E. H. Armstrong published studies about the fundamental operation of the triode vacuum tube before World War I, scientists at Bell Telephone Laboratories achieved their own understanding about the triode and were utilizing the audion as a repeater in weak telephone circuits. By 1925 it was possible to place a long distance telephone call with these repeaters between New York and San Francisco in 20 minutes, both parties being clearly heard.

With this technical prowess, Joseph P. Maxfield and Henry C. Harrison from Bell Telephone Laboratories were skilled in using mechanical analogs of electrical circuits and applied these principles to sound recording and reproduction.^[1] They were ready to demonstrate their results by 1924 using the Wente condenser microphone and the vacuum tube amplifier to drive the "rubber line" wax recorder to cut a master audio disc. ^[2]

Meanwhile, radio continued to develop. Armstrong's groundbreaking inventions (including FM radio) also made possible the broadcasting of long-range, high-quality radio transmissions of voice and music. The importance of Armstong's Superheterodyne circuit cannot be under-estimated -- it was the central component of almost all analog amplification and radio-frequency transmitter and receiver devices of the 20th century.

Beginning during World War One, experiments were undertaken in the United States and Great Britain to reproduce among other things, the sound of a Submarine (u-boat) for training purposes. The acoustical recordings of that time proved entirely unable to reproduce the sounds, and other methods were actively sought. Radio had developed independently to this point, and now Bell Laboritories sought a marriage of the two disparate technologies, greater than the two separately. The first experiments were not very promising, but by 1920 greater sound fidelity was achieved using the electrical system than had ever been realized acoustically. One early recording made without fanfare or announcement was the dedication of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington Cemetery.

By early 1924 such dramatic progress had been made, that Bell Labs arranged a demonstration for the leading recording companies, Victor Talking Machine, and Columbia Phonograph Co's.

Columbia, always in financial straits, could not afford it, and Victor, essentially leaderless since the mental collapse of founder Eldridge Johnson, left the demonstration without comment. English Columbia, by then a separate company, got hold of a test pressing made by Pathe' from these sessions, and realized the immediate and urgent need to have the new system. Bell was only offering its method to United States Companies, and to circumvent this, Managing Director Louis Sterling of English Columbia, bought his once parent company, and signed up for electrical recording. When Victor Talking Machine was apprised of the Columbia deal, they too quickly signed. Columbia made its first electrical recordings on February 25, 1925 with Victor following a few weeks later. The two then agreed privately to "be quiet" until November 1925, by which time enough electrical repertory would be available.

Other recording formats

This period also saw several other historic developments including the introduction of the first practical magnetic sound recording system, the magnetic wire recorder, which was based on the work of Danish inventor Valdemar Poulsen. Magnetic wire recorders were effective, but the sound quality was poor, so between the wars they were primarily used for voice recording and marketed as business dictating machines.

In the 1930s radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi developed a system of magnetic sound recording using steel tape. This was the same material used to make razor blades, and not surprisingly the fearsome Marconi-Stille recorders were considered so dangerous that technicians had to operate them from another room for safety. Because of the high recording speeds required, they used enormous reels about one metre in diameter, and the thin tape frequently broke, sending jagged lengths of razor steel flying around the studio.

The other major invention in sound recording in this period was the optical sound-on-film system, also generally credited to Lee De Forest. Although famous early "Talkies" like The Jazz Singer used a sound-on-disc system, the film industry eventually adopted the optical sound-on-film system and it revolutionised the movie industry in the 1930s, ushering in the era of 'talking pictures'. Optical sound-on-film, based on the photoelectric cell, became the standard film audio system throughout the world until it was superseded in the 1960s.

Magnetic tape

Main article: magnetic tape sound recording

The other major inventions of this period were magnetic tape and the tape recorder (Telegraphone). Paper-based tape was first used but was soon superseded by polyester and acetate backing due to dust drop and hiss. Acetate was more brittle than polyester and snapped easily. This technology, the basis for almost all commercial recording from the 1950s to the 1980s, was invented by German audio engineers in the 1930s, who also discovered the technique of AC biasing, which dramatically improved the frequency response of tape recordings. Tape recording was perfected just after the war by American audio engineer John T. Mullin with the help of Crosby Enterprises (Bing Crosby), whose pioneering recorders were based on captured German recorders, and the Ampex company produced the first commercially available tape recorders in the late 1940s.

Magnetic tape brought about sweeping changes in both radio and the recording industry. Sound could be recorded, erased and re-recorded on the same tape many times, sounds could be duplicated from tape to tape with only minor loss of quality, and recordings could now be very precisely edited by physically cutting the tape and rejoining it.

Within a few years of the introduction of the first commercial tape recorder, the Ampex 200 model, launched in 1948, American musician-inventor Les Paul had invented the first multitrack tape recorder, bringing about another technical revolution in the recording industry. Tape made possible the first sound recordings totally created by electronic means, opening the way for the bold sonic experiments of the Musique Concrète school and avant garde composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, which in turn led to the innovative pop music recordings of artists such as Frank Zappa, The Beatles and The Beach Boys.

Tape enabled the radio industry for the first time to pre-record many sections of program content such as advertising, which formerly had to be presented live, and it also enabled the creation and duplication of complex, high-fidelity, long-duration recordings of entire programs. It also, for the first time, allowed broadcasters, regulators and other interested parties to undertake comprehensive logging of radio broadcasts. Innovations like multitracking and tape echo enabled radio programs and advertisements to be pre-produced to a level of complexity and sophistication that was previously unattainable and tape also led to significant changes to the pacing of program content, thanks to the introduction of the endless-loop tape cartridge.

The vinyl microgroove record was introduced in the late 1940s, and the two main vinyl formats -- the 7-inch single turning at 45 rpm and the 12-inch LP (long-playing) record turning at 33⅓ rpm -- had totally replaced the 78 rpm shellac disc by the end of the 1950s. Vinyl offered improved performance, both in stamping and in playback, and came to be generally played with polished diamond styli, and when played properly (precise tracking weight, etc.) offered longer life. Vinyl records were, over-optimistically, advertised as "unbreakable". They were not, but were much less brittle and breakable than shellac. Nearly all were tinted black, but some were colored, as red, swirled, translucent, etc.

Stereo and Hi-fi

Magnetic tape also enabled the development of the first practical commercial sound systems that could record and reproduce high-fidelity stereophonic sound. Experiments with stereo dated back to the 1880s and during the 1930s and 1940s there were many attempts to record in stereo using discs, but these were hampered by problems with synchronization.

The first major breakthrough in practical stereo sound was made by Bell Laboratories, who in 1937 demonstrated a practical system of two-channel stereo, using dual optical sound tracks on film. Major movie studios quickly developed three-track and four-track sound systems, and the first stereo sound recording in a commercial film was made by Judy Garland for the MGM movie Listen, Darling in 1938. The first commercially-released movie with a full stereo soundtrack was Walt Disney's Fantasia, released in 1940.

German audio engineers working on magnetic tape are reported to have developed stereo recording by 1943, but it was not until the introduction of the first commercial two-track tape recorders by Ampex in the late 1940s that stereo tape recording became commercially feasible. However, despite the availability of multitrack tape, stereo did not become the standard system for commercial music recording for some years and it remained a specialist market during the 1950s. This changed after the late 1957 introduction of the "Westrex stereo phonograph disc".

Most pop singles were mixed into monophonic sound until the mid 1960s, it was common for major pop releases to be issued in both mono and stereo until the early 1970s. Many Sixties pop albums now available only in stereo were originally intended to be released only in mono, and the so-called "stereo" version of these albums were created by simply separating the two tracks of the master tape. In the mid Sixties, as stereo became more popular, many mono recordings (such as The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds) were remastered using the so-called "fake stereo" method, which spread the sound across the stereo field by directing higher-frequency sound into one channel and lower-frequency sounds into the other.

The Fifties and beyond

Magnetic tape transformed the recording industry, and by the late-1950s the vast majority of commercial recordings were being mastered on tape. The electronics revolution that followed the invention of the transistor brought other radical changes, the most important of which was the introduction of the world's first "personal music device", the miniaturized transistor radio, which became a major consumer luxury item in the 1960s, transforming radio broadcasting from a static group experience into a mobile, personal listening activity.

The first multitrack recording made using magnetic tape was "How High the Moon" by Les Paul, on which Paul played eight overdubbed guitar tracks. In the 1960s Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, Frank Zappa and The Beatles (with producer George Martin) were among the first popular artists to explore the possibilities of multitrack techniques and effects on their landmark albums Pet Sounds, Freak Out! and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The next important innovation was the compact cassette, introduced by the Philips electronics company in 1964. It eventually entirely replaced the competing format, 8-track tape (used primarily in cars). The musicassette became a major consumer audio format and advances in microelectronics eventually allowed the development of the Sony Walkman, introduced in the 1970s, which was the first personal music player and gave a major boost to the mass distribution of music recordings. Cassettes became the first successful consumer recording/re-recording medium. The gramophone record was a pre-recorded playback only medium, and reel-to-reel tape was too difficult for most consumers and far less portable.

A key advance in audio fidelity came with the Dolby A noise reduction system, invented by Ray Dolby and introduced in 1966. A competing system dbx, invented by David Blackmer, found most success in professional audio. Dolby's noise reduction system, which greatly improved the sound of cassette tape recordings by reducing the practical effect of the recorded hiss inherent in the narrow tape used. It, and variants, also eventually found wide application in the recording and film industries. Dolby A was crucial to the popularisation and commercial success of the compact cassette as a domestic recording and playback medium, and became a part of the booming "hi-fi" market of the 1970s and beyond.

The multitrack audio cartridge had been in wide use in the radio industry, from the late 1950s to the 1980s, but in the 1960s the pre-recorded 8-track cartridge was launched as a consumer audio format. Aimed particularly at the automotive market, they were the first practical, affordable car hi-fi systems, and could produce superior sound quality to the compact cassette. However the smaller size and greater durability -- augmented by the ability to create home-recorded music "compilations" since 8-track recorders were rare -- saw the cassette become the dominant consumer format for portable audio devices in the 1970s and 1980s.

There had been experiments with multi-channel sound for many years -- usually for special musical or cultural events -- but the first commercial application of the concept came in the early 1970s with the introduction of Quadraphonic sound. This spin-off development from multitrack recording used four tracks (instead of the two used in stereo) and four speakers to create a 360-degree audio field around the listener. Following the release of the first consumer 4-channel hi-fi systems, a number of popular albums were released in one of the competing four-channel formats; among the best known are Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells and Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. Quadraphonic sound was not a commercial success, partly because of competing and somewhat incompatible four-channel sound systems (eg, CBS, JVC, Dynaco and others all had systems) and generally poor quality, even when played as intended on the correct equipment, of the released music. It eventually faded out in the late 1970s, although this early venture paved the way for the eventual introduction of domestic Surround Sound systems in home theatre use, which have gained enormous popularity since the introduction of the DVD. This time despite the confusion of multiple surround sound systems, sometimes more than one from a single supplier.

The replacement of the thermionic valve(vacuum tube) by the smaller, cooler and less power-hungry transistor also accelerated the sale of consumer high-fidelity "hi-fi" sound systems from the 1960s onward. In the 1950s most record players were monophonic and had relatively low sound quality; few consumers could afford high-quality stereophonic sound systems. In the 1960s, American manufacturers introduced a new generation of "modular" hi-fi components -- separate turntables, pre-amplifiers, amplifiers, both combined as integrated amplifiers, tape recorders, and other ancillary equipment (like the graphic equaliser), which could be connected together to create a complete home sound system. These developments were rapidly taken up by Japanese electronics companies, which soon flooded the world market with relatively cheap, high-quality components. By the 1980s, corporations like Sony had become world leaders in the music recording and playback industry.

Digital recording

The invention of digital sound recording and the compact disc in 1982 brought significant improvements in the durability of consumer recordings. The CD initiated another massive wave of change in the consumer music industry, with vinyl records effectively relegated to a small niche market by the mid-1990s.

The most recent and revolutionary developments have been in digital recording, with the invention of purely electronic consumer recording formats such as the WAV digital music file and the compressed file type, the MP3. This generated a new type of portable solid-state computerised digital audio player, the MP3 player. Another invention, by Sony, was the minidisc player, using ATRAC compression on small, cheap, re-writeable discs. This was in vogue in the 1990s, and is still popular, especially in a newer, longer playing and higher fidelity version. New technologies such as Super Audio CD, DVD-A, Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD continue to set a very high rate of change in digital audio storage.

This technology spreads across various associated fields, from hi-fi to professional audio, internet radio and podcasting.

Technological developments in recording and editing have transformed the record, movie and television industries in recent decades. Audio editing became practicable with the invention of magnetic tape recording, but the use of computers has made editing operations faster and easier to execute with software, and the use of hard-drives for storage has made recording cheaper. Today, the process of making a recording is separated into tracking, mixing and mastering. Multitrack recording makes it possible to capture signals from several microphones, or from different 'takes' to tape or disc, with maximized headroom and quality, allowing previously unavailable flexibility in the mixing and mastering stages for editing, level balancing, compressing and limiting, adding effects such as reverberation, equalisation, flanging, and much more.

In the 1920s, the early talkies featured the new sound-on-film technology which used photoelectric cells to record and reproduce sound signals that were optically recorded directly onto the movie film. The introduction of talking movies, spearheaded by The Jazz Singer in 1927 (though it used a sound on disk technique, not a photoelectric one), saw the rapid demise of live cinema musicians and orchestras. They were replaced with pre-recorded soundtracks, causing the loss of many jobs.^[3] The American Federation of Musicians took out ads in newspapers, protesting the replacement of real musicians with mechanical playing devices, especially in theatres.^[4]

Voice to note

Voice-to-note refers to the capability of personal computers to be able to recognize notes that are sung, hummed, or whistled into a microphone. The pitch and duration of the notes are then calculated and converted into MIDI music files.^[5][6]

See also

Notes

External links

Online lists and directories of audio engineering schools and programs

• Mix Magazine/Primedia 2005 directory of Audio Engineering Programs

Other links of interest

• Collection of Holophonic/Binaural audios
• Sound recording and reproduction formulas and calculators
• Audio Engineering Society
• The Engineer's Notebook
• #1 Sound Engineering Overview
• http://www.transom.org Transom.org - a useful website for audio recording advice.
• Archival Sound Recordings A British Library Sound Archive resource.
• An Online Guide to Audio Recording anyone can edit.

Audio is sound recording and reproduction.

Audio or audible may also refer to:

• Audio (Blue Man Group album)
• Audio book, a sound recording of a book
• Audio file format

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Microsoft Windows

Screenshot of Windows Vista Ultimate, the latest version of Microsoft Windows.
Company/developer: Microsoft Corporation
OS family: MS-DOS/9x-based, Windows CE, Windows NT
Source model: Closed source

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Computer software is a general term used to describe a collection of computer programs, procedures and documentation that perform some task on a computer system. ^[1]
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Sound Recorder is an audio recording program included in Microsoft Windows.

Features

Sound Recorder can record audio from a microphone or headset; many modern sound cards allow their output channels to be recorded (the loopback channel is typically called
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Electricity (from New Latin ēlectricus, "amberlike") is a general term for a variety of phenomena resulting from the presence and flow of electric charge. This includes many well-known physical phenomena such as lightning, electromagnetic fields and electric currents,
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For other uses, see Mechanic (disambiguation).

Mechanics (Greek Μηχανική
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Sound is a disturbance of mechanical energy that propagates through matter as a wave (through fluids as a compression wave, and through solids as both compression and shear waves).
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human voice consists of sound made by a human using the vocal folds for talking, singing, laughing, crying, screaming etc. The vocal folds, in combination with the lips, the tongue, the lower jaw, and the palate, are capable of producing highly intricate arrays of sound.
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Editing of this page by unregistered or newly registered users is currently disabled due to vandalism.
If you are prevented from editing this page, and you wish to make a change, please discuss changes on the talk page, request unprotection, log in, or .
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Analog (or analogue) recording is a technique used to store audio or video signals for later playback. The first successful demonstration of analog recording for audio was by Thomas Alva Edison. The first analogs of moving pictures were those of the Lumiere Brothers.
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In digital recording, the analog signal of a motion-picture/sound is converted into a stream of discrete numbers, representing the changes in air pressure (chroma and luminance values in case of video) through time; thus making an abstract template for the original sound or moving
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14th century was that century which lasted from 1301 to 1400.

Events

• The transition from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age
• Beginning of the Ottoman Empire, early expansion into the Balkans

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Anthem
De Vlaamse Leeuw
(The Flemish Lion)

Location of Belgian Flanders in Europe

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barrel organ is a mechanical musical instrument consisting of bellows and one or more ranks of pipes housed in a case, usually of wood, and often highly decorated. The basic principle is the same as a traditional pipe organ, but rather than being played by an organist, the barrel
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15th century was that century which lasted from 1401 to 1500.

Events

• 1402: Ottoman and Timurid Empires fight at the Battle of Ankara resulting in Timur's capture of Bayezid I.
• 1402: The conquest of the Canary Islands signals the beginning of the Spanish Empire.

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A Musical clock is a clock that marks the hours of the day with a musical tune played from a spiked cylinder either on bells, organ pipes, bellows, combs and even dulcimer strings.
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A barrel piano (also known as a "roller piano") is a forerunner of the modern player piano. Unlike the pneumatic player piano, the barrel piano was operated by turning a hand crank.
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musical box (UK usage; music box in US English) is a 19th century automatic musical instrument that produces sounds by the use of a set of pins placed on a revolving cylinder or disc so as to strike the tuned teeth of a steel comb.
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18th century - 19th century - 20th century
1820s  1830s  1840s  - 1850s -  1860s  1870s  1880s
1854 1855 1856 - 1857 - 1858 1859 1860

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Subjects:     Archaeology - Architecture -
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Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville (1817 – April 26, 1879) was a French printer, librarian, and bookseller who lived in Paris. He invented the earliest known sound recording device, the phonautograph, in 1857.
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player piano is a piano containing a pneumatic mechanism that plays on the piano action pre-programmed music via perforated paper rolls. The true player piano was designed to be a fully interactive musical experience rather than merely an automatic instrument and hence they are
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piano roll is the music storage medium used to operate the player piano, pianola or a reproducing piano.

The piano roll was the first medium which could be produced and copied industrially and made it possible to provide the customer fast and easy with actual music.
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Description

A fairground organ is a pipe organ which is not played from a keyboard, but rather by mechanical means such as music roll or book music, and designed originally to be used on a fairground or in the United States on a carousel or in a dance-hall or skating rink.
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Edison cylinder phonograph ca. 1899]] The phonograph, or gramophone, was the most common device for playing recorded sound from the 1870s through the 1980s.

Terminology

Usage of these terms is not uniform across the English-speaking world (see below).
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Thomas Alva Edison (February 11 1847 – October 18 1931) was an American inventor and businessman who developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph and a long lasting light bulb.
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18th century - 19th century - 20th century
1840s  1850s  1860s  - 1870s -  1880s  1890s  1900s
1874 1875 1876 - 1877 - 1878 1879 1880

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Subjects:     Archaeology - Architecture -
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18th century - 19th century - 20th century
1840s  1850s  1860s  - 1870s -  1880s  1890s  1900s
1875 1876 1877 - 1878 - 1879 1880 1881

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Subjects:     Archaeology - Architecture -
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Berliner Gramophone was an early record label, the first company to produce disc "gramophone records" (as opposed to the earlier phonograph cylinder records).

Emile Berliner started marketing his disc records in 1889.
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Emile Berliner (May 20, 1851 - August 3, 1929) was a German-born Jewish American inventor, best known for developing the disc record gramophone (phonograph in American English).
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19th century - 20th century
1850s  1860s  1870s  - 1880s -  1890s  1900s  1910s
1886 1887 1888 - 1889 - 1890 1891 1892

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Subjects:     Archaeology - Architecture -
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