What was sound first recorded

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Visit our Help Center. Go here to connect your wallet. No acoustic recording system could have captured that. Just over a week later, the engineers turned their attention to the then greatest living Otello, Giovanni Zenatello. With his huge voice, the result must have been totally unusable.

The four surviving sides show the extraordinary progress the engineers had made. The Western Electric system, good though it was, did have a cost.

For each record sold and made by that process, a royalty was payable. The system itself was leased rather than sold outright. All the major record companies therefore made serious attempts to develop their own systems that did not infringe WE patents but that would result in equally good or better recordings. Columbia engineers in the UK, led by Holman and Blumlein, were streets ahead in the race.

When the Gramophone Co. The WE system used a moving-iron cutter head that was heavily damped to prevent the inherent resonances: the Blumlein cutter was a moving coil type which used feedback to damp the movement.

The recordings made with it tend to have a freedom that could sometimes be missing from the WE system. More importantly for EMI, it was free of royalty payments. Blumlein himself went on to develop stereo recording on disc and film before getting involved in secret radar work for the Government.

He was killed whilst testing airborne radar when his plane was shot down during the war. The Blumlein lathe. As might be expected, the Americans were trying to do exactly the same thing — to circumvent the WE patents. It was certainly capable of producing loud records, and RCA wasted no time in exploiting that feature. RCA Victor often abused their system! Lucrezia Bori in Loud and a terrible balance.

It is likely that a vocal booth was used for the soloist. Giovanni Martinelli, Pagliacci Spacious sound, well recorded. Even at the slower linear speed, the frequency response is more than adequate. Considering its date, and slow speed, the results are remarkable, and far better than the contemporary sound-on-film systems, although much more cumbersome of course. Such a format was never going to be suitable for home music reproduction.

These first LPs were not an unqualified success. America was in the middle of a depression and money was scarce. The new records needed specialist replay equipment that was not sold cheaply — a mistake Columbia did not make when post-war LP was introduced.

Even for those who did invest, the promises of high quality with long playing time did not quite work out. Too often the quality was poor, and in fact most of the LPs were actually dubbings from 78s. It was recorded on the 7th April both on 10 standard 78 rpm sides and on 5 LP sides. The results were very variable. An American transcription lathe. A press for 16 inch transcription discs.

Here the sound is good, however the other side is not. The reverse side demonstrates what happens when it went wrong — a distorted and wiry sound which characterised many of this series. Although pre-war LP was not a commercial success, it did hang on until the late s. Not hi-fi, but because what was there was clean and undistorted it sounded very good, and so obviously had improved during the decade.

Gigli — Aprile ] mp3 file. More, however, was to come with the ability to store a much wider range of frequencies - up to 14,Hz and more - on disc. This came about with the need by various government agencies to be able to record higher frequencies for a variety of secret purposes, including anti-submarine warfare. National Symphony Orchestra, Sargent. Halina —Stefanska, Chopin. Although first invented in , magnetic recording needed sophisticated electronics and a reliable medium.

While some work was carried out in the US and Britain, it was the Germans who really made it all work. When the Allies requisitioned German radio stations in , tape recording was found to have advanced way beyond pre-war capabilities. Compared to performances on contemporary 78rpm disc it is truly remarkable. Half-hour tapes could accommodate whole movements of a symphony.

But then came the scissor and sticky tape boys, and nothing has been the same ever since. The ability to edit seamlessly was the final piece in the jigsaw for the Long Playing Record. So it was that by the time the recording industry began to recover after the War all the technology was available to produce long-playing discs with a much better frequency response, carrying recordings that had been edited to give the cleanest possible performance.

This is not the place for a history of recording from LP onwards. There are plenty already on the shelves. Suffice it to say that for all its convenience replaced of course by the CD , the LP lacks the immediacy and that partial illusion of a live performance that characterises the By the early s, all 78s were purely transfers from tape, and in that form held on for a few years before being completed ousted by the LP.

This has been a brief look at the history of recording, principally on disc. Of necessity, some technical explanations have had to be simplified and much of the chronology compressed. For further reading, the following will repay their study. Courtney Bryson. The Gramophone Record. An exhaustive study of the manufacture of gramophone records at that time. Roland Gelatt. The Fabulous Phonograph. A good general history. Fred Gaisberg. The Music Goes Round. Romanticised version of the history to , with many inaccuracies, but entertaining and useful nonetheless.

Joseph Batten. Rockliff Another useful work, especially as seen from the Columbia perpective. Geoffrey Jones. The Gramophone Company: an Anglo-American multinational, Business History Review , Vol. Contacts Sitemap. Sound Files Sound Files Search.

A Brief History of Recording to ca. Edison's original tin-foil phonograph Wax makes its debut Some ten years were lost whilst others took up the challenge. Standardisation and its effect From here on, technical developments were rather slower, and it might be argued that the vividness of these early recordings was lost as the move towards a standardised and smoother sound was called for — this for reasons of record wear.

How some passed the wear test is a matter for conjecture [Audio example 5. Dmitri Smirnov — Sadko ] mp3 file Other companies and systems Whilst we have concentrated on the Gramophone Company and by inference Victor in the USA , there were other significant companies operating in the early years of the century.

Elgar recording in Jazz takes a bow Another field of musical endeavour that was benefiting from the slow improvements in technology was jazz. Secrecy The recording machinery, in almost all the surviving photographs, is out of sight behind the curtain. The third contained apparatus and notes pertaining to a new kind of sound recording device—the graphophone.

Already undergoing numerous challenges to his telephone patent, Bell sought to avoid future disputes about his photophone and graphophone work. These sealed deposits would, if necessary, serve as evidence of priority of invention. No patent dispute arose, and the boxes remained confidential and unopened for nearly fifty years. Images and Recordings High quality images of the recording media can be seen in this Flickr group. Audio samples and their transcriptions can be found on our YouTube channel , or see below for links to high quality.

Electrotyped copper negative disc of a sound recording, deposited at SI in October in sealed tin box. Listen 2. Glass disc recording, produced photographically on November 17, III Nov. Listen 3. Glass disc recording, produced photographically on March 11, Listen 4. Disc recording in green wax on brass holder, probably Listen 5.