Phonograph

The phonograph wasn’t always just the gear of choice of DJs and audiophiles. Once upon a time, one of its cousins was used to playback film sound. Early cinema processes such as Vitaphone used special 16” 33-1/3rpm discs synchronized with the projected film to add a whole new dimension to the experience of movie going audiences in the 1920s.

In general, the phonograph was the most common device for playing recorded sound from the 1870s through the 1980s. The term is derived from the Greek words for "sound" (or "voice") and “writing.” Thomas Alva Edison conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound in 1877; his early phonographs recorded onto a tinfoil sheet cylinder using an up-down ("hill-and-dale") motion of a stylus. The tinfoil sheet was wrapped around a grooved cylinder, and the sound was recorded as indentations into the foil.

Emile Berliner patented his “Gramophone” in 1887. The Gramophone involved a system of recording using a lateral (back and forth) movement of the stylus as it traced a spiral onto a zinc disc. Berliner's lateral disc record was the ancestor of the 78rpm, 45rpm, 33-1/3rpm, and all other analog disc records popular for use in sound recording through the 20th century, including the Vitaphone disc.

The phonograph became the most common type of analog recording from the 1910s on. With the high-fidelity advances of the 1970s, turntables became very precise instruments. Despite the popularity of the compact disc and other digital media, turntables and vinyl records remain popular with DJs and audiophiles for their full, warm sound.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License found at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html. It uses material from the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph.