From vinyl to MP3 - how is media recorded?
Music was made truly portable on 1 July, 1979, with the release of the Sony Walkman (Time)What is analogue recording? (Wikipedia)What is digital recording? (Wikipedia)Meet the 'telegraphone' & 'magnetophon', advancements in sound recording that never quite took off (Wikipedia) The new £5 note can play vinyl records (The Telegraph)The Voyager golden record (NASA)Playing a record with a pin & paper cup (YouTube)The 'compact cassette' tape was released by Philips in 1962 (Wikipedia)Transvision Vamp, Velveteen (Wikipedia)A timeline of audio formats: From 1860's 'phonautogram' to 2012's 'Opus' (Wikipedia)CDs were invented in 1982 (Wikipedia)A resource for some of the main ways we've recorded audio since olden times (Recording History)The history of the 8-track tape (Recording History)How recording tape was made, circa 1955 (Recording History)How is sound recorded onto magnetic tape? (HyperPhysics, Georgia State University)Johnny's old radio station, Wear FM, is now called Sun FM (Wikipedia)Video Home System, or VHS, analogue video recording, circa 1976 (Wikipedia)VHS 'please rewind' stickers appear to be making a comeback (Cafe Press)Analogue versus digital signals: What do they look like? (BBC, GCSE)Analogue versus digital technology & sampling (Explain That Stuff!)Generation loss: When stuff becomes crapper after you copy it (Wikipedia)A (slightly cheesy) but simple explanation of analogue versus digital sound waves (YouTube)Digital audio tape, or DAT (Webopedia)Digital audio tape (Wikipedia)The Hateful Eight: An explainer on 70 mm film (Nerdist)Lodestsar Pinot Gris (Naked Wines)Digital sound recording uses binary code, i.e. 1's & 0's (Encyclopaedia Britannica)How to count in binary (Instructables)How to 'play back' a picture of a sound wave (Griffonage-Dot-Com)What is sampling rate? (Wikipedia)The science of sample rates: When higher is better & when it isn’t (Trust me I'm a scientist)The Running Man, circa 1987 (Wikipedia)Explanation of the 44.1 kHz CD sampling rate (Columbia University)Music, not sound: Why high-resolution music is a marketing ploy (Kirkville)How audio compression works & can you really tell the difference (MUO)MP3 or lossless: See if you can hear the difference with this test (LifeHacker)A decade of iTunes singles killed the music industry (CNN Money)The impact of digital recording on the music industry (The Bionic Sisters)The effects of digital music distribution: A graduate school research paper (Southern Illinois University Carbondale)Jean Michel Jarre playing the laser harp wearing asbestos gloves (YouTube)How CDs work (How Stuff Works, Electronics)How CD & DVD drives work (Explain That Stuff!)The compact disc, or CD, was co-developed by Philips & Sony (Wikipedia)You can buy blank vinyl albums for $20 (Amazon)What is modulation & demodulation in a modem? (Quora)Digital to analogue conversion, or DAC (Whatis.com)What is a digital to analogue converter? (Wikipedia)Digital Versatile Disc, or DVD (Wikipedia)What is the difference between CD, DVD & Blu-ray discs? (Quora)LaserDisc (Wikipedia)LaserDiscs were like comically large CDs: Watch this guy insert his into a player (YouTube)LaserDisc FAQ (Disc Dude)What is Blu-ray? (Wikipedia)Why is the CD 74 minutes long? (Gizmodo)The great Blu-ray versus 'high-definition optical disc' format war of 2006-2008 (Wikipedia)The VHS versus Betamax format war (The Conversation)What was Betamax? (Wikipedia)The set list from the Dire Straits Gateshead Stadium concert, 13 June 1992 (setlist.fm)A flicker of remembrance of the Dire Straits Digital Compact Cassette promotion Johnny mentioned (Steve Hoffman Music Forums)The Digital Compact Cassette, or DCC, circa 1992 (Wikipedia)What is a MiniDisc & how does it differ from a CD? (How Stuff Works, Tech)An homage to the MiniDisc (Minidisc.org)The future of audio technology (The Inquirer)The future of audio recording, as predicted in 1998 (Turing Machines)How MP3 files work (How Stuff Works, Tech)Lossy compression (Wikipedia)
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Corrections
Conventional DVDs use 650 nm red lasers, CDs use 780 nm near-infrared lasers & Blu-rays use 405 nm blue lasers (but it's actually in the violet range) (Wikipedia)Cheeky review? (If we may be so bold)
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