Printed Page 131
The advent of magnetic audiotape and tape players in the 1940s paved the way for major innovations such as cassettes, stereophonic sound, and, most significantly, digital recording. Audiotape’s lightweight magnetized strands made possible sound editing and multiple-track mixing, in which instrumentals or vocals could be recorded at one location and later mixed onto a master recording in a studio. This vastly improved studio recordings’ quality and boosted sales, though recordings continued to be sold primarily in vinyl format until the late 1970s.
By the mid-1960s, engineers had placed miniaturized (reel-to-reel) audiotape inside small plastic cases and developed portable cassette players. Listeners could now bring recorded music anywhere, which created a market for pre-recorded cassettes. Audiotape also permitted “home dubbing,” which began eroding record sales.
Some people thought audiotape’s portability, superior sound, and recording capabilities would mean the demise of records. However, vinyl’s popularity continued, in part thanks to the improved fidelity that came with stereophonic sound. Invented in 1931 by Alan Blumlein, but not put to commercial use until 1958, stereo permitted the recording of two separate channels, or tracks, of sound. Recording-studio engineers, using audiotape, could now record many instrumental or vocal tracks, which they “mixed down” to two stereo tracks, creating a more natural sound.
The biggest recording advancement came in the 1970s, when electrical engineer Thomas Stockham made the first digital audio recordings on standard computer equipment. In contrast to analog recording, which captures the fluctuations of sound waves and stores those signals in a record’s grooves or a tape’s continuous stream of magnetized particles, digital recording translates sound waves into binary on-off pulses and stores that information in sequences of ones and zeros as numerical code. Drawing on this technology, in 1983 Sony and Phillips began selling digitally recorded compact discs (CDs), which could be produced more cheaply than vinyl records and even audiocassettes. By 2000, CDs had rendered records and audiocassettes nearly obsolete except among deejays, hip-hop artists (who still used vinyl for scratching and sampling), and some audiophile loyalists (see Figure 5.1).