45 Rpm The Vinyl Disc example essay topic

The History of Vinyl and CD In 1877 Thomas Edison was experimenting with a new telegraph devise when he accidentally runs indented tin foil under a stylus. The resulting speech like noise encourages him to develop an instrument that can both record and reproduce sound. By the end of the year Edison had produced the first working phonograph able to 'store' and playback sound. Before Edison, others including Charles Cros had the idea, but were unable to fund them. 1885 Chichester Bell and Charles Tainted call the machine the "Graphophone" and utilise a wax coated cylinder incised with vertical-cut grooves.

1887 Edison updates the phonograph by using a solid wax cylinder and a battery-driven motor as opposed the original hand crank, giving a constant pitch. 1888 Emile Berliner invents the gramophone which used a 7 inch disc which was manually turned at around 30 rpm and had about a 2 minute record capability. The discs are made by acid engraving onto a zinc master, The advantage that the disc had over the cylinder is that it is possible to mass-produce a hard rubber record from the original press. A material called shellac became available around 1910, and discs were produced in a range of sizes from 7 inch to 21 in.

Shellac was getting too brittle to transport around the world during the war, and around this time in the 40's Polyvinyl Chloride, PVC or vinyl for short (which had been discovered 20 years before) became available. New York CBS called a press conference to announce the introduction of the LP or long player. 12 inches wide, turning at 33 1/3 or 45 rpm the vinyl disc seemed a lot cheaper and easier to mass produce. It was a record that could contain up to 260 grooves or, more importantly, up to 30 minutes of music per side! By 1960 the golden age of vinyl had arrived, and the LP and single formats, supported by affordable turntables, amplifiers and loudspeakers were working well in the marketplace.

Since the 60's not a lot has changed with the actual disc itself, and up until the invention of the Compact disc was still selling well along side the cassette tape. In the early eighties, sales of vinyl, cassettes, turntables and cassette players were "flat". Meaning that sales were stable, not rising or falling. For the makers of all this hardware and software, that wasn't quite good enough. They needed a new angle. A new way to sell music and the stuff you play it on.

Hence the birth of the cd, a new digital format. It's maximum playing time, about 75 minutes, was chosen because the president of the company wanted something that could play his favorite piece of music, Beethoven's 9th Symphony, all the way through without stopping. At first compact discs weren't as successful as they had hoped. Prices were high, due to the fact that the discs and the players were mainly being produced in Japan. In the spring of 1989, something wonderful happened for the music industry. Everything changed!

Almost overnight, CD's were everywhere! Suddenly they were a huge success and suddenly it became almost impossible to get anything on vinyl at all... Youd be led to believe that the reason they became so popular was due to popular demand. The real reason was the fact that the record companies, stopped a return policy with the stores which had gone on for years. In the spring of 1989, the 7 big major labels said they would no longer accept any returns, and stopped the development of old back catalogue discs. This forced the stores to stop carrying vinyl, or face financial ruin.

Cds became the norm and are still selling well today.