The 4 ages of the humble discs which have been with us since 1895: 78s, LPs, singles, Compact Disc. And the players to go with the discs: phonographs, gramophones, radiograms, disc changers, turntables, decks and the like.
The age of the 78s
Replacing the old cylinders, the phonograph records for home use, as invented by Emile Berliner in 1895, were made of a shellac compound, scratch and noisy. They played at 78 rpm for a running time of 3-4 minutes per side for a 12 inch record. But there were variations of duration and sizes in a format that was being developed and improved by different companies.
The fragile records were housed in a typical brown paper or cardboard, sometimes with some print on the face, and a round cut out to show the all important record label. Storage was not easy and the broke easily.
Usually, these records were sold separately, but it seems that Odeon produced an album of the Nutcracker Suite by Tchaikovsky in 1909, in a package containing 4 double-sided discs.
It’s not easy to pinpoint when /(s stopped production, as collectors editions continued until the 1980s.
When, RCA launched the first commercial vinyl long-playing record in 1931, using a revolutionary 30cm flexible plastic disc for playback at 331⁄3 rpm, the days of the old 78 were counted, but they lasted until the early 1950s.
The age of the Vinyl LP – 33 rpm
However, in 1952, Columbia Records introduced extended-play LPs that played for up to 52 minutes, or 26 minutes per side.
Some record changers could play a stack of records piled on a specially designed spindle and arm arrangement. So, multiple-record sets were released in "automatic sequence".
A two-record set would have Side 1 and Side 4 on one record, and Side 2 and Side 3 on the other, so the first two sides could play in sequence and then they could simply flip the stack over.
Larger boxed sets used similar automatic sequencing: listeners could enjoy long classical pieces with minimum handling of the precious discs.
In 1949, RCA introduced the “Single” a 7-inch fine-grooved vinyl record playing at 45 rpm.
Soon "EP" (Extended Play) 45s were marketed, as they boasted two tracks onto each side and came in a cardboard sleeve with artwork.
Boxed "albums" of 45s were sold to compete with the LP but the 45 succeeded only in replacing the "78s" as the format "singles". And they became very popular indeed.
They could be stacked on a record changer, providing a nice selection of varied music, the first attempt to a mechanical “playlist” apart from the juke-boxes.
One great advantage of the discs was that they could not be duplicated on any home system at the time.
Being an industrial product made with very special machinery, amateur pirates with any kind of DIY process and equipment could not cut disc copies of original discs. This made things easy for the music industry and its consumers. Things would change with the advent of the Compact Disc.
But when tape recorders became more common in the late 50s, it was easy and cheap to transfer the music from any record player onto tape, with a microphone directed to a loudspeaker or with a simple audio cable. And radio programmes could be recorded too. So already in those far away days, enthusiasts made their own mixtapes from different sources, to suit their tastes.
Such homemade productions were very popular at parties when people got tired of feeding the record player with piles of 45s or 33s.
And then Philips invented the cassette and Sony came up with the Walkman. It seemed as though this combination specially design to record and make transfers and copies of any music available on radio, and on discs, of any type. Everybody made their own compilations, copied their own records, swapped with friends. It was so easy and many machines had two parts to make it even easier: a cassette player and a recorder, either on hi-fi chains, on boom boxes, on portables. It would get worse.
The LP was not seriously challenged as the primary medium for listening to recorded music at home until the 1970s, when the audio quality of the cassette format was greatly improved by better tape formulations and noise reduction systems.
Only the 1983 advent of the digital Compact Disc (CD), which produced a recording that was generally noiseless and not audibly degraded by repeated playing or relatively careless handling, succeeded in toppling the LP from its throne, but only after the initially high prices of CDs and CD players had come down.
Strangely enough, CDs had no built-in protection system against duplication or copying.
The function existed in VHS video tapes though, so the principle was well known.
Probably, at the time, it did not seem an issue as there was nothing to duplicate CDs with or onto. Yes, it was possible to transfer CDs onto tapes and cassettes, but in the early 80s, no computer had enough storage to contain the 600 Mb recorded on a CD: not even enough capacity for a song.
Hard disks became bigger and faster and cheaper and PCs became equipped with two CD trays and when software became readily available, copying CDs at home on personal computers became a very easy task. And we could even download the artwork for the sleeve from the internet.
Things were getting very digital and very easy to access.
It is generally accepted that old 78s were noisy, scratchy and were limited to a narrow range of frequencies. Things improved seriously with LPs and micro-groves and singles, but these records were still subject to surface scratches, dust, pops, and other defects and their handling was delicate. CDs are much better and produce a much cleaner output, although some purists prefer the smoothness of vinyl discs.
Beside the technical aspect of the “support”, there is the vexed question of the inherent quality of the original material used to make the disc. Original studio tapes will always offer the highest quality, but if the contents are lifted from copies of copies of tapes or worse, from previous discs, the final quality will be very poor. This happened time and time again with commercial compilations made on the cheap and sold on the market.
And it is usually the case with homemade copies, transfers and other duplication's not forgetting a lot of material posted on YouTube. When it comes to MP3, private productions are more often than not so poor, so diabolical as to be unusable.
The age of the 45 single
Soon "EP" (Extended Play) 45s were marketed, as they boasted two tracks onto each side and came in a cardboard sleeve with artwork.
Boxed "albums" of 45s were sold to compete with the LP but the 45 succeeded only in replacing the "78s" as the format "singles". And they became very popular indeed.
They could be stacked on a record changer, providing a nice selection of varied music, the first attempt to a mechanical “playlist” apart from the juke-boxes.
One great advantage of the discs was that they could not be duplicated on any home system at the time.
Being an industrial product made with very special machinery, amateur pirates with any kind of DIY process and equipment could not cut disc copies of original discs. This made things easy for the music industry and its consumers. Things would change with the advent of the Compact Disc.
But when tape recorders became more common in the late 50s, it was easy and cheap to transfer the music from any record player onto tape, with a microphone directed to a loudspeaker or with a simple audio cable. And radio programmes could be recorded too. So already in those far away days, enthusiasts made their own mixtapes from different sources, to suit their tastes.
Such homemade productions were very popular at parties when people got tired of feeding the record player with piles of 45s or 33s.
And then Philips invented the cassette and Sony came up with the Walkman. It seemed as though this combination specially design to record and make transfers and copies of any music available on radio, and on discs, of any type. Everybody made their own compilations, copied their own records, swapped with friends. It was so easy and many machines had two parts to make it even easier: a cassette player and a recorder, either on hi-fi chains, on boom boxes, on portables. It would get worse.
The age of the CD
Only the 1983 advent of the digital Compact Disc (CD), which produced a recording that was generally noiseless and not audibly degraded by repeated playing or relatively careless handling, succeeded in toppling the LP from its throne, but only after the initially high prices of CDs and CD players had come down.
Strangely enough, CDs had no built-in protection system against duplication or copying.
The function existed in VHS video tapes though, so the principle was well known.
Probably, at the time, it did not seem an issue as there was nothing to duplicate CDs with or onto. Yes, it was possible to transfer CDs onto tapes and cassettes, but in the early 80s, no computer had enough storage to contain the 600 Mb recorded on a CD: not even enough capacity for a song.
Hard disks became bigger and faster and cheaper and PCs became equipped with two CD trays and when software became readily available, copying CDs at home on personal computers became a very easy task. And we could even download the artwork for the sleeve from the internet.
Things were getting very digital and very easy to access.
High Fidelity, High Quality
Beside the technical aspect of the “support”, there is the vexed question of the inherent quality of the original material used to make the disc. Original studio tapes will always offer the highest quality, but if the contents are lifted from copies of copies of tapes or worse, from previous discs, the final quality will be very poor. This happened time and time again with commercial compilations made on the cheap and sold on the market.
And it is usually the case with homemade copies, transfers and other duplication's not forgetting a lot of material posted on YouTube. When it comes to MP3, private productions are more often than not so poor, so diabolical as to be unusable.
