Record Player
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cassette tape
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8 track
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phonograph
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cd
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mp3
player http://build.tripod.lycos.com/trellix/sitebuilder/f_edit_page.html
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http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bledisondiscphpgraph.htm
The History of the Edison Cylinder Phonograph
Return Thomas Edison Page
Phonograph Catalog/Advertisement "I want a
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The phonograph was developed as a result of Thomas
Edison's work on two other inventions, the telegraph and
the telephone. In 1877, Edison was working on a machine
that would transcribe telegraphic messages through
indentations on paper tape, which could later be sent over
the telegraph repeatedly. This development led Edison to
speculate that a telephone message could also be
recorded in a similar fashion. He experimented with a
diaphragm which had an embossing point and was held
against rapidly-moving paraffin paper. The speaking vibrations made indentations in
the paper. Edison later changed the paper to a metal cylinder with tin foil wrapped
around it. The machine had two diaphragm-and-needle units, one for recording, and
one for playback. When one would speak into a mouthpiece, the sound vibrations
would be indented onto the cylinder by the recording needle in a vertical (or hill and
dale) groove pattern. Edison gave a sketch of the machine to his mechanic, John
Kreusi, to build, which Kreusi supposedly did within 30 hours. Edison immediately
tested the machine by speaking the nursery rhyme into the mouthpiece, "Mary had a
little lamb." To his amazement, the machine played his words back to him.
Ever practical and visionary, Edison offered the following possible future uses for the
phonograph in North American Review in June 1878:
1. Letter writing and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.
2. Phonographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their
part.
3. The teaching of elocution.
4. Reproduction of music.
5. The "Family Record"--a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members
of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons.
6. Music-boxes and toys.
7. Clocks that should announce in articulate speech the time for going home,
going to meals, etc.
8. The preservation of languages by exact reproduction of the manner of
pronouncing.
9. Educational purposes; such as preserving the explanantions made by a
teacher, so that the pupil can refer to them at any moment, and spelling or
other lessons placed upon the phonograph for convenience in committing to
memory.
10. Connection with the telephone, so as to make that instrument an auxiliary in
the transmission of permanent and invaluable records, instead of being the
recipient of momentary and fleeting communication.
A process for mass-producing duplicate wax cylinders was put into effect in 1901.
The cylinders were molded, rather than engraved by a stylus, and a harder wax was
used. The process was referred to as Gold Moulded, because of a gold vapor given
off by gold electrodes used in the process. Sub-masters were created from the gold
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master, and the cylinders were made from these molds. From a single mold, 120 to
150 cylinders could be produced every day. The new wax used was black in color,
and the cylinders were initially called New High Speed Hard Wax Moulded Records
until the name was changed to Gold Moulded. By mid-1904, the savings in mass
duplication was reflected in the price for cylinders which had been lowered to 35
cents each. Beveled ends were made on the cylinders to accommodate titles.
In terms of playing time, the 2-minute wax cylinder could not compete well against
competitors' discs, which could offer up to four minutes. In response, the Amberol
Record was presented in November 1908, which had finer grooves than the twominute cylinders, and thus, could last as long as 4 minutes. The two-minute cylinders
were then referred to in the future as Edison Two-Minute Records, and then later as
Edison Standard Records. In 1909, a series of Grand Opera Amberols (a
continuation of the two-minute Grand Opera Cylinders introduced in 1906) was put
on the market to attract the higher-class clientele, but these did not prove successful.
The Amberola I phonograph was introduced in 1909, a floor-model luxury machine
with high-quality performance, and was supposed to compete with the Victrola and
Grafonola.
In 1910, the company was reorganized into Thomas A. Edison, Inc. Frank L. Dyer
was initially president, then Edison served as president from December 1912 until
August 1926, when his son, Charles, became president, and Edison became
chairman of the board.
Columbia, one of Edison's chief competitors, abandoned the cylinder market in 1912.
(Columbia had given up making its own cylinders in 1909, and until 1912 was only
releasing cylinders which it had acquired from the Indestructible Phonographic
Record Co.) The United States Phonograph Co. ceased production of its U.S.
Everlasting cylinders in 1913, leaving the cylinder market to Edison. The disc had
steadily grown in popularity with the consumer, thanks especially to the popular
roster of Victor artists on disc. Edison refused to give up the cylinder, introducing
instead the Blue Amberol Record, an unbreakable cylinder with what was arguably
the best available sound on a recording at the time. The finer sound of the cylinder
was partly due to the fact that a cylinder had constant surface speed from beginning
to end in contrast to the inner groove distortion that occurred on discs when the
surface speed slowed down. Partisans of Edison also argued that the vertical cut in
the groove produced a superior sound to the lateral cut of Victor and other disc
competitors. Cylinders, though, had truly peaked by this time, and even the superior
sound of the Blue Amberols could not persuade the larger public to buy cylinders.
Edison conceded to this reality in 1913 when he announced the manufacture of the
Edison Disc Phonograph. The Edison Company did not desert its faithful cylinder
customers, however, and continued to make Blue Amberol cylinders until the demise
of the company in 1929, although most from 1915 on were dubbed from the
Diamond Discs.
Photos Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound
Division
http://www.8trackheaven.com/faq.html#2. 8track
. WHO INVENTED THE 8-TRACK TAPE?
[8TM - David Morton] The 8-track tape has roots that extend into the
motion picture industry. Endless loop motion pictures
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were made from
the 1920s on for advertising or other special purposes. With the appearance
of inexpensive reel-to-reel tape recorders in the late
1940s, several inventors adapted the endless loop motion picture idea
for use with the new German-style plastic recording tapes. Of these
inventors, only one, William Powell Lear, gets much attention
Long before he set down to work on the famous Lear Jet, Lear had made a
name for himself developing instruments and communications equipment for
airplanes. In 1946 Lear Purchased a California company that had tried
to market a steel-tape loop recorder based on the old Western
Electric/AT&T Technology [from their 1933 "Hear Your Own Voice" endless
loop recorders]. Bits of this technology made its way into his own
design for several models of wire recorders announced in 1946, including
an endless loop wire recorder. But Lear's early experiments did not
result in a line of investigation that led directly to the 8-track.
Instead, Lear dropped the project and subsequently was out of the loop
for many years while he concentrated his efforts on aircraft.
In the mean time, the focus of endless loop technology shifted from wire
to tape and from Lear's Chicago headquarters to Toledo, Ohio. There,
Bernard Cousino, the owner of an Audio Visual equipment and service
company, became interested in endless sound recordings. He won a small
contract to build a "point of sale" device – that is, a store display
that played a recorded message over and over endlessly.
Cousino, aware of the widespread use of short motion picture film loops
for similar purposes, began experimenting with an 8-millimeter endless
loop film cartridge marketed by Television Associates, Inc. of New
Hampshire. Cousino soon developed a cartridge specifically adapted for
audio tape that he marketed in 1952 through his company, Cousino
Electronics, as the "audio vendor." The little cart could be used with
an ordinary reel-to-reel player -- the cart fit over one reel spindle
and the exposed loop of tape was fed through the heads. Later, Cousino
would develop the Echomatic, a more advanced two-track cartridge which,
like the later 8-track, required a special player. In the meantime,
another inventor named George Eash designed and patented a similar
cartridge that came to be known as the Fidelipac. Following Cousino's
pattern, Eash designed and patented a cartridge with
similar specifications, later modifying it to include a more complex reel
braking mechanism.
Eash's cartridge was the basis of dozens of commercial applications of
the endless loop, two of which were particularly successful. Eash's
Fidelipac design became the basis of several new recorders adapted for
radio station use; by the early 1960s, many radio stations had put some
or all of their music, spot announcements, and station i.d.'s on carts
that could be quickly inserted and played and which could be
automatically stopped at the beginning of the recording.
The second main commercial application was in the field of auto sound.
Earl "Madman" Muntz was a former used car salesman who became something
of a local celebrity on the West Coast by opening a chain of television
retail outlets selling TV sets that were manufactured by his other firm, Muntz
Television, Inc. When he discovered the Fidelipac in the early 1960's,
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He threw in his lot with the endless loop, never to return to the
Television business.
Muntz had inexpensive Fidelipac players custom manufactured in Japan, and
licensed the music of several record companies for duplication on carts. Even
though the players were intended to be installed in cars, Muntz sought to enhance
the appeal of his product by adopting stereo tape standards established by recorder
manufacturers a few years earlier, and his players used the new, mass produced
stereo tape heads being made for the home recorder industry by firms like Michigan
Magnetics and Nortronics. These heads but two stereo programs, a total
of four recorded tracks, on a standard 1/4 inch tape.
Muntz players caught on quickly, starting an autosound fad in California which slowly
spread east. By 1963 Muntz players were to be found stylishly adorning the
underdash regions of Frank Sinatra's Riviera, Peter Lawford's Ghia, James Garner's
Jaguar, Red Skelton's Rolls Royce, and Lawrence Welk's Dodge convertible. During
1964 and 1965 a number of major labels began issuing new releases and old
favorites on 4-track, and the Fidelipac looked like it was going to be the next big thing
in consumer audio. A number of home players even appeared.
Suddenly Bill Lear appeared on the scene, newly world famous for his Lear Jet
business plane, and announced in 1965 that he had developed a cartridge with eight
tracks that promised to lower the price of recorded tapes without any sacrifice in
music quality. Lear's enthusiasm for loops had not faded after the failure of his
endless wire cartridge of the late 1940s. In 1963, he became a distributor for Muntz
Stereo Pak, mainly in order to install 4-track units aboard his Lear Jets.
Dissatisfied with the Muntz technology, he contacted one of the leading suppliers of
original equipment tape heads, the Nortronics Company of Michigan. He specified a
head with much thinner "pole-pieces" and a new spacing that would allow two tracks
(or one stereo program) to be picked off a quarter-inch tape that held a total of 8tracks. Although a departure from the Muntz player, the technology of the closelystacked multi-track head was by the early 1960s well established in fields like
data recording. Lear in 1963 developed a new versionof the Fidelipac
cartridge with somewhat fewer parts and an integral pressure roller. During 1964,
Lear's aircraft company constructed 100 players for distribution to executives at the
auto companies and RCA.
Just how Bill Lear got his products from the drawing board to the dashboards of Ford
Mustangs and Fairlanes is a little unclear. Certainly Lear carried with him the cachet
of his successful business jet project, and had many personal contacts in industry.
And in a roundabout kind of way, he already had ties to Ford. In the 1930s Lear
and his partner Paul Galvin had together built Motorola into a leading manufacturer
of car radios, and Motorola was now affiliated with Ford.
Whatever the details of Lear's selling job, the keys to its spectacular success seems
to have been the backing of both Ford and the recording industry. After getting RCA
Victor to commit to the mass production of its catalog on Lear Jet 8-tracks, Ford
agreed to offer the players as optional equipment on 1966 models. The response, in
one Ford spokesman's word, "was more than anyone expected." 65,000 of the
players were installed that year alone. The machines were initially manufactured by
Ford's electronics supplier: the firm that had pioneered the mass produced auto
radio or "motor victrola" -- Motorola.
Meanwhile, a number of new contenders rose up to enjoy fleeting moments
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of glory. Bernard Cousino, arguably the source of much cart technology,
has rendered a seemingly endless succession of endless loop technologies. He had
a measure of success with his Echomatic largely by adopting Eash's strategy of
licensing his designs to other firms. In 1965 the success of the Echomatic spurred
the Champion Spark Plug company (a subsidiary of Ford) to purchase a controlling
interest in the firm. At Champion's insistence, Cousino Electronics
became a manufacturer of Lear-style players and was a major supplier for
Sears Roebuck. Looking for greener fields, Cousino had in the early 1960s also
linked up with Alabama entrepreneur and firebrand John Herbert Orr, whose Orradio
Industries tape manufacturing firm (makers ofIrish Brand tape) had recently been
acquired by Ampex. Orr and Cousino cooked up Orrtronics, a company that made a
background music system based on the old Echomatic cartridge. While Ford
debated the adoption of the Lear Cartridge in 1965, Champion Spark Plug funded
the development at Orrtronics of a competing system. This was the ill-fated
Orrtronics 8-track, a remarkably better sounding but commercially unsuccessful
response to Lear's cart. The Orrtronic cartridge had a somewhat different tape path
that reduced strain on the tape and allowed better head-to-tape contact, and was
somewhat more compact to boot.
Nonetheless, no record companies seemed interested, and the idea was stillborn.
Cousino continued to patent endless loop devices, such as a miniature cartridge and,
now in his 90s, he has recently submitted a patent for an endless loop videocassette.
Endless variations on the endless loop cart appeared during the 1960s and 1970s;
a.c.8-t-t readers will undoubtedly continue to discover obscure cart formats. The
best known, of course was the Playtape, a tiny cart introduced in the fall of 1966
which later re-emerged in slightly modified form as the basis of a Dictaphone Corp.
telephone answering machine in the 1970s. Answering machines, in fact, were a
major source of new endless loop variations from the 1960s on. The success of the
Fidelipac in radio spawned a host of imitators, including both the well known
Audiopak (which by the way is still being manufactured), the Aristocart made in
Canada, the Marathon made by some Massachusetts firm, and the Tapex.
While carts themselves continued to be manufactured in the U.S., makers
of 8-track players disappeared after only a few years. The manufacture of 8-track
players shifted almost entirely to Japan between 1965 and 1970.
There were a few valiant efforts to revive the flagging American industry, but to little
avail as the foreign firms cranked players out in huge numbers using cheap labor.
Nonetheless, Quatron, Inc., a Maryland firm, shone brightly for a few years making
the now highly desirable Model 48 automatic 8 track changer, but its star soon faded.
By the time the major record labels stopped offering new releases on 8-track, there
were no domestic manufacturers of home or auto players.
3. A. WHEN DID THEY STOP MAKING 8-TRACKS?
The big labels who had 8-tracks out of the stores by 1983. The last 8-tracks were
manufactured by the various Record & Tape clubs in 1988 (RCA & Columbia
House). These tapes don't quite have the quality of prime 8-T craftsmanship, but
watch your friends eyes bug out when you show them you have George Harrison's
_cloud nine_ or Michael Jackson's _Bad_ on 8-track. The last Columbia Record
Club 8-track we know of was _Chicago XIX_, which shipped in 1988Also, a few
hungry young bands have put out homemade 8's recently of (mostly) alternative
music. It has been reported from one tracker that in Mexico 8-tracks abound. This
tracker reports to have recently (1995) purchased some brand new Tejano, brought
into the country illegaly.
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3. B. WHY DID THEY STOP MAKING 8-TRACKS?
Consumer demand for the 8-track-tape format was strongest from 1970-74.
The format began dramatically losing market share after 1975. IMHO, the
reasons the format fell into disfavor are:
Audio industry improvements in the cassette format. During cassette's first few years,
sound quality was mediocre, marred by tape drop-outs, wow and flutter, modulation
noise, hissing, tape jamming, distortion, and poor frequency range. But in the early
1970s, cassettes were improved so that (potentially at least) their fidelity was equal
to, or better than,
8-track... the major audio manufacturers put their R&D efforts into
upgrading cassette.
The "high end" 8-track deck makers, Wollensak, Akai, Pioneer, and
Realistic, stopped developing improved 8-track units around 1974. In fact,
the short-lived Elcaset format received the R&D efforts that would have
gone into better 8-track decks.
Manufacturers adopted cheaper, flimsier, less reliable cartridge mechanisms. Tape
jamming and mechanical problems were a major "kiss of death" to consumer
acceptance of 8-track....and these problems were entirely avoidable if the tape
makers had maintained consistent design standards and quality control.
Relatively few decks, and relatively few 8-track-tapes, incorporated
Dolby noise reduction. The Dolby-B system was widely adopted for cassettes
during the late '70s, while very few 8-track decks incorporated Dolby
circuits.
In short: the same industry that improved cassette tapes from a mediocre dictatingmachine medium to a hi-fi music format, failed to offer and promote improvements
for the 8-track format. Now they're trying to get rid of cassettes in favor of CDs...and
then get rid of CDs in favor of
HDCDs or the Smart Card.
RBENSLEY@GNN.COM
3. C. WERE 8-TRACKS POPULAR INTERNATIONALLY, OR ONLY IN AMERICA?
It's true that 8 tracks were only ever popular in North America, i.e., that it's the only
place people ever really liked them.
However, they were made in many other countries. There are tons of UK carts,
Especially on the Island and EMI labels, and these tend to be of higher
quality than US carts. Beatles and Pink Floyd carts,
especially, sound a lot better than the US releases.
http://www.hocoenterprises.com/recs/RecordsHistory.html
recordplayer
History Of The Record Player
The record player or phonograph is a device for reproducing sound that has been
recorded as a spiral, undulating groove on a disk. This disk is known as a
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phonograph record, or simply a record. In using a record player, a record is placed
on the player's motor-driven turntable, which rotates the record at a constant speed.
A tone arm, containing a pickup at one end, is placed on the record. The tone arm
touches the groove of the record with its stylus, or needle. As the record revolves,
the variations in its groove cause the stylus to vibrate. The stylus is part of the
pickup, a device that also contains a transducer to convert these mechanical
vibrations into corresponding electrical signals. These signals are then increased in
size by an amplifier. After leaving the amplifier, they are passed to a loudspeaker
that converts them into sound.
Although sound waves had been recorded in the middle of the 19th century, the first
machine to reproduce recorded sound, the phonograph, was built by Thomas A.
Edison in 1877. Edison's records were made of tinfoil, upon which a groove of
unvarying lateral direction but varying depth was cut; later this method became
known as “hill-and-dale” recording. In 1887, Emile Berliner invented the disk record
(patented 1896), which has grooves of unvarying depth but of varying lateral
direction. His method, called lateral recording, superseded the earlier method.
Berliner also invented the matrix record, from which unlimited duplicate recordings
could be pressed. Early turntables were operated by a spring-driven motor that
required rewinding for each record played; later the use of an electric motor made
rewinding unnecessary.
The quality of reproduction was greatly improved by high-fidelity amplification
(popularly called hi-fi) and by complex speaker systems. From 1948 records were
made to be played at slower speeds, thus lengthening the amount of material that
could be recorded on a single disk; such long-playing discs were known as LPs.
Stereophonic reproduction was achieved by adapting the phonograph to reproduce
two channels of sound. The first commercially available stereo recordings were
produced in 1957. In addition to musical performances, records were often used to
reproduce sound effects for radio and the theater, transcriptions of radio broadcasts,
“talking books” for the blind, and lessons for language study. Most recording
companies stopped producing phonograph records by the early 1990s in favor of
cassette tapes and compact discs.
http://www.hocoenterprises.com/recs/CassetteHistory.html cassette
History Of Cassette Tapes
Audiocassette tape recording also makes use of electromagnetic phenomena to
record and reproduce sound waves. The tape consists of a plastic backing coated
with a thin layer of tiny particles of magnetic powder, usually ferric oxide (Fe2O3)
and to a lesser extent chromium dioxide (CrO2). The recording head of the tape deck
consists of a tiny C-shaped magnet with its gap adjacent to the moving tape. The
incoming sound wave, having been converted by a microphone into an electrical
signal, produces a time-varying magnetic field in the gap of the magnet. As the tape
moves past the recording head the powder is magnetized in such a way that the tape
carries a record of the shape of the wave being recorded. The frequency of the
impressed signal determines the distance along the tape over which the impressed
magnetic field must be reversed, and the amplitude of the signal determines the
extent of the magnetization of the tape.
There are inherent problems with the magnetic recording system. As magnetic
domains are flipped in magnetizing the material, they exhibit a certain magnetic
inertia, or unwillingness to respond, so that it requires a greater magnetic field than
expected to magnetize the oxide on the tape. This effect, known as hysteresis, leads
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to distortion of the wave shape on the tape. In order to overcome this problem, a
sinusoidal signal of about 100 kilohertz is added to the wave immediately before the
wave is impressed onto the tape. Known as equalization bias, this signal has the
effect of linearizing an inherently nonlinear magnetic medium, largely eliminating
distortion.
Another problem arises from the inability of the recording system to organize
completely the magnetic domains in these tiny magnetic crystals. The resulting
random orientation of the domains results in random noise, which is heard by the
listener as tape hiss. Because lower frequencies are more effective in magnetizing
the tape, and because the random variation in magnetization is a microscopic effect,
tape hiss is primarily a high-frequency phenomenon. Several systems have been
designed to deal with this problem, the most prevalent of which is Dolby noise
reduction. In the Dolby system the higher-frequency components of a sound wave
are amplified before the signal is impressed on the tape so that their amplitudes are
well above the amplitude of the tape hiss. On playback, the high frequencies are
attenuated after they are read off the tape, reducing their amplitudes to the correct
level.
http://inventors.about.com/od/audiowaxrecordstomp3/a/Cassette_Tape.htm
Cassette Tape
History of Cassette Tape
The Philips Company of the Netherlands invented and released the first compact
audio-cassette in 1962. They used high-quality polyester 1/8-inch tape produced by
BASF. Recording and playback was at a speed of 1.7/8 inches per second.
The next year in the U.S. sales began of the Norelco Carry-Corder dictation machine
that used the new cassette tape. The consumer's demand for blank tape used for
personal music-recording was unanticipated by Philips.
http://inventors.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/r
ussell.html
Compact Disk
The Digital Compact Disc
The digital compact disc, now commonplace in stereos and computers, was invented
in the late 1960s by James T. Russell.
Russell was born in Bremerton, Washington in 1931. At age six, he invented a
remote-control battleship, with a storage chamber for his lunch. Russell went on to
earn a BA in Physics from Reed College in Portland in 1953. Afterward, he went to
work as a Physicist in General Electric's nearby labs in Richland, Washington.
At GE, Russell initiated many experimental instrumentation projects. He was among
the first to use a color TV screen and keyboard as the sole interface between
computer and operator; and he designed and built the first electron beam welder. In
1965, when Columbus, Ohio - based Battelle Memorial Institute opened its Pacific
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Northwest Laboratory in Richland, Washington, Russell joined the effort as Senior
Scientist. He already knew what avenue of research he wanted to pursue.
Russell was an avid music listener. Like many audiophiles of the time, he was
continually frustrated by the wear and tear suffered by his vinyl phonograph records.
He was also unsatisfied with their sound quality: his experimental improvements
included using a cactus needle as a stylus. Alone at home on a Saturday afternoon,
Russell began to sketch out a better music recording system --- and was inspired
with a truly revolutionary idea.
Russell envisioned a system that would record and replay sounds without physical
contact between its parts; and he saw that the best way to achieve such a system
was to use light. Russell was familiar with digital data recording, in punch card or
magnetic tape form. He saw that if he could represent the the binary 0 and 1 with
dark and light, a device could read sounds or indeed any information at all without
ever wearing out. If he could make the binary code compact enough, Russell saw
that he could store not only symphonies, but entire encyclopedias on a small piece of
film.
Battelle let Russell pursue the project, and after years of work, Russell succeeded in
inventing the first digital-to-optical recording and playback system (patented in 1970).
He had found a way to record onto a photosensitive platter in tiny "bits" of light and
dark, each one micron in diameter; a laser read the binary patterns, and a computer
converted the data into an electronic signal --- which it was then comparatively
simple to convert into an audible or visible transmission.
This was the first compact disc. Although Russell had once envisioned 3x5-inch
stereo records that would fit in a shirt pocket and a video record that would be about
the size of a punch card, the final product imitated the phonographic disc which had
been its inspiration. Through the 1970s, Russell continued to refine the CD-ROM,
adapting it to any form of data. Like many ideas far ahead of their time, the CD-ROM
found few interested investors at first; but eventually, Sony and other audio
companies realized the implications and purchased licenses.
By 1985, Russell had earned 26 patents for CD-ROM technology. He then founded
his own consulting firm, where he has continued to create and patent improvements
in optical storage systems, along with bar code scanners, liquid crystal shutters, and
other industrial optical instruments. His most revolutionary recent invention is a highspeed optical data recorder / player that has no moving parts. Russell earned
another 11 patents for this "Optical Random Access Memory" device, which is
currently being refined for the market.
James T. Russell has many interests beyond optical data devices. In fact, he has
claimed, "I've got hundreds of ideas stacked up --- many of them worth more than the
compact disc. But I haven't been able to work on them." Digital engineers and
consumers alike will be lucky if he does find the time.
[Dec. 1999]
http://inventors.about.com/od/mstartinventions/a/MPThree.htm MP3
The History of MP3
13
From Mary Bellis,
Your Guide to Inventors.
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Fraunhofer Gesellschaft and MP3
The German company Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft developed MP3 technology and now
licenses the patent rights to the audio compression technology - United States
Patent 5,579,430 for a "digital encoding process". The inventors named on the MP3
patent are Bernhard Grill, Karl-Heinz Brandenburg, Thomas Sporer, Bernd Kurten,
and Ernst Eberlein.
In 1987, the prestigious Fraunhofer Institut Integrierte Schaltungen research center
(part of Fraunhofer Gesellschaft) began researching high quality, low bit-rate audio
coding, a project named EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB).
Dieter Seitzer and Karlheinz Brandenburg
Two names are mentioned most frequently in connection with the
development of MP3. The Fraunhofer Institut was helped with their audio
coding by Dieter Seitzer, a professor at the University of Erlangen.
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Dieter Seitzer had been working on the quality transfer of music over a standard
phone line. The Fraunhofer research was led by Karlheinz Brandenburg often called
the "father of MP3". Karlheinz Brandenburg was a specialist in mathematics and
electronics and had been researching methods of compressing music since 1977. In
an interview with Intel, Karlheinz Brandenburg described how MP3 took several
years to fully develop and almost failed. Brandenburg stated "In 1991, the project
almost died. During modification tests, the encoding simply did not want to work
properly. Two days before submission of the first version of the MP3 codec, we
found the compiler error."
What is MP3
MP3 stands for MPEG Audio Layer III and it is a standard for audio compression that
makes any music file smaller with little or no loss of sound quality. MP3 is part of
MPEG, an acronym for Motion Pictures Expert Group, a family of standards for
displaying video and audio using lossy compression. Standards set by the Industry
Standards Organization or ISO, beginning in 1992 with the MPEG-1 standard.
MPEG-1 is a video compression standard with low bandwidth. The high bandwidth
audio and video compression standard of MPEG-2 followed and was good enough to
use with DVD technology. MPEG Layer III or MP3 involves only audio compression.
Timeline - History of MP3

1987 - The Fraunhofer Institut in Germany began research code-named
EUREKA project EU147, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB).
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


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
January 1988 - Moving Picture Experts Group or MPEG was established as
a subcommittee of the International Standards Organization/International
Electrotechnical Commission or ISO/IEC.
April 1989 - Fraunhofer received a German patent for MP3.
1992 - Fraunhofer's and Dieter Seitzer’s audio coding algorithm was
integrated into MPEG-1.
1993 - MPEG-1 standard published.
1994 - MPEG-2 developed and published a year later.
November 26, 1996 - United States patent issued for MP3.
September 1998 - Fraunhofer started to enforce their patent rights. All
developers of MP3 encoders or rippers and decoders/players now have to
pay a licensing fee to Fraunhofer.
February 1999 - A record company called SubPop is the first to distribute
music tracks in the MP3 format.
1999 - Portable MP3 players appear.
What Can MP3 Do
Fraunhofer Gesellschaft has this to say about MP3:"Without Data reduction, digital
audio signals typically consist of 16 bit samples recorded at a sampling rate more
than twice the actual audio bandwidth (e.g. 44.1 kHz for Compact Discs). So you end
up with more than 1.400 Mbit to represent just one second of stereo music in CD
quality. By using MPEG audio coding, you may shrink down the original sound data
from a CD by a factor of 12, without losing sound quality."
MP3 Players
In the early 1990s, Frauenhofer developed the first, however, unsuccessful MP3
player. In 1997, developer Tomislav Uzelac of Advanced Multimedia Products
invented the AMP MP3 Playback Engine, the first successful MP3 player. Two
university students, Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev ported AMP to Windows and
created Winamp. In 1998, Winamp became a free MP3 music player boosting the
success of MP3. No licensing fees are required to use an MP3 player.
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