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)

• Where are you from? Send us a postcard! Strange Attractor, c/ PO Box 9, Fitzroy, VIC 3065, Australia

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)

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