Recorded audio is an amazing thing. Our world is awash in it these days. Everything Everywhere Daily has a great epsidoe up today on its history. I particularly enjoyed the tidbits around various inflection points of format.
First up…
##Magnetic Tape
We’ll use ol' Frankie Blue Eyes to illustrate the impact the invention and introduction of magnetic tape in the early 1950’s had on the world of recorded audio.
Frank recorded sometime in the mid-1940’s:
Frank recorded sometime in 1953 (according to Wikipedia):
##Compact Disc
The length of a CD was set at 74 minutes because the wife of the then Sony CEO Akio Morita flet that an entire recording of Beethoven’s 9th symphony should be able to fit on a single disk, and the longest version they could find was 74 minutes.
##MP3
This is the song the German engineers used to test their compression method: