A brief recording history 1920 – 1960.

March 25th, 2009 • Music

I was recently reading Tape-Op magazine and came across a very interesting article titled “A brief recording history 1920 – 1960″ by Lewis L. Durham. For my own learning experience and hopefully yours, I’ve taken from it what I believe to be most interesting and compiled my own article. Some call it plagiarism, I call it the big share.

Another great thing is that I’ve scrawled links across the article so if you need further reading on a subject or word, just click the link and you’ll be whisked away to a world of forgotten intelligence.

1920′s

The only way to record sound was by getting a whole band in a room together. The sound vibrations the band made would go into a huge horn about 10 foot in diameter. The horn was attached to a diaphragm which was in tern attached to a stylus which would cut grooves into a revolving wax disc beneath it. This would be the master disc, so once it was recorded, that was that. Great and really mechanical if you ask me, it’s great to think about how real the process was. It wasn’t about number crunching inside a computer, it was a real life process that unfolded before your eyes.

By the late 1920′s there were electrical recording systems which consisted of a microphone going into an amplifier which was in tern connected to a moving coil cutterhead. The moving coil cutter head works in the same manner as a moving coil speaker, except that instead of a cone, there is a stylus which cuts a groove onto the recording material.

1930′s

The first stereo cutterhead designed by Alan Blumlein. Imagine that, stereo arrived. The first ever tape recorder was made by Telefunken, however they were not available commercially until the late 1940′s.

1940′s

General improvement of recording devices such as mixing consoles, microphones, recording heads and crucially, improvement of recording lathes. Electrical recording direct to disk continued in the same way as in the 1930′s.

Ampex released the first ever commercial tape recording device designed by Alexander M. Poniatoff. Can I add, this was the beginning of the future in my humble opinion. Towards the end of the 40′s, the quality of these devices had increased dramatically. Recording onto tape also meant it was possible to edit relatively quickly and easily for the first time. For example, you could record over previous material, or splice tape pieces together. By the end of the 1940′s some of the best recording devices ever made had been made. Enough said.

By 1949 Columba had released 33 1/3 micro-groove L.P and RCA had released 45rpm single.

1950′s

During the early 1950′s stereophonic tape was avaliable, but only really sought after by audiophiles. The first commercial stereophonic recordings were avaliable in 1957. Despite this, most systems remained mono until the mid 60′s.

In 1953 the RIAA equalization curve became standard for phono pre-amps. Along with this, the first ever 6-track tape recorder was made by Ampex and used in 1958. Amazingly also, the first Plate Reverb was made and allowed reverb to be used as an effect without the need for a large echo chamber.

1960′s

In the early 1960′s, major pressing planets had totally stopped working with shellac and were concentrating solely on vinyl. Until the late 1960′s a lot of music was still being recorded live to mono or stereo. If overdubs were necessary, usually only 1 or 2 were possible unless the audio was bounced down which meant degraded audio fidelity. The Beatles are well known for being pioneers of this technique, however this is not true as bouncing down of audio was done extensively during the 1950′s.

In the mid 1960′s transistor recording equipment was introduced to recording studios. This meant cheaper products, but also in many cases inferior build quality due to the use of printed circuit boards (PCBs). This trend of poor quality as reached it’s peak in todays modern recording studio. Recording devices are made from the cheapest components on PCBs and if a unit breaks it is often cheaper to buy a new one than fix it.

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