It’s in the Groove

By Kremena Krumova

SOURCE: http://www.theepochtimes.com


Until recently, Thomas Edison was considered the first man to record sound. He recorded “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in 1877 and played it back using his own invention, the phonograph, which reproduced music from a bulky cylinder.

But last year, an older recording was discovered. “Au Clair de la Lune” was recorded in 1860 by French Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville. He invented a device called phonautograph which was equipped with a needle which followed the sound vibrations and etched the waves produced onto a sheet of paper smeared with oil-lamp soot.

There is also a claim—albeit controversial—by Belgian scientists who say they have analyzed the curves on a clay vase dating 5,000 years back to the city of Pompeii of the Roman Empire. According to their theory, the manufacturers of the vase had used sticks to make carvings on the clay corresponding to the vibrations of musical sounds. The playback of the “decoration” revealed a man’s voice speaking Latin and laughing.

But be they ancient or more contemporary, all of these recordings work by the same principle—even today.

How Recordings Work

A round disc is engraved with concentric spiral grooves. Usually they start from the outskirts of the surface and finish close to its center. The last spiral forms a closed circle, and that is where the music stops.

The sound is hidden in the super-fine carvings made on the edges of the grooves. A stylus usually made of steel or sapphire “reads” the carvings and sends the sound to a horn or, as is true later in history, to an amplifier.

In 1887, Emile Berliner, a German immigrant to the U.S., changed the Edison cylinder into a flat disc, thus giving birth to today’s phonograph or gramophone record. He registered the patent for the gramophone.

Berliner’s disc found firm footing in the market due to its ease of manufacture and portability.

Numerous formats, rotation speeds, and materials for the phonograph record were explored, but in the end, the 78 rpm (revolutions per minute) version won recognition and became the standard—for awhile, anyway.

In 1948, the Hungarian engineer Peter Goldmark, who worked for Columbia Records, made a great breakthrough with his long-playing (known today as the LP) microgroove 12" vinyl record with 33 1/3 rpm, made of the artificial material polyvinyl chloride.

The LP could play 25 minutes on each side and was much more durable than its shellac (natural resin) predecessor. The vinyl was smaller and thinner in size but provided the means for longer playing times: shellac records had only 80-100 groove walls per inch, while the new vinyl could have as many as 260 groove walls per inch. The background noise was also significantly reduced.

While the 78 rpm record was on its way out, another standard was making its way on the scene: the 45 rpm vinyl. The 45 was most popular during the 1960’s in the United Kingdom. Millions of records were sold as the Beatles were among those to produce their music on such vinyl. This record was smaller in size and turned out to be very attractive for promoting hit singles.

CD or LP, Which is Better?

Despite the introduction of the CD (compact disc) in the mid 1980’s, many collectors and audiophiles say the vinyl still produces the richest and most pleasant sound of all music carriers known so far.

Actually, the CD works by exactly the same principle as the vinyl record, with the main difference being that the sound on the CD is digitized, while the vinyl record reproduces analog tones.

It is precisely in the analog sound that the secret of the vinyl record’s superior tonality lies. Why? Because sound is analog by nature. In order for sound to become digitized, some of its components have to be cut: The usual CD recording takes 44,100 snapshots in a second. Then these snapshots are transformed into digits with a precision of 16 bits. Thus digital recording cannot capture the whole range of sound there is.

Conversely, with the vinyl record, while relaying music to the amplifier, no “data” is lost as there is no need for the sound to be converted into anything else. It is heard as it is performed.

Over time, however, the precision of conversion from analog to digital music is becoming more and more sophisticated, as modern players are able to play a far greater number of snapshots per second (as many as 192,000), which makes for a precision of 24 bits.

This, together with the recent resurgence of vinyl sales, shows us that we are heading back to the basics and to what is referred to as the original sound of nature.

However fine the modern devices may be, they still fail to imitate perfectly the infinitely rich and complicated sound of life. And for now, it seems the truth is still in the groove.


SOURCE: http://www.theepochtimes.com

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