One of the initial reasonably priced home entertainment technologies were the fascinating vinyl records. Compact discs were yet another revolutionary disc medium that appeared almost 100 years later. The non-disc counterpoint to both, tape cassettes, were popular commencing in the later years of vinyl and concluding in the earlier years of CDs. The three distinct media enabled people all over to hear their favorite songs (or skip over or through them) anytime they wished, with each exhibiting strong and weak points.
The classic vinyl records were an outgrowth of the invention of the gramophone, which at last ensured that a broad range of Americans and those in other industrialized states would be able to afford to listen to various non-live songs whenever they so desired. Thomas Edison had earlier invented a contraption that made use of wax or tinfoil cylinders, but this appliance, devised by Emile Berliner, utilized space-saving vinyl discs instead. Little grooves in a vinyl record would emit sound via a vibrating stylus which moved over them, with the audio then being amplified by an attachment of some kind. As a positive, sounds from many frequencies could be replicated on a vinyl record, but as a drawback, records' surfaces were easily damaged and the discs were often warped under higher temperatures.
The gramophone was rather large, though, and tape players were supposed to be a smaller alternative. A long piece of tape wound over a pair of spools, all encased in plastic, composed an audio cassette, the medium read by these machines. The tape inside of a cassette, readable by playback components through a gap on the underside of the plastic case, had aural information magnetically written into it. A significant advantage of cassettes was their capacity to be taken places, with a number of portable players being popular for quite some time. Major drawbacks included the risk of the tape becoming snagged and possibly even damaged by a player, and playback pitch varying with the factory-set speeds of players.
The most popular purchasable audio format at present, aside from mp3s, is the compact disc. A spiral track with incredibly tiny pits of different lengths, which a player's laser picks up on and transmits to decoding firmware in the machine, is imprinted on each compact disc. The main drawback with CDs is their likelihood of being scratched on either of their surfaces, although this problem has been somewhat alleviated by the development of re-surfacing solutions for the clear side on the bottom.
Without needing to rely on radio, we had the option to hear our favorite songs anytime on Beatles vinyl records, Allman Brothers cassettes, Nirvana CDs, and tons of others. Thus, our lives were without a doubt more enriched by the availability of these three technologies.
SoundStage Direct, LLC is an online independent store based in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. SSD has the largest selection of Beatles vinyl online. You don't want to miss amazing closeout deals available at our LP outlet! We have vinyl records for everyone and a variety of genres and formats available and ready to be shipped at your doorstep.
Seth Frank
SoundStage Direct, LLC
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