Germany claims to have began the era of Reel-to-Reel recorders, which started in the 1920's. To this day, we still use a development of these concepts created by the companies BASF and Telefunken. Such devices use a large machine to turn reels with recorded audio. These were dominate in the 1940's and 1950's. The oversized playing device inspired creators to come up with a more compact form of music-playing. This gave birth to the cassette player, which was first seen in the early 1960's.
Compact Cassettes were made by a firm called Philips, derived from the Dutch electronics. They were originally for personal recording purposes, but they were later established to become a replacement of vinyl records. Cassettes are simply constructed of a plastic casing, which holds a spool of magnetic tape reeled between two wheels. When the actual tape player comes in contact with the exposed material, it is able to interpret an analog signal. Essentially, it is a modified version of the Reel-to-Reel, only encased, keeping the strips of tape rolling between to reels. While there were early production errors in the quality of the tapes because of it's small size, the technology continued to improve and creators were able to develop the capability of analog encoding.
A present-day-popular company called Sony began it's marketing of portable cassette players in the 1980's. The Walkman became a hit worldwide and increased the cassette popularity. Cars took advantage of this, and began installing tape decks which became the standard replacement for the 8-tracks. Such an invention quickly removed any vinyl records from the music store shelves.
Cassettes remained popular until further technology gave birth to compact discs. Compact discs made their way to the industry in 1982. The invention took off quickly, and has become one of the most successful examples of the consumer electronics technology. Compact Discs became useful for not only music, but from 1985 through 1987, Philips constructed tests, growth, and eventually introduced the read only storage format. Eventually, the cost was affordable to the general public and the CD industry boomed. This era lasted about 10 years until music started to become digitalize, and stored music within memory chips within an MP3 Player.
This new development was first created by Fraunhofer-Gesellshaft, a German company who patented the rights to audio compression technology. The company's creation was unsuccessful. Soon after this, the United States seized the opportunity and made a patent for the "digital encoding process." This new device was capable of a smaller, hand-held size and enabled more songs to be saved to a memory chip. In 1999, portable MP3 Players, along with companies to distribute these digital songs were available to the public.
From there, MP3 were developed into popular must-have's, and companies made varying models, the most popular being the iPod by Apple. From Reel-to-reel machines, to cassettes, all the way to iPod, the music industry has developed and improved by leaps and bounds. Today, millions of music players are sold annually. Apple successfully sold 75 million iPods in 2008 alone. Music is readily available in large quantities and has changed the impact music has made on our society.
Tatum, Malcolm. "What is a Reel-to-Reel Tape Deck?" WiseGeek. 3003. Web. 20 April 2010.
Bellis, Mary. "The History of MP3." About.com:Inventors. 2010. Web. 21 April 2010.
"History." ThinkQuest. Web. 25 April 2010.
Heibutzki, Ralph. "History of the Cassette Tape Recorder." eHow. 1999. Web. 23 April 2010.
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