Music Players Over The Years [Sara Popovich]

From phonographs made by Thomas Edison to iPods made by Apple, we have seen a huge change in the development of technology when it comes to music players. Not only has the technology changed, but the styles and materials used to make these new products have changed as well. Starting with the 60s music players consisted of radios and transistor radios, LP records, tape recorders, FM radios and sterophones. When the 80s hit, another jump in technology occurred when companies started making Sony cassettes, walkmans and compact discs. Yet another significant change occured in the late 90s and on into the 2000s with the development of mp3s and iPods.

Transistor radios became popular in the early 60s. The advantages of transistors were that they were aportable way to listen to music and the news and were battery operated. This sparked the musical revolution of this era. The design of the transistor was not like earlier radio design. Designers stepped away from bright plastic. Most product designs of this era consisted of black or wood grain effects, plastics or leathers. Also, they had trimmings of brass, aluminum, chrome, or gilt, which gave items a heavy-duty look. The first popular transistor was the Regency TR-1. It came in four main colors: black, cloud gray, mandarin red, and ivory. There were other colors, such as pearlescent,but those where extremely rare.

Record players were another popular item on which to listen to music. One model that is very well known is the Dansette. Dansette was a record player from a British designer. It was small and came with a handle so it was easy to move around. It was cheap and very simple. Throughout the 60s record players began to improve. Some became battery operated and came in plastic cabinets, which had speakers in the lid. Along with record players came LPs, which stands for Long Play record also known as an album. This was the preferred disc for singles.

Record players did not last for long though before the next new music devices were developed—stereos and cassette tapes. Stereos came out in the 70s and 80s. There were many different designs for stereos. A well-known stereo was the floor standing rack stereo model. But of course,designers began making stereos smaller and more portable. They even created a cassette tape and a Walkman. Phillips developed cassette tapes in 1963. Consumers were able to listen to their favorite tunesin their new high tech stereos. They could even record their own music. If you weren’t at home, you were still able listen to listen to it on the go with the help of the Walkman. Sony was the company that came up with Walkmans. In the 70s and 80s Walkmans were the “King of miniaturization”. The size was just a little bigger than a cassette tape. The perks of this Walkman was that it came with lightweight portable headphones. They were also operated with batteries. In the 90s Walkmans began to disappear with the birth of the new and improved CD player.

This bring us to the new generation of music players. The mp3 players and iPods were the new big thing. Steven Jobs’s Apple Corporation created the iPod in 2001.The first iPod contained 5 GB of hard drive. This new music player didn’t have the normal buttons like the Walkman or even the CD player. The iPod had and still has wheel that controls the volume along with the play, pause, stop and menu buttons. There have been many generations of the iPod since the first one was created with each one getting more advanced than the last.

Citations:

technabob.com/blog/2007/02/08/a-brief-history-of-portable-media-players/

amale16.weebly.com/1962-1963.html

history.sandlego.edu/recording/transistor.hmtl

dansettes.co.uk/hisotry.htm

Atttwood, David. Sound design:classic audio &hi-fi design. Great Britain: Octopus Publishing Group Ltd., 2002. Print.

Highlights of the Past 50 Years [Karrie Platfoot]

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.

Future Design [Joe Puckett]

The devices on which we listen to our music have changed so much over time. In the last several years we have seen the rise of MP3 players taking on many different shapes, sizes and designs. However some of the most popular brands, such as Apple and their iPod, have taken a less ergonomic approach to design in terms of possible ear damage and within your hand. In the past couple of years we’ve seen MP3 players merge into other devices. Nowadays we have ‘all in one’ devices, such as the iPhone and other smart phones. I believe in the near future MP3 players will be completely obsolete. As smart phones take over, they’re becoming much more than phones as they surf the internet, play our music and movies, make our calls, as well as allowing thousands of other applications to work their way into our lives to do many other tasks.

We take our iPods with us everywhere we go as well as our cell phones, so it only makes sense to start combining these devices. As we now simplify our gadgets to one, it is expected to have them in our hands more often for longer periods of time so ergonomics is key. Our projected design goes in a similar direction of what we’re seeing today with the HTC and Droid smart phones. I believe that the biggest change in these devices will not be so much in hardware, but rather the operating system that runs it all. They will be more reminiscent of computers allowing more multitasking.

The design is simple in that it encompasses every possibility of what one of these multimedia devices may be capable of. It has all the physical peripherals, such as a keyboard, one may want as well as touch screen capabilities which has also been a huge new wave in the past few years. The most important part is the size; its larger than most MP3 players and cell phones but comfort is huge part of the design. The device is also fairly thick with a curved back to ensure comfort.