From Vinyl to Streaming: How music formats shaped our world

You're listening to 20,000 Hertz.

Recently, our producer Andrew Anderson randomly hit me up to chat with him on mic.

I think I'm getting a little bit of um bumps and stuff on your microphone.

Okay, I'll stop tapping the table.

That was me tapping the table, I think.

Specifically, I wanted to ask Dallas how he usually listens to music.

So, are we doing like a whole show, or are you just quizzing me?

We'll see how far we get.

Because I know Dallas has strong opinions when it comes to his listening experience, and that includes the music he streams.

The thing I do the most is cooking.

That pairs very nicely with music.

What kind of music do you like to listen to while you're cooking?

The most recent thing I listened to is like a French playlist of just French pop hits.

Cool.

I should make you a Bulgarian playlist.

I would love that.

But that got me thinking.

How did people experience music in the past before hi-fi streaming came along?

What were the most popular formats?

What was the quality like?

And what role did recorded music play in popular culture?

Recorded sound, it's such a rich source of social history.

That's Adam Tavell, who works in a department called Sound and Vision at the British Library.

The British Library holds the National Sound Collection.

So that's a vast collection of over six million recordings.

That collection reaches all the way back to the 1800s and the earliest days of recorded sound.

We have to go back to the 1860s when we think about the first recorded sound.

So, Edouard Léon Scott de Martinville's phone autograph, which was a means of recording sound visually.

De Martinville was as much an eccentric entertainer as he was an inventor.

He'd take his phone autograph to carnivals where people would pay to use it.

The whole thing looked a bit like a small metal barrel, about the size of the reservoir on a water cooler.

You'd speak into the horn at one end.

that would move a membrane, which moved a needle, and that scratched a pattern onto paper.

It was like your voice was being turned into a picture.

For the time it was very impressive, but it couldn't be played back.

It was purely intended as a means of visualization.

Luckily for us, scientists have since used digital technology to turn those patterns back into sounds.

Here's a recording made on the phonautograph in 1860.

The voice on the recording is most likely de Martinville himself, singing the French folk song Eau Claire de la Lune.

So who recorded the first sound that you could actually listen back to?

Well, that was a man whose name might be familiar to you, Thomas Edison.

Yeah, I think I've heard of him.

So Edison's work used cylinders coated in a thin layer of tinfoil and grooves were essentially embossed in that tin foil in the same way that one would imagine an LP working today.

An LP or long play is another term for a vinyl record.

In 1877, when Edison debuted his tinfoil cylinders, they wowed the public.

We all know that if you record your voice and play it back, it sounds super, super weird.

So I could only imagine back in 1877 recording a voice and playing it back for that person and going wait a second that doesn't sound like me like that weird uncanny thing but as impressive as these cylinders were they weren't very durable the reproduction of sound from that tinfoil was incredibly difficult because tinfoil had to be very malleable in order to emboss the sound into it that meant that after a few plays the recording

would stop working.

As a result, most of the original tinfoil recordings have been lost.

Before long, other inventors started improving on Edison's original idea.

They included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, and his cousin, Chichester Bell.

What they introduced was a wax coating to replace tinfoil, which was soft enough to be cut into, but equally solid enough to be replayed.

Here's one of those early wax cylinder recordings from the 1890s.

Wow, were those violins?

It's a violin player, yeah.

Wow, that's cool.

But soon enough, a rival format came along.

These were large, flat discs that could be made from shellac, lacquer, or even aluminium.

You played them on a gramophone, and they basically worked the same way as vinyl records do today.

And the invention of discs triggered the original format war, right?

So you've got cylinders, which were great.

They're an incredibly useful medium for home recording.

But discs had other advantages.

You can have two sides on a disc, which means that you can have more music for your money.

Discs were also way faster and cheaper to produce than wax cylinders.

So, in terms of industry and commerce, discs won out.

I can actually play you now a very early example of a gramophone record.

This is from 1902, and it's a piece from the opera Pagliacci, sung by Enrico Caruso.

That's incredible.

That's the type of stuff I'd be listening to on the gramophone.

The quality is actually not bad, even, you know, 120 plus years later.

Disc recording was so simple that it soon became accessible for the general public.

You'd go into a shop with a disc recording machine, pay a small fee, and record your own voice directly onto the disc, which could then be played back on a normal grammar phone at home.

Here's a recording that two parents made for their children as a Christmas present.

Good morning, Simon.

Good morning, Janet.

Mummy and Daddy wish you both a very happy Christmas.

Mummy and I really wanted to say that this record plays a joint Christmas present for you.

Oh gosh, was everyone a voice artist back then?

That was so perfect.

Yeah, it's lovely, isn't it, having that?

I love how intentional the wording is, because it's clear that they know that they have a limited amount of time, so they're choosing every word very carefully.

And I love how precious that recording is to these people.

You can still find these machines if you know where to look.

For example, Jack White refurbished one and has it available to use at Third Man Records in Nashville.

When I visited, my friend Mike stepped into the booth and recorded this little number.

We're all going round in circles.

The disc format was a big success and before long record companies were selling millions and millions of them.

In fact, millions of disc recordings are still sold today.

The material is different, vinyl rather than lacquer, and the albums are now in stereo, but the concept is the same.

And it turns out, both Dallas and I listen to music this way.

You're also a bit of a vinyl buff though, right?

You know, I'm not a vinyl buff due to the sound quality, because a lot of old vinyl still has a lot of clicks and pops.

But I will use vinyl as a way to put me in the right mindset of listening to music.

I like the act of pulling out a vinyl record and being intentional with listening.

Even like turning the album over and kind of reflecting on the first half and thinking, why did they pick that song as the last song of the first first half to make me listen to the second half?

And all of the artist intention, like you kind of said, there

these days, the sound quality of new vinyl records is pretty fantastic, but back in the early 1900s, there was a big difference between how a performance sounded in real life

and how it sounded on a disc recording.

What was needed was a medium where the recording quality was just as good as being there in person.

And that medium was magnetic wire.

Wire was useful in that it was relatively light, wires were incredibly thin, around the thickness of a human hair, and one could record for a long time on a wire.

This made wire perfect for situations where weight and length of recording were important.

For example, black box recorders.

Flight Control, this is Captain Dallas Taylor speaking.

We're currently holding at 20,000 feet.

Over.

But wire wasn't only used for black box recorders.

Although it wasn't common, some music was recorded onto wire, including this 1949 performance by Woody Guthrie.

That's incredible.

It sounds great.

I can't believe believe it's about as thin as the smallest string on a guitar.

Yeah, it's really, really thin.

That sounds pretty great for a very thin wire.

So, wire had its uses, but it never caught on as a medium for music because of another format that worked even better, magnetic tape.

With magnetic tape, the improvements in the length of recording were extraordinary, and the fidelity of the recording was indistinguishable over the airwaves from someone speaking live.

I'll give you $100, Dallas, if you can guess the person that really pushed this technology along and led to a lot of the early breakthroughs.

Hmm.

The ghost of Thomas Edison?

Well, that's why I could bet $100.

Bing Crosby.

Oh, wow.

Back in the 1940s, Bing Crosby was the biggest star in America.

He appeared in movies and television programs and sold everything from scotch tape to photocopiers.

Here's another great boon for the businessman.

This Thermifax copying machine.

It's really a marvelous little helper.

But at the center of it all was his weekly radio show, the Kraft Music Hall program.

The Kraft Music Hall with Bing Crosby, John Scott Trotter's Orchestra, The Charioteers, and Metro Golden Mare's charming star of the Technicolor Musical Best Foot Forward, Lucille Ball.

Now, Bing loved his radio show, but it was also a lot of work.

That's because he had to perform each episode not once, but twice.

Once for audiences on the East Coast,

and once again for audiences on the West Coast.

And it was all live, which meant no mistakes.

This didn't leave much time for his other passion, golf.

Nothing like a game of golf, you know, to chase the cobwebs out of your brain.

So, when Bing heard about the possibilities of tape, he invested millions.

He even became the U.S.

distributor for both the company that made the tape machines and the company that made the magnetic tape.

After a few test runs, the system was ready.

In August 1947, he recorded his first show to magnetic tape, which was broadcast later that year to an audience of millions.

However, this kind of tape was expensive, so it was mostly used in professional recording studios.

But soon enough, other recording devices would find their way into people's homes and offices.

These included personal recorders called dictaphones.

Secretaries too find the dictaphone easy and pleasant to use.

Of great help in all their work.

No wonder it has given business an entirely new conception of dictating machine usage.

Inside the dictaphone was something called a dicta belt.

It worked in a similar way to a wax cylinder, but instead of wax, dictor belts were made from colourful bands of plastic.

That meant they looked pretty funky.

What the heck is this?

It looks like fruit roll-ups.

Yeah, it looks like a kid's suite.

That's a really good way of putting it, yeah.

By the 1960s, it was possible to record your voice at the office using a dictating machine.

Note to self, the office bar is low on bourbon.

And then, when you got home, you could listen to high-quality music on a reel-to-reel tape machine.

Although, these tapes were pretty expensive, so they never really competed with vinyl in terms of popularity.

But music still wasn't portable.

Sure, you could take a record play with you, but even the so-called portable ones were pretty heavy.

And of course, you could listen to the radio, but that wasn't the same as taking your own music collection with you.

Then, along came a new invention that changed everything.

Radio Shack has a super half-price deal now on an 8-track car stereotape player.

Put stereo 8-track players in two cars for the regular price of one.

Or buy one and have enough money left over for car speakers and your reverse tape.

Get on the road to savings now with this sale-priced realistic 8-track car stereotape player.

I am down to buy an 8-track because I hear that I can buy one and have enough money for another or have money for speakers left over.

Get on the road to savings.

Yeah, Yeah, that's a great copy.

We should use that in our ad.

Get on the road to savings now.

We'll get on that road, catch some stories from our listeners, and hear about what might just be the worst audio format ever created after the break.

The first portable music player that really took off was the 8-track.

8-track tapes were great because they were durable, affordable, and could hold a lot of music, up to 80 minutes in some models.

Dallas, originally, I gave you a chance to win $100 if you could guess who pushed forward the development of magnetic tape recording in the US.

But here's a chance for you to win $1,000 with this second challenge.

If you can guess which company developed the 8-track,

I'm going to go with Sony.

Sony.

I'm afraid I will once more be keeping the $1,000.

Learjet.

Learjet.

Learjet.

Like the airplane company?

Exactly.

8-Tracks might have had a jet plane company behind them, but they weren't perfect.

For example, each 8-track tape was divided into four sections of equal length, called programs.

Each program was around 10 minutes long, which was long enough for at least a couple of pop songs.

but if there was a song that lasted more than the length of a program, it would fade out,

then the program would switch over, and the song would fade back in again.

When I lived in America, I bought a car that had an 8-track player in it, and the guy that sold it to me said, I could keep all of the tapes.

That's a huge bonus.

Yeah, but it was exactly what you would imagine.

Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, 70s kind of rock, R-A-W-K rock music.

You know, I would probably buy that car.

If I was in the market for an old car with an 8-track and they were like, you're going to get a bunch of 70s rock 8-tracks with it, I'd be like, okay, fine, sold.

8-tracks peaked in popularity around the mid-70s.

And not long after, another tape system started making its mark.

It was called the Compact Cassette.

Cassettes were actually introduced back in the early 60s by Dutch company Philips.

Philips cassette loading battery recorder.

It's easy because tape comes in compact cassettes that you clip in for instant use.

For a long time cassettes were simply too expensive to compete with 8-tracks but by the 80s it was finally the cassette's time to shine.

In the 1980s, the cassette became ubiquitous and in many ways is one of those images that we associate with that period.

Oh yeah, I think I literally still have a box of cassette tapes in a closet somewhere.

Tell me what's cool about cassette tapes.

Out of all physical media, the cassette tape is the most satisfying, tactily.

If we're going to compare it to vinyl records, vinyl is cool.

You know, you pull it out of a sleeve, you're real delicate with it, you put it down.

But cassette tapes are like, you can just roughhouse them.

I love just all the little plasticky sounds of putting it into a player and then snapping it back.

And then there was always a big physical button that's just super satisfying.

Now, there is a downside to cassette tape, and that is the horrible moment when it sort of chews itself.

Oh gosh, and then you pull the cassette out, and all the tape just gets mushed in there, and you pull it all out, and then you try to rewind it with a pencil, and you try to get it all back to the way it was, and it's just never the same.

But these problems didn't prevent people from enjoying cassettes, and at least some of our listeners loved them.

When my sister and I were young, we had a toy Fisher Price tape recorder.

We used to record a radio show on it, and we took this very, very seriously.

I always hope that one day we'll find those tapes and get to listen to them again.

The Compact Cassette also triggered a very important cultural icon, the mixtape.

For music-loving nerds like me, flirting would never be the same again.

If you were recording a bunch of songs, you know, like they had to be related in some way, the more effort you put into it, like here's the list of all the songs on this little note card, here's some drawings or something else that you would stick in it, those you only gave to people that you really, really liked.

By the mid-80s, more than 50% of all music was purchased on compact cassette.

But that domination didn't last long because there was a new format that was about to take over, the compact disc or CD.

Here's one of the original adverts for CDs from 1984, starring John Cleese.

Pure sound played by laser.

Just listen to that.

No hisses and crackles, of course, but if you do want that, munch a biscuit, sip a cup of cocoa, and it'll sound just like your old record player.

You know what I mean?

the cd is quite maligned but revolutionary in the 1980s right the quality of a cd versus what was possible with an average cassette deck was an incredible improvement they had a decent length uh 74 minutes pretty good is that because of beethoven's ninth is that is that right

allegedly because of the length of beethoven's ninth symphony yeah depends how fast you play it, I suppose.

Yeah, good point.

People loved the quality and convenience of CDs.

However, they could also be really irritating.

They were really easily scratched.

And in cars, they would skip all the time because it was a real tiny laser.

And if you can imagine just little bumps in the road,

I remember out of everything, that was the most fickle format for a vehicle.

And it seems that a lot of listeners shared the same experience.

Back in the 90s, I used to be really afraid of thunderstorms.

Something I used to try to drown off the sound was my CD player.

So I had a CD player, I had my headphones on, but the problem with that was

every time the thunder would sound, my C D would skip.

Vinyl Records had over 50 years as the dominant format.

Magnetic tapes managed about 20.

But for CDs, it was barely 10, because by the early 2000s, they were already being replaced by MP3s.

MP3s were amazing.

You could download them from the internet, load them onto a music player, and take them anywhere.

Here's our producer, Marissa Flaxbart.

For my 17th birthday, my dad got me this tiny little turquoise 64 megabyte mp3 player.

And so he told me about how you could go online and there was software you could use to find whatever song you wanted in MP3.

And you could fit, as I recall, about 16 songs on the 64 megabyte MP3 player.

And I remember that being so amazing.

I took it on a study abroad trip to Germany and I listened to those 16 songs that I'd painstakingly picked over and over again.

I think that was probably the last time in my life that my dad was the one that was teaching me about a brand new technology.

However, while previous formats had improved both quality and convenience, this time the quality was actually worse.

And that's because MP3s are a compressed or lossy format.

The space needed back then, a lot of people were on dial-up internet.

You just needed to make sure that these things were teeny tiny and making sure you could kind of make them at the best quality where your casual listener wouldn't notice.

It's kind of complicated, but basically an MP3 works in the same way as a JPEG.

When you look closely at a JPEG, you can see it's pixelated, and colors that are similar get grouped together as a single colour.

With MP3s, the same thing happens, except with sound.

For example, it cuts out any quiet sounds that would be partially masked by louder sounds.

The result is a smaller file, but with less depth and spaciousness.

We've reached a point today where actually we've gone back a little bit.

A lot of us are just streaming things now from compressed sources, and we care less about that quality than perhaps we did before.

There was one format that maybe best represents this urge for convenience over quality.

It was called HICClips.

Coming at you right between the ears is Hitclips.

Hitclips is a slick micro-audio system.

This type package is small.

It pumps out monster sounds.

So it just played like the chorus over and over again?

Yeah.

Come on.

So what you're saying is you're not going to be converting to hit clips anytime soon?

Ugh.

This sounds like

misery.

But despite Dallas's misgivings, there were actually some people who really liked hitclips.

Here's one of our sound designers, Soren.

You gotta remember, these were made for children, and mostly they were distributed through kid-friendly sources.

Like, I remember getting them in McDonald's Happy Meals.

It was the early 2000s, and most people didn't have tech that could support MP3s.

CDs were expensive, and not something most kids had, so hit clips, getting this cartridge the size of a thumbnail that could play back choruses of radio singles for a kid, that was so cool.

Today, MP3s are still the dominant format, though most of us don't have a dedicated MP3 player.

Instead, we just stream MP3s over the internet using our phones or computers.

In fact, this podcast is in MP3 format.

Although, we always make sure to use the highest quality MP3 possible that isn't too huge of a file.

These days, some music platforms do have an option for higher quality MP3s, though you might have to turn it on in the settings.

And a few services go even further and stream audio in a lossless format.

We have so-called lossless encoding technologies now, so bit perfect transmission and replay of sound, which is amazing.

But that came at quite a cost in terms of storage size.

And back when devices were relatively small, that meant that they were expensive to store.

Storage is bigger now and cheaper, and it's much easier to store those lossless formats.

But then, why not just stick with MP3 as this small, very convenient, easy format?

Isn't it good enough?

Was VHS good enough?

Was DVD good enough?

It's perfectly acceptable now to stream endless amounts of 4K video.

You don't have to be a videophile to go, oh, I can now appreciate video because it's 4K now.

We'd never do that with video.

The kind of weird, mysterious, gatekeepy world of audio seems as if the layman couldn't possibly appreciate a higher quality format if they didn't understand the mystery and the nuts and bolts and the bit range and the sample blah, blah, blah.

None of that matters.

The point is, the highest quality of audio in the world will be acoustic audio when there's a vibration off of something that travels into your ears.

So the closer and closer we can get to that digitally, the more human and the more powerful listening experience.

And I just want to get as close to that purity as possible.

If someone can't afford high quality streaming service, I understand that.

Can you still enjoy music?

Otherwise, of course you can.

But once you get a taste of that sound, especially from a track that you know, for me, I can't go back.

20,000 Hz is produced out of the sound design studios of DeFacto Sound.

Find out more at de factosound.com.

This episode was written and produced by Andrew Anderson.

It was story edited by Casey Emmerling.

With help from Grace East.

It was edited and sound designed by Soren Bajan, Joel Boyd, and Colin DeVarney.

A special thanks to our listeners, Christina, Jamie, David, and Julia, whose messages were used in the show, as well as to everyone else who called in.

We really loved listening to all of your stories.

Thanks to Cobuz for making this episode possible, and thanks also to our guest, Adam Tavell.

For another great music episode, check out our two-part series on mastering.

Part one is episode number 77, The Compressed History of Mastering.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

Thanks for listening.