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Leon Scott de Martinville invented the Phonautograph the first device capible of recording sound, but it couldnt reproduce sound signals
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Thomas Edison's tinfoil cylinder phonograph made the first recording of the human voice.
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Edison lauches company to produce recording and playback machines which initally were intended as dictation machines for busisness purposes
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Emile Berliner adapts Martinville's idea into a disc music player he called a Gramophone
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Berliner’s gramophone became especially marketable through the invention of the spring motor record player, as first used by Eldridge Johnson in a hand-cranked motorized gramophone for Berliner
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Berliner and Johnson eventually joined interests to form the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1901. Their 1905 Victrola became the industry’s premiere disc phonograph, and the era of the 78 RPM disc standard was born
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By the 1920s, innovation in electrical recording and amplification systems combined with the advent of magnetic recording to help drive the recording industry for the next two centuries
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• In the 1940s, Columbia introduced the 33-1/3 RPM long-playing record (LP) at about the same time the Decca Record Company helped usher in the era of high fidelity with full frequency range recordings. Meanwhile, 3M introduced a “plastic-based recording tape with a magnetic oxide coating” as the Ampex Corporation led the way in high-quality tape recording machines
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In 1963, Phillips introduced the audio cassette tape format that eventually became popular among home audio enthusiasts. Analog cassette systems displaced the 8-track, but other systems remained popular for high fidelity applications among professionals until the advent of digital recorders.
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Sony developed the first digital audio recording devices to be used by professional studios in 1978. The next year, Sony revolutionized the world of personal audio with the introduction of the Walkman portable audio cassette player, initially called the “Soundabout.”
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Later, the first commercially available digital audio players in the United States using the MP3 format (which had been in development since 1987) would launch the digital audio player revolution that achieved meteoric success with the introduction of Apple’s iPod in 2001
