Significant Music Technology Developments

  • Vinyl player

    Vinyl player
    In 1857, French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, showcased his phonautograph. It used a vibrating diaphragm and stylus to record sound waves by tracing them on sheets of paper, but it could only visualize sound waves and could not play them back. It was this concept that led to Thomas Edison invention of the Phonograph in 1877.
  • Cassette tapes

    Cassette tapes
    The Cassette tape, or the Compact Cassette, was first developed by the Phillips company in 1962 in Belgium. Phillips released the invention to Europe at the Berlin Radio show on August 30th: 1963 the invention was released in the United States in November of next year. Up until then, listening to music was largely vinyl based and not exactly on-the-go friendly. The cassette tape made it easy and convenient to take your favorite music with you.
  • Portlable CD Player

    The compact disc turned 30 on Oct 1, 1982, Sony began selling the world's first commercially available CD player. Lets not forget the importance of the CD. Unlike its predecessor, the Cassette, the CD was designed to be a higher quality audio format than LPs (audiophiles to this day still debate that point, vehemently.) But what most people liked about the CD was its convenience
  • MP3

    MP3
    Common features of all MP3 are a memory storage device, such as flash memory or a miniture hard disk drive, an embedded processor, and audio codec microchip to convert the compressed file into an analogue sound signal.