The Consumer Marketplace

The Consumer Marketplace

     by Michael Daisy

1903 Victor Monarch record label

A History of Recorded Sound, Part Three

The consumer market for pre-recorded music is currently dominated by home and car-audio usage, but that wasn't the case originally. The first audio playback devices were relatively costly. There were no home or car audio markets. In order to enjoy a pre-recorded audio experience it was necessary for people to get out of the house, and go to where the playback machines were.

Put Another Nickel In…

Wurlitizer has been one of the big names in the music entertainment business for well over a century. The musical tradition of the Wurlitizer family – as manufacturers and dealers in music instruments in Saxony – can be traced back to the 17th century. Rudolph Wurlitizer, who came to the US at the age of 24 in 1853, founded the Wurlitizer Company in 1856.

Wurlitzer Tonophone

Initially, Wurlitizer imported musical instruments for which he opened sales outlets in several large American cities. He began manufacturing pianos in 1880. The "Tonophone" – the first coin-operated variation of a player piano – was introduced to the public in 1896 and was a huge success, but not the big-ticket item the company would take to the bank. That took place some six years earlier, in November 1889, when the world's first jukebox was installed in San Francisco's Palais Royal Saloon.

The word "jook" is an old African-American term, meaning to dance, but often included sexual overtones. It has been suggested that workers in southern jute fields frequented low class roadhouses or makeshift bars called juke (or jute) joints where early versions of jukeboxes were featured attractions. The jukebox in the Palais Royal Saloon was a coin-operated cylinder phonograph with four listening tubes that generated over $41,000 in its first six months of operation.

Classic Wurlitzer Jukebox

Meanwhile, the Wurlitizer Company's revenues were boosted to dizzying heights by demand for theatre organs during the silent film era. Introduced in 1910, a number of "Mighty Wurlitizers" continue to entertain theater goers in several cities in the US and other countries. The "Mighty Wurlitizer" name itself is still well known.  

During the 1920s and '30s Wurlitizer adopted the "Music for Millions" slogan as its coin-operated record-playing machines laid claim to 60-percent of the market and the company name because a popular corporate eponym for "jukebox", not unlike “Kleenex” for “tissue”.

Phonograph Records

Emile Berliner

Despite its seemingly obvious limitations as a musical playback device, the cylinder managed to survive as an alternative to what became popularly known as the phonograph record until about 1929. This, however, was more a result of Thomas Edison's popularity and stubborn persistence than to any qualities possessed by the cylinder, itself. Emile Berliner's disc was clearly a better delivery mechanism for prerecorded music. On the other hand, the initial lack of standardization of playback discs did not seem to hold out much hope for the format's long term survival in an often fickle consumer market.

Early discs were all over the map. The first turntables were hand cranked, spring-loaded devices that spun records as fast as 130 rpm. Noise generated from hard rubber, cellulose and shellac playing surfaces were antithetical to pristine audio experience. And the sizes. Many early discs were 5-inch, some were 7-inch, and some were as much as 14 or 15-inch diameter. But gradually, a sense of order began to assert itself.

Ten-inch records were introduced in 1901, and 12-inch in 1903. The earliest records were all single sided with the first double-sided records released by Columbia in Europe in 1904. By 1910, double-sided discs were standard fare both here and across the pond. Out of this practice naturally evolved the recording industry practice of placing the track promoted as the "hit" on the "A-side" of the record, and a lesser, or often, throwaway track on the "B" or "flip-side."

As discussed in the previous installment, technicians at the British Gramophone Company determined 78 rpm to be the ideal playback speed for 10-inch discs, while the first Jazz releases in 1917 helped to extend the life of the cylinder by a few years. Then came the game changing introduction of electrical (or electromechanical) recordings in 1919 and '20.

1906 Victor Victrola

The earliest recordings were acoustical. That is, a live performance picked up by a diaphragm in the cutting head and transcribed directly onto a cylinder or disc. The use of electrically powered devices – amplifiers, microphones, and later tape recorders – added a whole new dimension.

During recording, microphones and amplification meant it was no longer necessary to shout into a horn, while tiny sounds could be picked up from a comfortable distance. For record buyers, it meant the end of claustrophobic listening experiences where one or more people huddled around a hand-cranked record player or listening tube.

"Pop music" – a term believed to have been first used to describe a type of prerecorded music "having popular appeal" in 1926 – came fully into its own on February 10, 1942 when Glenn Miller's recording of "Chattanooga Choo Choo" qualified for the first ever Gold Disc for achieving sales of a million or more. Miller's recording had actually racked up sales of 1.2 million copies and spent nine weeks at the top of the Billboard charts after debuting on September 13, 1941.

Another milestone was achieved in 1948 with the introduction of the long-playing, 33-1/3 rpm vinyl record by Columbia.

Polyvinyl chloride (PVC, or vinyl) a durable type of plastic in common usage was accidentally discovered twice; first in 1835 by French chemist Henri Victor Regnaut (1810-1878), and then again in 1872 by German chemist Eugen Baumann (1846-1896). But it wasn't until 1926 when Waldo Lonsbury Semon (1898-1999), a chemist employed in the research department at BF Goodrich Company, figured out how to plasticize what, until then, had been a waste product and nuisance. It wasn't long before the new wonder material gained widespread commercial usage in a wide range of products like pipes, cables, building materials, and, of course, vinyl records.

Employing Dr. Peter Goldmark's new "microgroove" system, the LP, as it came to be called, had a playing time of more than 20 minutes per side, nearly four times the playing time of a standard 78. The longer playing time was better suited to classical music, and could easily accommodate 10 or 12 shorter selections of "Pop" or other musical genre. There were other advantages, too. Records made of shellac were brittle and easily broken. Those made of vinyl were flexible and longer wearing with a much quieter playing surface.

Actually, the "new" format wasn't new at all. It had already been around. The "Long-Playing" 33-1/3 rpm speed was first used in 1927 for movies using Vitaphone, an early sound system developed by Warner Brothers. The soundtrack for Vitaphone movies was not embedded in the film, but on a record, the playback of which was synchronized with the film by the projectionist; a system that naturally lent itself to untold numbers of amusing oops moments.

And as for the 12-inch LP format itself, RCA had actually introduced a commercial version of a 12-inch, vinyl record designed to play at 33-1/3 rpm in 1930 that it called a "Program Transcription" disc. RCA's LP was a commercial flop for a number of reasons, among them its short-sighted failure to take into account the lack of affordable playback equipment capable of traversing the format's narrower grooves, and that it was the middle of a depression, a period when people weren't buying much of anything non-essential.

With the exception of RCA, full of resentment over its ill-fated LP adventure, the "new" Columbia format was quickly adopted as the "long-playing" industry standard, a distinction it retained until after the introduction of the compact disc in 1983 in the US. And unlike RCA's badly-timed introduction, Columbia's introduction of the LP coincided with the development and appearance on the market of a whole new generation of sophisticated hi-fidelity audio equipment

A year after Columbia's new format coup, RCA introduced a new format of its own in the form of the now familiar, 7-inch, vinyl “45”. Like the LP, the new 45 was embraced by the industry. Unlike Columbia's LP, however, manufacturers chose to ignore RCA's marketing recommendations. That's because RCA initially intended the 45 to compete head-to-head against the 12-inch LP. With the benefit of more than a half century of hindsight, plans to release boxed "albums" of multiple 45s and EPs (Extended Play 45s having two or three tracks per side) now seem particularly bizarre.

In any event, common sense won out over obstinate pride. By 1950, RCA conceded defeat as it began releasing LPs using the Columbia system. Conversely, Columbia and other manufacturers began issuing "singles" on the 45 format. But why the big hole? According to a number of sources, this was an act of pique by RCA. The large center hole serves no other purpose than to make RCA's product different from Columbia's.

Widespread acceptance of the 45 as a "singles" format spelled the end for the lowly 78 by the end of the 1950s. According to some, the last commercially released 78 was Chuck Berry's "Too Pooped To Pop" (Chess 1747), which entered the Billboard Pop charts on February 15, 1960. In England, 78s were deleted from EMIs catalogue in 1962. And though people did save their old 78s, they could no longer purchase turntables or record players with a 78 speed setting by the 1980s.

Does anybody remember 16 rpm records? Probably not, but surprisingly, there were a few music recordings released in this format. These slower (thus longer) playing records, however, were most often used as "talking books" produced for the blind in the 1950s and '60s.

Other notable advancements in records included:

RCA's release of the first stereophonic records -- featuring two audio tracks, one on each side of the groove – in 1958.

The introduction of quadrophonic sound - four audio tracks, two on each side of the groove - in 1970, also by RCA. This was the earliest commercial version of what is now known as "Surround Sound." These discs, however, were more expensive than comparable mono or stereo records, and required more costly playback equipment: specially equipped styli on a turntable, a minimum of four speakers, and receivers and amplifiers designed to decode the four separate audio channels.

Also,

The 12-inch single. This was a 12-inch disc most often designed to play at 45 rpm. The discs featured wider grooves, which allowed for greater volume, a wider dynamic range, and better overall sound quality, making them popular with disc jockeys in discotheques. 

Before getting too far ahead of ourselves, we need to return to 1949 to discuss the one true game-changing event that happened that year before finishing up this history with an overview of magnetic recording.

Although some sources say it occurred a year or more earlier, most agree that the transistor – a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and electrical power – was the big news of 1949. Brought into being through the efforts of John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at the Bell Labs (a feat for which the trio would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956), the transistor was greeted with wild enthusiasm by representatives of a huge range of product manufacturers. One of these being Akio Morita, a partner in Tsushin Kogyo, a Japanese startup company that would become more familiar to people after changing its name to Sony.

The transistor would go on to revolution the field of electronics, and home entertainment devices in particular. This one tiny component led the way for a seemingly endless array of devices that were increasingly smaller, sophisticated, more powerful, and even portable.

On October 18, 1954, the first transistor radio – a joint venture between Regency Division of Industrial Development Engineering Associates and Texas Instruments – was put on the market. It used four germanium transistors, stood a mere five-inches high, and was an immediate and unqualified success. The rest, as they say, is history.

Tape Recording

Valdemar Poulsen's "Telegraphone" of 1898

Alexander Graham Bell's Volta Lab is given credit by some sources as the inventor of the tape recorder in 1886. This claim has some credibility since the Bells’ device employed a long strip of paper (tape) that was transported across the recording/playback head between two reels (reel-to-reel?). However, this hand-cranked, wood and metal gadget with its wax covered, paper tape was more closely related to the Volta Lab's Graphophone than an actual tape recorder. For honest-to-goodness magnetic recording, there was nothing until 1898 when Valdemar Poulsen's "Telegraphone" (briefly discussed at the end of the previous installment) was introduced. Metal wire as a recording medium, was wear-resistant and long lasting, but required a very strong current to imprint a readable signal, the playback sound quality of which was very poor. This made it a less than ideal choice for music reproduction.

German Magnetophon

The Magnetophon, the world's first true magnetic tape recorder was introduced in 1935 by AEG, a German manufacturer of electrical equipment. The machine incorporated principles established by Poulsen, and was developed to use the magnetic tape – a long strip of plastic film with a magnetisable coating – patented by its inventor Fritz Pfleumer (1881-1945) and produced by BASF in 1928. 

Very basically, tape recording and playback is accomplished by means of recording and playback heads that contain tiny electromagnets. Most tape recorders use a system of three heads: erase, record, and playback. In many recorders, the record and playback heads are combined.

When recording, the tape is transported first across the erase, and then the recording head. A large electromagnetic wave generated within the erase head erases any previous signal on the tape by randomly scrambling the magnetic particles in the coating of the tape. Sounds picked up by a microphone are converted to electrical impulses that are, in turn converted into an electromagnetic wave in the recording head, which transfers the signal to the tape by polarizing the particles in the tape's coating. To reproduce the recorded sound, the playback head merely reverses the process performed by the recording head

Reel-to-reel machines started appearing on the market in the late 1940s after the end of the war. Early machines were high-end devices that were prohibitively expensive and not well suited for use by casual users. And as a consumer commodity, pre-recorded tapes were largely confined by costs that were higher than for records. One reason for this being that it was necessary to reproduce a copy from a master in real time to maintain quality.

As costs began to fall in the 1950s, tape decks became an increasingly popular consumer choice but never presented a serious challenge to more user-friendly record players. And despite steady improvements in magnetic tape formulations that resulted in a superior audio experience for the listener, records remained significantly cheaper than pre-recorded tapes.

In 1952, Bernard Cousino of Toledo OH developed the endless-loop tape cartridge. It eliminated the need for tape threading that made reel-to-reel tapes so annoying and cumbersome. Rather ingeniously, the standard 1/4-inch tape was wrapped around a single reel and pulled from the center of the reel. The tape ends were spliced together. Two years later, George Eash, an associate of Cousino, developed what he called the Fidelipac (aka NAB cartridge, or CART), which he patented in January 1957. The CART would gain widespread usage by radio stations for pre-recorded jingles, commercials, announcements and music from 1959 until the 1990s when many those functions were being assumed by automated computerized broadcasting.

Earl "Madman" Muntz, an Illinois car dealer and car audio pioneer, seized on Eash's Fidelipac as the basis of a pre-recorded tape-based car audio system in 1962. He maneuvered around the Fidelipac's relatively short 10-minute playing time – determined by the cartridge itself, which limited the amount of tape contained – incorporating multi-track playback first developed by German audio engineers in 1943. The result was the Muntz Stereo-Pak, or 4-track cartridge.

Multi-track recording and playback is accomplished by dividing the tape surface into multiple parallel tracks that allowed sounds from multiple different sources to be recorded separately and played back simultaneously, or separately depending on the need. The obvious, first big development to come out of this technology was stereophonic recordings.

Muntz's 4-track tapes played either four mono, or two pairs of stereo tracks. As the story goes, the 8-track tape cartridge was inspired by a test drive that Muntz gave to Bill Lear of Lear Jet fame in 1963, during which he demonstrated his 4-track car audio system. Reportedly unhappy with Muntz' technology, Lear managed to bring together and lead a consortium that included Ampex, Ford Motor Company, General Motors, Motorola, and RCA Victor Records, to bring the 8-track into being with an emphasis on convenience and safety. The 8-track players featured minimal knobs and controls that allowed the driver to play tapes while driving without taking his eyes off the road. An 8-track car audio system was first offered as an option on the iconic 1964-1/2 Ford Mustang.

By the late '60s, pre-recorded 8-Track tapes were competitively priced with records, gaining popularity as a result. By 1970, it was the predominant car audio format in the United States.

Compact Cassette

The third major tape format, the compact cassette, was developed and introduced by Phillips in Europe in August 1963, and in the US under the company's Norelco brand in November 1964. The cassette was initially designed to be used for dictation. And while the first pre-recorded music cassettes were released in the US in 1965, sound quality was exceedingly poor.

Despite its initially lousy audio performance, the cassette format made notable progress into the market primarily due to Phillips' decision to license the format free of charge. Meanwhile, a succession of advances in tape formulations, noise suppression systems and recording technology led to the cassette surpassing the 8-track as the dominant tape format.

The cassette's rise to dominance was helped along by its design. Essentially a miniature reel-to-reel tape, the cassette was more readily adapted for home dubbing and with longer uninterrupted stretches; up to 45 minutes to an hour or more playing time per side. To create an endless loop, 8-Track tape ends were spliced together, often with a conductive material that caused a very noticeable pause and click as the track changed. The shorter playing time of tracks meant that longer selections (i.e. the album version of Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida") did not fit on a single track. Splices were also prone to breakage due to age, and handling. And even if your splice remained intact, you could still be victimized by dirty tape heads that could cause your tape player to eat your favorite tape.

The icing on the cake for the cassette came in 1979 when Sony introduced the Soundabout cassette player. You probably know it as The Walkman… portable, good sound from tiny headphones, which brings us to the Compact Disc, and the end of THIS history of recorded sound.

The Compact Disc, or CD, is an optical data storage device that was a joint collaboration of the Phillips Corporation in Europe and Sony in Japan. The word "Compact" was reportedly chosen because of another Phillips' product, the Compact Cassette. The first album released on CD was Billy Joel's 52nd Street, which was released on October 1, 1982 in Japan.

Compact Disc

Currently, CDs can contain up to 80 minutes of music. Initially, however, CDs were able to accommodate a maximum of 74 minutes. Why 74 instead of, say, 60 minutes? That is reportedly attributable to Norio Ohga, President of Sony during the disc's development in the 1980s. Accordingly, Ohga insisted that CDs be capable of containing the longest known performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which happens to clock in at 74 minutes.

Development of the CD was begun in 1974, and is an outgrowth of LaserDisc technology used for movies. From the beginning it was intended to replace the phonograph record. That is largely what happened, although vinyl records have enjoyed a renaissance within the last few years as a result of claims by some audiophiles that vinyl produces a superior listening experience. Of course, now the CD as a music format is being superseded by other digital formats, digital downloads in particular. And since the sale of pre-recorded music CDs peaked in 2000, CD usage has become increasingly dominated by digital data storage (CD-ROM) purposes.

Sources:

78-Records.com – CBS San Francisco – CollectorsWorldWest.com – EdInformatics.com – Google News – History-Of-Rock.com – Hoffman, Frank; Encyclopedia of Recorded Sound; 2005 – JukeBoxPlaying.com – PBS.org – Record Collectors Guild – Recording-History.org – Shellac.org – The Straight Dope – TimeToast.com – Vinylville.com – Deutsche-Wurlitizer.de – Wikipedia.