Analogue Audio Formats

This page lists analogue audio recording/storage formats chronologically, with a short description of each and an external link for further reading.

Phonautograph
The story of sound recording technology begins in the late 1850s with the invention of the Phonautograph by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. This device was the very first piece of analogue audio recording technology. However, its usage was limited because it was unable to reproduce the sounds it had recorded. This was followed up by a similar device named the Phonograph, invented by Thomas Edison, which used tin cylinders and was capable of some degree of sound playback.

Gramophone
The iconic gramophone, developed in 1887 by Emile Berliner as an improvement to Edison's Phonograph. The gramophone used flat discs of a vinyl acetate material on which to record and play back music via the gramophone system, which used a stylus to read indentations made on the surface of the disk. This was the first iteration of what we now know as a vinyl record player, but it still did not produce an especially high quality reproduction. The disc production and playback system processes were developed as the years went on until arriving at the systems we still use today. The music store chain HMV (His Masters' Voice) still uses a gramophone in its logo, harking back to its historical founding era.

Telegraphone and Magnetaphon
Valdemar Poulsen invented the telegraphone around the turn of the 20th century. It used a length of magnetisable steel wire to store electrical signals similar to those used to broadcast over the radio. When Fritz Pfleumer invented the Magnetophon in 1935, recording devices were beginning to resemble reel-to-reel tape machines which were a staple for audio recording later on in the century. Using a very similar process to the telegraphone, but instead recording to paper strips lined with iron filings (which could store a magnetic alignment), electromagnetic recording was born.

Magnetic Tape
The development from the magnetophon to reel-to-reel magnetic tape machines seen in the more modern era took place during World War II, when German engineers discovered a method to reduce recording distortion by applying a current to the recording head of the device. A US solider named Jack Mullin acquired some of these devices during the war, and then worked to develop them for commercial use back in the USA, before presenting them to Hollywood film producers.

Extrapolation of the reel-to-reel devices lead to audio cassette and DAT tapes in later years.

Digital audio began to appear after the invention of the hard-disk, and engineers realised the potential application of the binary language to audio recording technology.