Art by Divya Tak.
This episode was written by Andrew Anderson.
The history of recorded sound stretches back over a hundred and fifty years, starting with a device that could “record” a voice on a piece of paper. Today, we can enjoy lossless streaming anywhere we go… but getting here wasn’t easy. In this episode, we worked with Qobuz, the high quality music platform, to chart the history of audio mediums, from cylinders made of tin foil and wax, to vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CDs, and mp3s. Along the way, we explore the innovations and quirks of each format, with memories sent in from our listeners and the 20K team. Featuring Adam Tovell from the British Library Sound Archive.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Original music by Wesley Slover
Steppin Intro by Sound of Picture
Paraphrase on Sleeping Beauty by Paul Pabst
Greylock by Skittle
Lonely Summertime by The Rockin’ Berries
Ding Dong by Niklas Gabrielsson
Bebop Blues by Vendla
Living Memories by Golden Age Radio
Gin Boheme by Vermouth
Forever in Love With a Ghost by PÄR
You Oughta Know by Rockin’ For Decades
Back in Time by They Fall
Pink Gloves by J.F. Gloss
Dreamweavers by Sven Lindvall & Daniel Fridell
No One Knows But Me by Torii Wolf
Tour 505 by Epocha
Blipper by Sound of Picture
October by UTAH
Do You by KENA
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View Transcript ▶︎
You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz
[music in]
Recently, our producer Andrew Anderson randomly hit me up to chat with him on-mic.
[sfx: tapping table]
I think I'm getting a little bit of, um, bumps and stuff on your microphone
Andrew: Okay, I'll stop tapping the table. That was me tapping the table, I think.
Andrew: 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?
Andrew: Well, well, we'll see how far we get. Um, I do have….
Andrew: Because I know Dallas has strong opinions when it comes to his listening experience. And that includes the music he streams.
The first time that I heard high definition streaming music in my studio, I audibly gasped.
Andrew: Hm!
Andrew: Luckily for Dallas, these days it's super easy to listen to high fidelity music. All you need is a decent internet connection, and you can have musical accompaniment for whatever you're doing.
Andrew: What do you actually do while you're listening to music?
The thing I do the most is cooking that pairs very nicely with music.
Andrew: What kind of music do you like to listen to while you're cooking?
The most recent thing I listen to is like a French playlist of just French pop hits.
Andrew: Cool. I should make you a Bulgarian playlist.
I would love that.
[music in]
Andrew: 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?
[music in]
Adam Tovell: Recorded sound, it's such a rich source of social history.
Andrew: That’s Adam Tovel, who works in a department called Sound in Vision at the British Library.
Adam Tovell: The British Library hold the National Sound Collection, so that's a vast collection of over 6 million recordings.
Andrew: That collection reaches all the way back to the 1800s, and the earliest days of recorded sound.
Adam Tovell: We have to go back to the 1860s when we think about the first recorded sound. So Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph, which was a means of recording sound visually.
Andrew: De Martinville was as much an eccentric entertainer as he was an inventor.
[sfx: crowds, carnival sounds]
Andrew: He'd take his phonautograph 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...
French voice: Bonjour, j'enregistre le tout premier son.
Andrew: That would move a membrane [sfx: membrane vibrating]. Which moved a needle [sfx: scratching] and that scratched a pattern onto paper [sfx: paper writing]. It was like your voice was being turned into a picture.
Andrew: For the time, it was very impressive, but…
Adam Tovell: It couldn't be played back. It was purely intended as a means of visualization.
Andrew: Luckily for us, scientists have since used digital technology to turn those patterns back into sounds.
Andrew: 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 Au Clair de la Lune.
[clip: de Martinville]
So who recorded the first sound that you could actually listen back to?
Andrew: Well that was a man whose name might be familiar to you: Thomas Edison.
Yeah I think I’ve heard of him.
[music in]
Adam Tovell: So Edison's work used cylinders coated in a thin layer of tin foil. And grooves were essentially embossed in that tin foil in the same way that one would imagine an LP working today.
Andrew: An LP or “Long Play,” is another term for a vinyl record. In 1877 - when Edison debuted his tin foil 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.
Andrew: But as impressive as these cylinders were, they weren’t very durable.
Adam Tovell: 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.
Andrew: That meant that after a few plays, the recording...
[sfx: static]
Andrew: ...would stop working. As a result, most of the original tin foil recordings have been lost.
Andrew: 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.
Adam Tovell: What they introduced was a wax coating to replace tin foil, which was soft enough to be cut into, but equally solid enough to be replayed.
Andrew: Here's one of those early wax cylinder recordings from the 1890s.
[clip: wax cylinder]
Wow, were those violins?
Andrew: It's a violin player, yeah.
Wow. That's cool.
[music out]
Andrew: But soon enough, a rival format came along.
[music in]
Andrew: These were large, flat discs that could be made from shellac, lacquer or even aluminum. You played them on a gramophone, and they basically worked the same way as vinyl records do today. And the invention of discs triggered...
Adam Tovell: The original format war, right? So you've got cylinders, which were great. They're incredibly useful medium for home recording.
Andrew: But discs had other advantages.
Adam Tovell: You can have two sides on a disc, which means that you can have more music for your money.
Andrew: Discs were also way faster and cheaper to produce than wax cylinders.
Adam Tovell: So, in terms of industry and commerce, discs won out.
[music out]
Andrew: 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.
[clip: NBC Orchestra]
That's incredible. That's the type of stuff I'd be listening to on the gramophone.
Andrew: The quality is actually not bad even, you know, 120-plus years later.
[music out]
Andrew: 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 gramophone at home.
Andrew: Here's a recording that two parents made for their children as a Christmas present.
Parent: 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 player’s a joint Christmas present for you.
Oh gosh. Was everyone a voice artist back then? That was so perfect.
Andrew: Yeah, it's lovely, isn't it? Hearing that.
I love how intentional the wording is, cuz 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.
Andrew: 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...
[music in]
Andrew: The disc format was a big success, and before long, record companies were selling millions and millions of them.
[music in]
Andrew: 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.
Andrew: 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.
Andrew: I 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 half to make me listen to the second half?” And all of the artist intention like you kind of said there.
[music out]
Andrew: 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…
[clip]
Andrew: And how it sounded on a disc recording…
[clip]
Andrew: 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.
Adam Tovell: 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.
Andrew: This made wire perfect for situations where weight and length of recording were important - for example, black box recorders.
[sfx: ping sounds]
Flight control, this is Captain Dallas Taylor speaking. We’re currently holding at Twenty Thousand feet, over.
Andrew: 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.
[clip: Woody Guthrie]
That's incredible. It sounds great. I can't believe it's about as thin as the smallest string on a guitar.
Andrew: Yeah, it's, it's really, really thin.
That sounds pretty great for a very thin wire.
Andrew: 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.
Adam Tovell: 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.
Andrew: I'll give you a hundred dollars 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?
Andrew: Well, that's why I could bet a hundred dollars, um, Bing Crosby.
Oh, wow.
[music in]
Andrew: 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.
Bing Crosby: Here's another great boon for the business man. This Thermofax copying machine. It's really a marvelous little helper.
Andrew: But at the center of it all was his weekly radio show, the Kraft Music Hall program.
[clip: Kraft Music Hall program]
Andrew: 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 [sfx: audience cheers] and once again for audiences on the west coast [sfx: audience cheers].
Andrew: And it was all live, which meant no mistakes. This didn't leave much time for his other passion: golf.
Bing Crosby: Nothing like a game of golf, you know, to chase the cobwebs outta your brain.
Andrew: So when Bing heard about the possibilities of tape, he invested millions. He even became the US distributor for both the company that made the tape machines, and the company that made the magnetic tape.
[music out]
Andrew: 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.
[clip: Bing Crosby radio show]
Andrew: 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.
[music in]
Dictabelt Commercial: Secretaries, too, find the Dictaphone easy and pleasant to use, a great help in all their work. No wonder it has given business an entirely new conception of dictating machine usage.
Andrew: Inside the Dictaphone was something called a Dictabelt. It worked in a similar way to a wax cylinder. But instead of wax, Dictabelts were made from colorful bands of plastic. That meant they looked pretty funky.
What the heck is this? It looks like um Fruit Roll Ups.
Andrew: Yeah, it looks like a kid's sweet. That's a really good way of putting it, yeah.
[music out]
Andrew: By the 1960s, it was possible to record your voice at the office using a dictating machine.
[sfx: tape recorder starts]
60s Guy: Note to self: The office bar is low on bourbon.
Andrew: And then when you got home, you could listen to high quality music on a reel to reel tape machine.
[music in]
Andrew: Although these tapes were pretty expensive, so they never really competed with vinyl in terms of popularity.
Andrew: But music still wasn't portable. Sure, you could take a record player 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.
[music out]
Andrew: Then along came a new invention that changed everything.
Radio Shack Ad: Radio Shack has a super half price deal now on an eight track car stereo tape player. Put stereo eight 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 first tape. Get on the road to savings now, with this sale-priced realistic 8-track car stereo tape player.
I am down to buy an eight track, ‘cuz I hear that I can buy one and have enough money for another, or have money for speakers left over.
Andrew: Get on the road to savings!
Yeah, that's a great copy. We should use that in our ads.
Announcer: Get on the road to savings now with promo code two zero K!
[music in]
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.
[music out]
MIDROLL
[music in]
The first portable music player that really took off was the 8-track.
Andrew: 8-track tapes were great because they were durable, affordable, and could hold a lot of music - up to 80 minutes in some models.
[music out]
Andrew: Dallas, originally, I gave you a chance to win a hundred dollars 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 a thousand dollars with this second challenge, if you can guess which company developed the eight track.
I'm gonna go with Sony.
Andrew: Sony, I'm afraid I will once more be keeping that $1,000. Learjet.
Learjet?
Andrew: Learjet.
Like the airplane company?
Andrew: Exactly
[sfx: plane taking off]
[music in]
Andrew: 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…
[music fades out]
Andrew: ...then, the program would switch over, [click] and the song would fade back in again.
[music fades back in, then out]
Andrew: When I lived in America, I bought a car that had an eight 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.
Andrew: Yeah, but it was exactly what you would imagine.
[music in]
Andrew: Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, seventies kinda rawk, 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 eight track and they were like, you're gonna get a bunch of seventies rock eight tracks with it. I'd be like, “Okay, fine. Sold.”
[music out]
Andrew: 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 commercial: Philips cassette loading battery recorder. It’s easy because tape comes in compact cassettes that you clip in for instant use.
Andrew: 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.
[music in]
Adam Tovell: 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.
Andrew: Tell me what's cool about cassette tapes.
Out of all physical media the cassette tape is the most satisfying, tacitly. If we're gonna 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 'em.
I love just all the little plasticy 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.
Andrew: Now there is a downside to, uh, cassette tape. And that is the horrible moment when it sort of chews itself.
[music out]
[sfx: tape getting jammed]
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. [sfx: sound design Dallas doing this] And it's just never the same.
[clip: music restarts, but sounds wrong]
Tape Listener: Sigh.
Andrew: But these problems didn't prevent people from enjoying cassettes, and at least some of our listeners loved them.
Listener: 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.
Andrew: The compact cassette also triggered a very important cultural icon: the mix tape.
[music in]
Andrew: For music-loving nerds like me, flirting would never be the same again.
Listener: 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.
[music out]
Andrew: By the mid eighties, 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.
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?
Adam Tovell: The CD's 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.
Andrew: Is that because of Beethoven's ninth? Is that, is that right?
[music in]
Adam Tovell: Allegedly because of the length of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, yeah. Depends how fast you play it, I suppose.
Andrew: Yeah. Good point.
[music out]
Andrew: People loved the quality and the convenience of CDs. However, they could also be REALLY irritating.
[music in]
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 [sfx: skips]. I remember out of everything, that was the most fickle format for a vehicle.
Andrew: And it seems that a lot of listeners shared the same experience.
Listener: Back in the nineties, I used to be really afraid of thunderstorms.
[sfx: thunder and rain]
Listener: Something I used to try to drown out 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 CD would skip.
[sfx: thunder + CD skip]
[music out]
Andrew: 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 two thousands, they were already being replaced by MP3s
[music in]
Andrew: 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.
Marissa: 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 this 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.
[music out]
Andrew: 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.
[music in]
The space needed back then… A lot of people were on dialup 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, where your casual listener wouldn't notice.
Andrew: It's kinda 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 color.
Andrew: 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.
Adam Tovell: 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.
[music out]
Andrew: There was one format that maybe best represents this urge for convenience over quality. It was called Hit Clips.
Hit Clips Commercial: Coming at your right between the ears is Hit Clips. Hit clips of a slick micro audio system. This tight package is small. Pumps out monster sound.
So it just played like the chorus over and over again?
Andrew: Yeah.
Come on.
Andrew: So what you're saying is you're not gonna be converting to Hit Clips anytime soon.
Dallas: Ugh. This sounds like misery.
Andrew: But despite Dallas’ misgivings, there were actually some people who really liked Hit Clips. Here’s one of our sound designers, Soren.
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.
[music in]
Andrew: 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.
Andrew: 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
Adam Tovell: 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.
Andrew: 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 that 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.
[music in]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. Find out more at Defacto Sound dot com.
Andrew: This episode was written and produced by Andrew Anderson.
It was story edited by Casey Emmerling, with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Soren Begin, Joel Boyter and Colin Devarney.
Andrew: A special thanks to our listeners Christina, Jamie, David and Julia whose messages we used in the show, as well as to everyone else who called in. We really loved listening to all of your stories.
Thanks to Qobuz for making this episode possible, and thanks also to our guest Adam Tovell.
Andrew: 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.
[music out]
