The history of audio goes all the way back to 1877 starting with an inventor known as Thomas Edison. He was the man who created the phonograph. Edison made his first phonograph out of tin foil. It could record and reproduce sound created a sensation. I also found this information from the Digital Audio Basics Article. A phonograph is a machine that reproduces sound and uses cylinders to even record. Throughout the years, technology approved so much. In 1881, Clement Alder used carbon microphones and armature headphones and accidentally produced a stereo effect.
In 1887, Emile Berliner is granted a patent on a flat disk. In 1910, Enrico Caruso was heard in the very first live broadcast. In 1921, the first commercial on the radio was created by KDKA, Pittsburgh PA. In 1940, Walt Disney’s “Fantasia was released with eight tracks of stereophonic sound. In 1947, Ampex produces its first tape recorder. In 1951, Tape recording with introduced to the “hot stylus” technique. In 1975, Digital tape recording takes hold in pro audio sets. Finally in 1999, audio DVD was agreed upon.
With that link you can see the timeline of audio beginning in 1877-1999. There are now computers we use to record and reproduce. We can even save it to CDs and other devices that store recordings. To do so, the sound is sampled. Which means that the audio is snapshotted and the more samples taken, then the better quality. Such as the sampling rate of 22kHz has a bit depth of 16. Bit depth is the quality of the stream.
Its channel is stereo and disk space for one minute is 5.2 Mb. Computers used for creating sound was created by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard in the late 1940s. The computer they created was called the CSIR Mark 1 (CSIRAC). Software is now starting to rise and hardware are starting to get forgotten. Everyday something changes in using software, like updates, and those cause the use of hardware to drop. That an impact on audio in everyday audio production these years. There is less money going around. CDs are way down which means, so are the recording budgets.
Even consumers buying habits have changed by the way audio has impacted today’s society. CD sales have gone way, way, way down and the digital sales went way up. There are a lot more home studios now then there was long ago. There are now portable studios in a home studio, so people could be anywhere in the room and be mixing audio. This is actually both good and bad. The gear for audio and even music is way better than an average of before. Now in movies the audio has better quality and a lot more sound then back then. So that has been the history of audio and the impact it has on today’s lovely society.