Digital Media Player

Vinyl Records

A phonograph record stores a copy of sound waves as a series of undulations in a wavy groove inscribed on its rotating surface by the recording stylus. When the record is played back, another stylus (needle) responds to the undulations, and its motions are then reconverted into sound. Its invention is generally credited to Thomas Alva Edison (1877). Stereophonic systems, with two separate channels of information in a single groove, became a commercial reality in 1958. All modern phonograph systems had certain components in common: a turntable that rotated the record; a stylus that tracked a groove in the record; a pickup that converted the mechanical movements of the stylus into electrical impulses; an amplifier that intensified these electrical impulses; and a loudspeaker that converted the amplified signals back into sound. Phonographs and records were the chief means of reproducing recorded sound at home until the 1980s, when they were largely replaced by recorded cassettes (see tape recorder) and compact discs.

Compact Cassette tape

The first compact cassette tapes were launched in 1962 by Philips, swiftly followed by the first dictation machine in 1963. Philips was unprepared for the popularity of their blank cassette tapes as they quickly became used across the world for use in the office, the home and in the bedroom for many wannabe singers. Cassette decks became widespread for home audio systems, cars as well as portable recorders. A major boost in popularity came with the invention of the Sony Walkman in 1979, which was a portable headphone only music device.

Compact Disc

Now famous TV footage shows the first CD’s available being heralded as so indestructible that you could spread jam on them. Marketed as a way of playing music with a previously unheard of clarity and the fact they – apparently – couldn’t be damaged. The invention of the CD in 1980 by the joint efforts of Sony and Phillips meant that the days of buying vinyl were very quickly numbered.

MP3 Player

From vinyl to cassette to CD, music had always been available as a visually stored item. You could hold the record as it was put on the deck or place the CD in the player. This all changed in 1989 when a patent was granted to German company Fraunhofer- Gesellschaft following their work into music compression. The first MP3 player was completed in 1997 (with a previous commercial disastrous attempt in 1995). The CD now found itself in the same situation as its musical predecessors when the first players were launched on the market.

Video Tape

Before the video tape, the only way to view modern films was as they were released and then the long wait – originally a number of years – before they would be televised for the first time. This often tied in with times such as Christmas when the new James Bond film would be scheduled.

The invention of the video tape in 1951 was originally used by television companies and the first commercially available machine in 1956 cost an eye- watering £30,000. It wasn’t until 1971 that the first machines were seen in stores when they were launched by Sony.

Betamax and Philips tried to break into the video player market in the 1980s but were quickly outnumbered in terms of sales by those wanting VHS machines due to the availability of new films at the local video rental shop.

DVD

The DVD represents the second generation of compact-disc (CD) technology. Like a CD drive, a DVD drive uses a low-power laser to read digitized (binary) data that have been encoded onto the disc in the form of tiny pits. Because it uses a digital format, a DVD can store any kind of data, including movies, music, text, and graphical images. DVDs are available in single- and double-sided versions, with one or two layers of information per side. Single-sided DVDs have become standard media for recorded motion pictures, largely replacing videotape in the home market. A double-sided, dual-layer version can store about 30 times as much information as a standard CD. DVDs are made in a ROM (read-only memory) format as well as in erasable (DVD-E) and recordable (DVD-R) formats. Though DVD players can usually read CDs, CD players cannot read DVDs. It is expected that DVDs will eventually replace CDs, especially for multimedia workstations.