Turntables Timeline

1857Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville

Édouard-Léon created the phonautograph which

records sounds using a rotating cylinder but it does

not playback audio.

It is the first known device to record sound.

1877

Thomas Edison

Thomas created the first hand-cranked

Phonograph. It is demonstrated in the scientific

American magazine.

1887Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander created the graphophone which

included a floating stylus that produced clearer

sound and used wax cylinders.

1892

Emile Berliner

Emile patents the first gramophone disc records

these eventually made cylinders obsolete,

1895

Thomas Edison

Edison amplifies the sound of the phonograph

by adding a horn and begins mass production.

1901

Victor Talking Machine Company

The Victor Talking Machine Company

is founded and it becomes America's

leading producer of records and

phonographs.

1906Reginald Fessenden

Reginald Fessenden; an American engineer

is the first person to play music over the

Airwaves.

1931

Alan Dower Blumlein

Alan Dower invents stereophonic sound for

recording he was an EMI researcher for the

British music recording and publishing company.

1939

Magnetic tape was invented.It is used for magnetic recording and is made of a thin magnetic coating which is on a strip of plastic film.

1950s

The 45 rpm 7 inch record is invented.

This is a type of vinyl.

How did the introduction of vinyl make a difference to the performance with turntables?

14/04/15

Prior to the introduction of vinyl, there were various different materials used, initially brown wax cylinder records were used in the 1890s. The introduction of vinyl in the 1930s made a difference to the performance with time-tables as the gramophone records were previously made from hard rubber and then shellac, which is more fragile than the vinyl material. The advantages of vinyl over shellac was that they could hold a lot more grooves to allow for longer playing time, also vinyl was produced better sound quality and a lot less likely to get unwanted frequencies unlike the shellac discs. Therefore, vinyl’s allowed DJs to play much longer records, at higher speeds, with less unwanted frequency disruption and were hard wearing as the Vinylite was more durable than the previously used shellac. Due to the introduction of vinyl, the company Columbia, decided to produce a new turntable to demonstrate the power of the vinyl records to their full potential. This turntable was slower than previous ones, with a lighter pick up, which meant that it was a lot steadier when playing a vinyl record and it also produced a better sound quality. This helped start the DJ wave as it made DJ-ing a possibility and more affordable than it previously was.

1955

Edward P. Casey

Edward P. Casey from New york creates the

first custom built turntable.

1969

The technics direct drive system SP-10 was released.It was designed for studio use.

1972

The revolutionary direct drive turntable was created by Matsushita Technics it was called Technics SL- 1200.It was a hi-fi turntable.

1978

The 2nd generation SL-1200 MKII turntable was created by technics.It has slider pitch control for beat matching.

1981

Scratching's first vinyl was used on the album - the adventures of grandmaster flash on the wheels of steel.

How does scratching work /what is happening to the sound?

14/04/15

Scratching works by manipulating the vinyl on a turntable, by moving the vinyl at different velocities (back and forth), the stylus will move through the grooves and create the sounds we know of as scratching.

What has changed more recently with regards to scratching?

With the rise of digital laser discs, scratching has had to adapt over the years and has become popular in a digital format. They have done this by creating CD players with jog wheels which allows a user to scratch a CD as if it were a vinyl record. They do this by using software that emulates the original scratching sounds that you would get with the original vinyl, such as beat scratching and beat matching. You would usually connect this to a programme using MIDI.

Could scratching be related to music concrete (where sounds were manipulated by changing the speed and direction)?

14/04/15

Musique Concrete is a genre of electroacoustic music that was invented by Pierre Schaeffer in France in the 1940s. Musique Concrete is similar to what we know as sampling nowadays, where you take a recorded sound and use it to create a piece of music, rather than relying solely on musical instruments. This type of music, and how they used recorded sounds to sound like musical instruments, has influenced scratching as they both use samples and manipulating the sounds in various ways. If it wasn’t for Musique Concrete, I believe that scratching and other forms of music sampling would not be what they are today.

2004

The digital turntable was invented it can play CDs and MP3s from a SD .Panasonic released the technics SL-DZ1200 digital turntable.

2005

Serato created software that allows analogue turntables to be able to play audio files via special timecode records.This software was called scratch live.

2008

Scott de Martinville's phonautogram from April 9,1860 recording is played back from more than 150 years ago by the First Sounds Collaborative in the United States.