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Music is the world's universal form of communication. It touches every person of every culture on the globe to the tune of $38 billion a year, and the U.S. recording industry accounts for one-third of that world market. It employs thousands of people, including singers, musicians, producers, sound engineers, record promoters and retail salespersons, and its innovations span everything from the first phonograph to digital recordings and beyond.
The "technology boom" in the recording industry did not really take off until Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877. Early on in America’s recording history, the phonograph was surrounded by questions regarding what repercussions its dramatic innovations might have on technology, and about what was truly the 'best' way to record and reproduce sounds. This caused a whole new breed of recording devices to crop up. Because of the constant innovations being made, inventions often overlapped, which caused a great deal of confusion at the U.S. patent office. Inventors were constantly fighting to be the first one to secure a patent on their inventions before someone else beat them to it.
The result of this chaotic rush to invent better and better recording devices was a plethora of incompatible formats. Cylinders and disks came in all different sizes, some grooves were cut vertically, others horizontally, and there was absolutely no conformity in regard to speeds. Some companies tried to accommodate the various standards by offering home players that were not tied to a particular brand of record. One example was the Deuxphone, which played both cylinder and disc records.
By the early 1950’s, radio stations were incorporating the use of tape recorders into their daily operations, providing radio stations with a better, faster way of reproducing sound. Many station managers had already invested a considerable amount of money in their disc-based "transcription" recording and playback equipment. Tape recorders were very costly at that time, and not every station could afford one.
After the introduction of transistor portables in the late 1950s, RCA tried to allow a transistor to be used in automobiles. It included an antenna and a special bracket for the dashboard and was responsible for the mass infiltration of the recording industry into mainstream society. The 8-track tape system introduced in 1965-66 spurred a great deal of interest in automotive sound systems. Suddenly everybody wanted AM, FM, tape, tons of extra speakers, and anything that would imitate “concert hall” clarity of sound. The problem was that most people could not afford to buy an all-in-one unit with AM, FM, and tape. Cars usually came with an AM radio so attachable FM radios that could wired to the car’s cigarette lighter quickly became popular. There were of course also lots of plain FM adapters that mounted in a car and played FM through an AM radio. Once in-car cassette players were introduced, reel-to-reel recordings and 8-track recordings were suddenly obsolete.
According to some people, you just can't have enough innovation. But technology is expensive and not everyone can afford to keep replacing their current sound system with the newest cutting-edge technology. Sales of pre-recorded cassettes have declined in the past few years, and portable CD player sales have increased, but who is to say how many new innovations will continue to replace each other year after year. Which leads me to wonder… If “necessity is the mother of all invention”, why do we keep ending up with more new technology than we can afford to keep up with?
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