Old to New School—A Brief History of Sound Recording

By Emily Wright | From the July/August 2025 issue of Strings

Some years ago, an article reporting the alleged discovery of prehistoric recordings made the rounds. The story went like this: An unfired clay pot was being spun inside a cave with a brush or stick resting against it to create a design. The hope was that a light enough touch combined with a loud enough sound might cause whatever was resting against the wet clay to react, capturing the signature of the sound. In the end, the story was debunked, but the tantalizing idea had recording nerds arguing about it for months. 

Fortunately, the history of recording formats gives this group plenty to discuss as it stands. We can loosely organize the history of sound recording into four eras based on the emergent technology of each period: acoustic, electrical, magnetic, and digital. As is the case with all innovation, as soon as a reliable mechanism is developed, the process of improvement and refining begins. Sometimes—and you’ll hear this argument from audiophiles—newer technology is not necessarily the best. I do not intend to settle that score in this piece, but perhaps by the end, the ideas will be parsed clearly enough to ask well-informed questions. 

Acoustic: Mid–19th Century to 1925 

Simply put, the idea of acoustic recording involves a direct mechanical relationship between a sound and the recording medium. In the case of Thomas Edison’s phonograph, someone would play or speak into a funnel, and the changes in air pressure caused by the sound traveled to a sensitive membrane where an inscribing arm carved the membrane’s responses into a soft metal or wax cylinder. The first recordings made this way were also listened to on cylinders, the etchings transcribed from soft wax onto a harder one that could be spun again and again.

It should come as no surprise that what we think of as the invention of acoustic recording happened at least two times. Edison’s name is synonymous with early recording, but readers wishing for an honest accounting of the Wizard of Menlo Park’s accomplishments should add considerable quantities of duplicity, scheming, and ruthlessness to their measure of the man. French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented his phonautograph in 1857—the earliest mention of a device that could capture sound—at least 20 years before Edison’s phonograph. Interestingly, although Scott’s invention could register and transcribe vibrations, it was not able to play them back. The transcriptions, called phonautograms, were embossed onto smoke-stained paper for visual study as opposed to audible reproduction. The main distinction, and the reason we remember Edison, is that the phonograph made its way into people’s homes in a way that the phonautograph did not. 

For listeners, wax cylinder recordings were first encountered in public coin-operated arcades and other gathering spaces. Business owners would rent them, and customers remarked upon how a gentle soundtrack made shopping, watching films, and sitting in waiting rooms more enjoyable. Over time, and with advances in mass production methods, in-home phonographs became affordable. They were tinny sounding, cumbersome, and fragile, making consumers ready for nearly any other option to replace them. The first generation of audiophiles was born. 

Fun Fact 

In 2008, Scott’s original recordings were rediscovered, transferred to a digital medium, and are available to listen to online. They’re scarcely recognizable as more than noise, but the proof of concept was absolute. 

Electrical: Mid–20th Century

The invention of the microphone kicked off the electrical era. One of the pitfalls of pre-electrified recording was the need for a signal powerful enough to move the inscribing needle, frequently resulting in faint-sounding recordings that had to be turned up, which then turned up the volume of any ambient noise or other artifacts. The advent of amplified sound meant that even the softest sounds could be faithfully recorded and played back for the listener.

Within a few years of the electrification of sound, most consumers were listening to music on what we now think of as records: the first generation was pressed into brittle, noisy shellac; the second generation, into polyvinyl plastic. The format became even more popular with the introduction of the LP, or long-playing record, which offered roughly 25 minutes of uninterrupted listening time, compared to the five minutes typical of the previous generation. Suddenly, people could have a house party with music and dancing without having to hire a band or task someone with changing out the record every few minutes. 

There’s something special about technology that allows regular folks to interact with art on a daily basis: studies show that access to music in particular improves nearly every measure of mental health and a surprising number of physical ones too. 

Fun Fact 

RCA Victor released the first direct-to-consumer long-playing vinyl records in 1931. Called Victor Program Transcription Discs, these dinner-plate-sized prototypes featured short stories and light classical music. The inauspicious economic timing meant that it was not an instant success, but as the austerity of the Great Depression faded and more people furnished their homes with phonographs, folks began to see what all the fuss was about. One of the first pieces available to this wider audience was Bizet’s Carmen Suite, as interpreted by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski. The jury is still undecided as to whether the benefits of greater access to classical music outweighed the anguish of the countless innocent listeners who ended up with the dreaded Habanera Earworm, for which the only cure is, of course, Boléro. 

Magnetic: Mid–20th Century to 1975

Magnetic tape was a leap forward in audio fidelity and opened up an entire realm of possibility in terms of sound manipulation during the recording process. The basics are elegant: a thin strip of plastic coated with iron oxide is passed through a series of magnetic heads that takes the signal and registers the strength of the charge and imprints it on the strip. For playback, the same heads can read the charges and modulate them back into sound waves.

Tape had been the industry standard for radio and recording in Germany for over a decade when the technology fell into Allied hands at the end of World War II. Its advantages were obvious: tape is a robust format, and compared to everything that came before it, easy to use, transport, and manufacture. There was a scramble by several companies to improve upon the original design, with RCA Victor and Goldmark making the product smaller and higher fidelity with every iteration. What we think of as the modern cassette tape was patented by Philips in 1963 after an internal competition at the company to push the capacity and quality ever higher while maintaining the physical size. This arrival of the portable cassette tape gave people the option to do something revolutionary: choose the music they listened to in the car. This ended up changing car culture and laws governing distracted driving in ways that still endure.

Digital: 1975–Present

This was a time of wild innovation in nearly every industry that went into the making and distribution of recorded music. Plastics and polymers, miniaturization, circuit boards and microchips, electronic recording effects, formal musical training and audio engineering, syndication of radio stations, and the profusion of record labels and artists found enthusiastic support from a populace that could not get enough music on their stereos, in cars, and piped through headphones connected to the status item at the top of every Gen Xer’s list: a Sony Walkman. 

The current era is characterized by the idea of sampling: taking waveforms and turning their signal into numbers, a process called encoding. British scientists developed pulse-code modulation (aka using a packet of digital information to represent an analog sound) in 1927, which is essentially the same technology we use today. Samples serve as synecdoche for the whole sound, and while early attempts at digital recording did a poor job of enshrining tone quality, the digital music most of us listen to is now recorded at the astonishing rate of over 44,000 samples per second.

The benefit of the sampling model is that it reduces the size of the listening format while also encouraging—for better or worse—sharing and collaboration. The technology used for playback is still analog, so a tiny processor called a digital-to-analog converter is necessary to turn the packets of data back into waves our ears can understand as music.

The global labor market of the late-20th century is in part responsible for the massive number of tried and failed formats and technological gimmicks: getting new products to market is easier when a company can churn out a million of something without risking insolvency. Even though the first models were hideously expensive, by the 1990s, most people were listening to digital music on compact disc, which uses a laser to read the data inscribed into the surface much the same way a stylus read the grooves of a record. 

Recent trends are surprising: CDs have remained popular in places like Japan, and, after nearly two decades of decline, are resurgent in many markets, including North America. In 2022, vinyl record sales in the United States outpaced compact discs for the first time since 1987. Are audiophiles to blame? In part. If you believe the internet—and that’s a big if—it seems that people really like holding something in their hands. Just not a wax cylinder.

Viva La Vinyl

Are audiophiles onto something re: vinyl? Yes, but with caveats. The main issue is that once it’s out in the world, there is nothing to prevent a listener from playing an absolutely stunning recording on a set of ratty speakers or low-end ear buds. The reverse is true too: listening to a haphazardly recorded project on professional studio monitors reveals every imperfection. If you want to go down the audiophile path, things can get spicy quickly—finding various specialist items like headphones, a turntable (belt versus quartz drive is a whole other conversation), a suitable stylus, an amplifier, and, of course, recordings meant to be listened to with all your fancy gear. But for the most part, the hunt for the right equipment and recordings to play on it is as seductive a ritual as the rustle of unsheathing your favorite record and taking in the faint hiss before the program begins. —EW