April 22, 2019 • 43 mins
The development of the magnetic recording process changed the entertainment industry. In this episode, we look at the rise of tape, including the 8-track and the compact cassette.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I am your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer
with How Stuff Works and I heart Radio and I
love all things tech. And it has been about two
(00:25):
weeks since I've been in the studio, even though this
episode is going to go right behind one that I
recorded two weeks ago. So in our last episode, which
was ages ago for me, I teased a bit about
the emergence of the audio cassette tape, and I think
you could argue that the cassette split the path of
audio consumption into two sort of broad philosophies. On one side,
(00:51):
you have the audiophile dream of a format and a
system capable of producing sound from a recording that would
be indistinguishable from the original performance. So would be as
if you, the listener, were actually in the recording studio
when the tracks were first laid down, or at the
very least, that you would be hearing the sound that
(01:12):
the producers intended for you to hear, because if they
put a lot of effects on it or anything like
that in post production, then obviously you're not going to
hear exactly the thing that was performed when it was
being recorded. But you get my point. The other philosophy
would sacrifice some quality in return for added convenience. So
(01:32):
these this isn't just one format, but sort of a
group of formats that are not the highest in audio
quality compared to things like vinyl albums, for example. These
formats can't provide the fidelity of the ones that are
beloved by audio files, but they do allow for more
versatile listening experiences, such as portable devices capable of playing
(01:54):
back audio. These two philosophies would continue on from the
nineteen sixties through to today, and they have an impact
on the actual practices of audio recording. But we'll get
into all of that in this and future episodes. So first,
let's talk about magnetic tape. I mentioned it a bit
(02:14):
in the previous episode, like when I talked about recording
multiple tracks to the same tape, making it possible for
a single musician to accompany him or herself on different
instruments or even the same instrument, playing different parts of
a song. With enough tracks and a versatile enough musician,
you could have one person play virtually all the instruments
(02:37):
and provide lead and backing vocals on a single piece
of music. So, for example, this isn't a song, but
a piece of music. In the piece tubular Bells, which
was made famous in The Exorcist, Mike Oldfield played acoustic guitar,
bass guitar, electric guitar, three different kinds of organs, fuzz guitars, glockenspiel, mandolin,
(03:00):
and piano, and timpani. Oh, and also the tubular bells,
plus some other stuff. And obviously he wasn't playing all
of that simultaneously during the recording session, he was able
to lay that down track by track into a full piece.
So let's talk a bit about the tech of magnetic
tape and how all of this is possible. So this
(03:21):
is gonna mean backtracking again through our history, but I
feel like this is easier to understand if we tackle
each topic individually, as opposed to going year by year
and kind of leap frogging back and forth between different
technologies evolving at different rates. Um, that was just the
call I made when I was building out these episodes. So, uh,
(03:43):
you've gotta remember that the progress of magnetic tape is
also connected in many ways to other technologies. Including stuff
like the evolution of the microphone and the development of
amplification tubes and later amplification transistors. But we're gonna start
with a Danish engineer named valdam Our Poulson. Though some
other smarty pants had already been theorizing that magnetic recording
(04:05):
could be a possibility, but it was Poulson's work that
would produce the first actual working devices. Everything else was
kind of theoretical. Sometime around nine, Poulson developed a machine
that could record sound onto a length of steel wire
through means a magnetism. He called it the telegraphone. I'm
guessing it's telegraphone perhaps, But how the heck does the
(04:28):
darn thing work? Let alone? How is it pronounced? Well,
imagine you've got a ferro magnetic material. So this is like,
you know, something like iron. This is a material that
if you expose it to a magnetic field, it will
remain magnetized by that field. You take the field away,
the material still remains magnetized, so it doesn't just have
(04:49):
magnetic effect in the presence of a magnetic field. The
magnetic field itself will magnetize the material, at least until
some other magnetic force acts upon it. Now before you
record anything onto a fresh strip of magnetic tape or
in the case of Poulson's device, steel wire, the material
isn't magnetized. It's in its raw state, so it's just
(05:12):
waiting as a blank medium. You take a microphone and
you play sound into the microphone. Maybe you're singing into it,
maybe you're playing an acoustic guitar. But the vibrations from
the sound cause a small diaphragm inside the microphone to vibrate,
and the diaphragm transfers those vibrations to other elements in
the microphone. Those elements depend upon the type of microphones,
(05:34):
so not all microphones are exactly the same. They all
work on a similar principle, but the details are different. However,
for simplicity sake, let's talk about dynamic microphones for the
purposes of this discussion. The diaphragm would cause a coil
of conductive wire to move around a magnetic core. So
imagine you've got a coil and the coil is uh
(05:57):
is wrapped around a magnetic core loose wrapped around and
the coil can move back and forth laterally along this core.
If you remember how electro magnetism works. You'll remember that
if you happen to move a conductor in and out
of a magnetic field, or you subject the conductive material
(06:17):
to a fluctuating magnetic field, it induces current to flow
through that conductor. The electric current is pretty weak coming
out of a microphone, but it represents the fluctuations of
the diaphragm, which in turn are representations of the sound
vibrations that hit that diaphragm. So think of it this way.
Sound hits the diaphragm, diaphragm vibrates, the vibrates cause vibrations,
(06:40):
cause this coil to move back and forth across this
magnetic core. That induces current to flow through the wire,
and then you've got an electric current. You can use
that current to drive a different electro magnet. Typically you
would wrap the wire around a ferromagnetic or iron lie core,
(07:00):
and as the current flows through the wire coiled around
this core, the electro magnet generates a magnetic field. So
it's kind of recreating the magnetic field that was uh
fluctuating when the coil was vibrating in the microphone side.
So it's sort of the same thing I just described earlier,
but in reverse magnetic recording devices use such an electro
(07:23):
magnet too imprint a magnetic recording onto the medium. So
typically the core is actually a disc or a ring.
It's very small, and there is a wire coiled around
one side of the ring. Think of like a washer,
like a washer that you would get from a hardware store,
(07:45):
a little round disc. And imagine that you've wrapped this
particular little round disk happens to be magnet or at
least it's feral magnetic, and you've wrapped a wire, a
conductive wire, around one side of that disk, and then
you cut a gap at the bottom of that disk.
(08:05):
That that gap is what is going to be very
close to the recording medium. The gap actually causes the
magnetic field that will be generated when electric current flows
through the wire to fringe outward, and it's this that
magnetizes the recording medium passing below. So you've generated this
magnetic fluctuation by feeding an electrical signal that you had
(08:27):
generated with the microphone. And remember that electric signal represents
the original sound. You need the recording medium to pass
by that electromagnet at a regular speed to get a clear,
undistorted recording. So it's very important that the speed at
which the medium passes under this recording head is is
(08:48):
nice and regular. As the medium passes by this electromagnet,
the material in the medium is magnetized according to those
fluctuations from the magnetic field. When you're on you've got
a length of that medium, whether it's tape or it's
steel wire that has imprinted on it, those magnetized particles,
and they will stay in those magnetic orientations unless you
(09:12):
expose them to a more powerful magnetic field, in which
case they will re orient. This, by the way, is
why if you've ever worked with any sort of magnetic storage,
people would tell you make sure you don't have any
powerful magnets nearby it. That's why, because the powerful magnets
could re orient the magnetic particles in that material and
(09:32):
thus erase whatever was recorded on them. That's why if
you are destroying magnetic storage, you typically expose it to
a very powerful magnet first. To play back recorded sound.
You would then take this medium where you've got these
magnetized particles, and you would run them under a tape head. Uh.
(09:54):
It's essentially it's exactly the same thing. In fact, it
could be the same head as the recording tape head.
And in this case, you don't actually have a current
running through that wire. It's the ferromagnetic core and it's
the coil wrapped around up. But the coil at the
moment is inert, there's no electricity running through it. When
you run the magnetic material past this, then you create
(10:19):
those magnetic fluctuations which induce electricity to flow through the
wire wrapped around the ferro magnetic core, and you reproduce
the electric current that was used to create the magnetic
fluctuations that were imprinted on the material in the first place.
So you're just you're reversing the whole process. And again
(10:39):
it's because of that electromagnetic phenomena where you have the
magnetized material running past a conductor that's wrapped around ferro
magnetic core. You technically don't even need the ferro magnetic
core to do this. It's just it makes it easier.
It kind of it almost acts like amplifier, so that's
(11:01):
really why it's there. And then that current that's generated
can be then sent to amplifiers which will take in
that signal and boost its strength so that that signal
can then drive something like speakers and then you get
the sound. So the steel wire approach worked, but it
produced recordings of pretty low sound quality. It was not
(11:23):
something you could use for music or for performance. Recorders
using magnetic wire did find their way into some products
with later innovators. They took that same idea that Pulson had,
and mostly you would get dictation machines that were used
by hoity toity executive types who would dictate their words
(11:43):
to be preserved on wire for later transcription. Then you
have a German businessman named Louis Blattner who wanted to
take this technology and to develop it further. Well, not
not himself personally, he actually told the engineers in his
company to get to work on doing that. He wanted
to try and have a product he could sell to
the BBC. And they made the switch from steel wire
(12:05):
to steal tape, so it's flat piece of tape, but
it's made out of steel, and they produced a device
that was called the Blattner Phone, which is probably the
most attractive name for a piece of technology I've ever heard.
Lou would present this gadget to the BBC and they
decided it's good enough for recording speech, but it was
(12:26):
not good enough to record sound of other stuff like
like music, and a high enough quality to be considered broadcastable.
The tape was, or at least the original machines the
first two use tape that was six millimeters wide, so
not very wide at all, and it ran through the
machine at a rate of five ft per second. That's
(12:47):
about a meter and a half per second, which is
pretty darn fast. Think about this. You've got this thin
steel tape moving at that speed. You might be thinking, oh, my,
Drew gees, that's pretty darn dangerous, and you would be right.
You would not want to get too close to this thing,
or you could get pretty badly cut. And it didn't
(13:08):
get much better. When Blattner's team created a version that
used tape. It was only three millimeters wide, but the
tape was actually better than steel wire. You've got better
quality recordings, but still not to the level that could
be used for broadcast, and certainly a far cry from
anything that could be used for consumers. Now. While the
Blatner phone was terrorizing the BBC, there was a German
(13:30):
Austrian engineer named Dr Fritz Floimer, and he had been
experimenting with a paper tape coated with lacquer and an
iron oxide powder. So iron oxide is ferro magnetic and
would serve as the actual recording medium, and iron eyed
oxide for a very very long time would become the
(13:52):
go to material. There were different iron oxides that different
inventors would use over the years to get better and
better results, but iron oxide became kind of ve go
to powder that you would use to create this kind
of magnetic tape. So the A E. G Company in
Berlin negotiated with floim Er Uh to develop a device
(14:14):
based off of his work back in ninety two, and
they also collaborated with a different company called B A
SF to create a magnetic recording materials and equipment. This
collaboration led to a tape made from cellulose acetate rather
than papers, still coated with lacquer and iron oxide, and
using another cellulos acetate type of material to act as
(14:38):
a binder agent. The two companies presented their collaboration, which
they called the Magneto Phone, which is not something you
used to call the head of evil mutants, and they
showed it off at the nineteen thirty five Radio Fair
in Berlin. Now floim er had a bit of a
sad outcome to this whole thing. Everything was done on
(15:00):
the up and up, but his patents were later overturned
by the German National Court. They court determined that the
ideas he had patented had already been presented way back
in the late eighteen hundreds by none other than Valdemar Poulson,
the guy who came up with that steel wire contraption
that he had already described a tape based system. It's
(15:23):
just that he wasn't able to make that one work
during his lifetime. But because there was prior art, the
patents that Floeimer had had registered were overturned. German engineers
continued to improve the technology, and by the early nineteen
forties it was at the point where it was a
legitimate alternative to the other recording methods of the time.
(15:46):
Magnetic tape made a huge impact on that recording industry. So,
for one thing, you could record way more information on
a reel of tape than you could on a wax
cylinder or a shellack disc, which of the other media
at the time. For another, with tape, you could edit
if you're recording to a wax disc or a shell
(16:09):
act disc, and you make a mistake, it's there and
you pretty much have to scrap everything and start over,
or you have to live with the mistake. With tape,
you could actually record and you could literally cut and
paste if you needed to the tape so that you
could get rid of accidents. You could loop things if
(16:30):
you wanted to. There are a lot of different tricks
you could do. And as we listened to the last episode,
you could do multi track recordings. You could put multiple
tracks side by side on the same length of tape.
You know, imagine you've got a piece of tape and
it's several feet long and it's maybe a couple of
inches wide. You could actually fit multiple tracks side by side,
(16:54):
and each track is a different recording, and they're all
synchronized by just being next to each other on this tape.
So that allowed for a lot of versatility in the
recording process and it really freed things up. Shifting the
recording head over slightly allows you to record a second
track or a third track. Um you could even record
(17:15):
tracks for specific speakers. That's what allowed for stereo sound.
And like I said in the last episode, Less Paul
played a really big part in getting multi track recording
off the ground running. Uh Ampex would actually build the
device based on less Paul's requests, and they built the
first eight track recording system. So soon you had the
(17:35):
entire recording industry relying on magnetic tape for recording, mixing,
and mastering. At the time, they were mostly relying on
three track systems, and then a little bit later four
track systems. The eight track actually didn't come into play
until a bit later, but people began to figure out
how to work with those, Like you could record four
tracks onto a tape, then you can take that tape
(17:57):
of four tracks and transfer the recording to one track
of another four track recorder, and thus you could start
to build a piece that way. It was more time consuming,
but it was also still more versatile than the you know,
just getting everybody in the same room at the same
time and hope that no one makes a mistake. So
the real impact of magnetic tape I want to feature
(18:20):
on this episode hit consumers, and we're gonna talk about
that in just a second, But first let's take a
quick break from the nineteen thirties to the early nineteen sixties,
the format of the tape recorder was huge. It was
(18:41):
a big, big machine. You are working with real to
real tapes. That meant that you would have one reel
that would have all of your audio stored on magnetic tape.
It's wrapped around this reel, and then you have a
second empty reel, and you would put both of those
reels on spokes on your tape recorder. Then you would
take the magnetic tape from the main reel. You would
(19:02):
carefully feed the magnetic tape through the machine so that
the tape is going to pass under the tape head
or over the tape head, depending upon the design of
the machine, but that the tape head would it would
pass across it. Then you would feed it continuing through
the machine until you could wrap it and tuck it
into the secondary reel. You turn on the machine, and
(19:27):
then the secondary reel starts to turn and starts to
pull the tape through the recorder. And that meant that
the magnetic tape would pass over or under the tape head,
and that would create that electrical signal in the tape
head that could be amplified to drive a speaker and
you could play it back. It was big, it was bulky.
(19:47):
It required deft hands to thread the tape, and it
meant it was not typically very user friendly for most people,
and it was pretty expensive. There were consumer models of
reel to reel tape players. You could out and buy
one yourself, but very few people actually owned one, just
because it was kind of a hassle to use them
and they were very expensive. Also, the reels took up
(20:10):
a lot of space, and depending upon which model you got,
you might be stuck with specific types of reels that
you could use, and you couldn't use other ones because
they weren't compatible. Our c A, the Radio Corporation of
America that has factored so heavily in these histories, developed
a reversible cassette tape as early as the late nineteen fifties,
(20:31):
but it didn't look like the cassette tapes that were
all the rage in the nineteen eighties. The r C
A cassette tape was much larger. It was about the
size of a video cassette. And now I'm realizing that
I'm comparing one obsolete technology against a different obsolete technology,
and some of you may have no idea what I'm
talking about. But the cassettes were about the size of
(20:54):
your average paperback book. They were big and the form
factor didn't really catch on, so our ci A would
scrap it. After a short while, the company Phillips created
the format that would become the cassette tape that those
of us who grew up in the eighties no and love.
It was called a compact cassette in the early days,
and Phillips developed these much smaller cassettes filled with magnetic
(21:17):
storage back in nineteen sixty two. They unveiled the technology
at the nineteen sixty three Berlin radio show, the same
radio show where we got to see the earlier forms
of magnetic tape playback. So these cassettes were about the
size of a credit card, much much smaller than our
Cier's version. At the time, there were other magnetic storage
(21:39):
formats that were vying for the top spot in the market,
and the early versions of the Phillips cassette weren't able
to produce very high quality recordings, and so they were
marketed more as something to record speech to rather than music.
You would buy a tape recorder and you would buy
the cassettes and you would use it to dictate, very
(22:02):
much like the steel wire devices from decades earlier. So
how the heck did the cassette become the standard with
these kind of drawbacks, Well, it was largely because Phillips
made a very shrewd move. The company licensed the technology
to other companies for free. So if you had the
means to manufacture cassettes, you could get a free license
(22:24):
from Phillips and then you could do it. Phillips wasn't
going to take any sort of licensing fee or royalties.
That way, they could make money selling machines capable of
recording and playing back the stuff on tapes. And it
was a savvy move that paid off, and the cassette,
despite its early limitations, received widespread adoption. Engineers would continue
to work on the technology and it didn't take terribly
(22:46):
long for the recording quality to improve to the point
where it was at least feasible to use cassettes to
record music. By nineteen sixty five, European companies were doing that,
and the following year in sixty six, saw the United
States doing the same, and right away companies were selling
machines that could not only play a cassette, but also
record to blank cassettes. And this would be another thing
(23:08):
that would make an enormous impact on the recording industry.
For two decades, Vinyl would still hold out over prerecorded cassettes.
It's not like prerecorded cassettes immediately displaced vinyl records, but
in the nighties, prerecorded music cassettes overtook vinyl sales and
things changed dramatically. The compact cassettes quality was pretty much
(23:31):
always held up as inferior to a good vinyl album.
Cheap cassettes had a lot of tape hiss, and tape
hiss is produced by the magnetic particles that are on
the tape. The larger the particles are, the more hiss
you will hear during a recording. It's kind of the
base level or the the room noise of a tape.
(23:51):
And you can reduce tape hiss a couple of different ways.
One is by recording sound at a higher tape speed,
which effectively uses more tape to cord the same amount
of sounds. So instead of saying, let's say that one
version would have a second equals you know, let's say
eight inches of tape, which is pretty fast, and another
(24:15):
one a second equal sixteen inches of tape, Well, you're
using twice as much tape to record the same amount
of sound, and you also reduce hiss that way. You
can also reduce hiss by reducing the size of the
magnetic particles themselves. If you get finer grains of iron
oxide than it brings down hiss, and then other technologies
(24:37):
later on would reduce hiss further. But early in the time,
the early days of cassette tapes, hiss was one of
those issues, and cheaper tapes would still kind of create
a hissing sound even late in the cassette tape era.
That sound quality issue allowed another type of tape cassette
to emerge as a contender for a relatively short while.
(25:00):
So you had the compact cassette that was pretty versatile
but not giving you the best sound quality. This rival
had much better sound quality but less versatility, and that
was the famed eight track tape. The eight track was
able to take a spot the cassette wasn't quite ready
for in nineteen as a format for prerecorded content, specifically music,
(25:24):
and it was the product of an odd collaboration. The
partners of that collaboration included Ampex. That was the company
that made the eight track recorder for Les Paul, and
it also included r C A Records as a prime contributor.
And then there was the Lear Jet Company, which, yeah,
that's kind of weird, right, company known for making jets,
(25:45):
played a major role in developing a magnetic tape technology
for music, and William Lear, the head of the company,
used his connections to convince executives at Ford Motors to
come on board and make an eight track player and
option on every single nineteen sixties six Ford model, and
that was a huge boost for the eight track, and
it was considered a great solution. You could take your
(26:10):
music with you and you could listen to it in
the car. So there's something else that I gotta talk about,
just briefly before I get into more about the eight tracks,
which was that in the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties,
leading up to the introduction of the eight track, a
few companies had experimented with vinyl turntable systems for cars,
which sounds crazy for understandable reasons. It was not an
(26:33):
easy thing to do. You have to rely on a
format that has a physical needle or stylus moving through
a tiny groove on a spinning disk. Meanwhile, you're driving
a vehicle on different surfaces, it's probably not the most
reliable way of hearing high fidelity tunes. So while some
companies tried that, including CBS, which introduced a record format
(26:56):
just for cars that spun at sixteen and two thirds
rp ms than a specific player that spun at that speed,
which meant that you had to have discs recorded at
that speed to be able to use it. They these
systems never got much momentum, and that's a pun. So
eight track tapes are portable. You could have a few
(27:16):
in your car. You can plug them into your system
listen to tunes, and that came in handy if your
radio wasn't picking up any strong signals, or if the
stuff playing in your area didn't meet your personal musical tastes.
And this was a time when FM stereo wasn't really
widely available in the nineteen sixties. You know, you couldn't
get it everywhere, So there was a niche to be
filled for for higher quality sound in cars, and the
(27:40):
eight track one out over another format, the four track.
There was a four track tape as well, but the
quality of an eight track was far superior to cassettes
of the same era, and it would take more advances
in cassette technology for the cassette format to surpass that
of the eight track, and music labels jumped on board.
They gave a lot of port for eight track tapes
(28:01):
in the early days, and it had a pretty strong
run for about a decade. But by the mid nineteen seventies,
improvements in cassette technology, including reducing tape hiss and Dolby
invented a noise reduction approach, along with the introduction of
high bias tape coding UH that really made cassettes viable
against eight tracks. Plus, cassette tapes were easy to record on.
(28:23):
If you wanted, you could buy blank tapes, put them
in a tape recorder and take music from some other
source like the radio, which is what I used to
do as a kid. And man, did I hate it
when DJs would start talking at the end or beginning
of songs and ruining my song. Man, shut up, does
let it play? The eight track faded from the consumer
space over the course of another decade, so cassettes took
(28:46):
over after about ten years, but the eight track held on.
It didn't just disappear immediately. By the mid nineteen seventies,
the major companies had stopped making eight track players, but
the format itself hung on a little bit longer than that.
Companies were still produced seeing eight track albums for several
years after that. Um though, it was actually a challenge
to find a store that would carry eight tracks while
(29:08):
the cassette was taking off because stores loved cassettes. They
took up very little space, so you can have a
pretty wide selection of music without requiring an enormous amount
of physical store space, and cassettes didn't have some of
the capacity limitations that eight track tapes had. An eight
track typically divided up an album into four stretches of
tape called programs, and there was an audible gap between programs.
(29:30):
There was a limited amount of tape that the eight
track could hold, and it usually meant that at least
one song on an album wouldn't make it onto the
eight track version, and some songs would fall right on
that break between two programs. Typically that would mean that
the song you were listening to would fade out, then
there would be an audible click, then there would be
(29:51):
a pause of silence while the next program was getting
pulled through the player, and then the song would fade
up again, essentially where it left off, which wasn't ideal.
Cassettes had a bit more versatility, allowing record labels to
fit an entire side of a vinyl album onto one
side of a cassette tape. Cassettes were also seen as
more portable than eight tracks. It was possible to have
(30:13):
a cassette player in a car or stereo system, or
a boom box, or a portable cassette player like the
famed Sony Walkman. People could have their music on the go.
They could jog while listening to music. The convenience and portability,
paired with the capability of recording stuff of your own
choosing onto tape whether it was someone else's stuff or
(30:34):
your own, that made cassettes the clear winner over eight tracks,
And while those early cassettes still weren't necessarily viewed by
audio files as being particularly good, they also were winning
out over vinyl for those same reasons with the general consumer.
The philosophy of convenience and accessibility over fidelity was winning
(30:55):
in the mainstream public, much to the chagrin of many
audio files out there, and the cassette gave opportunities to
independent musicians that they otherwise never would have had more
about that in just a second. But first let's take
another quick break. So the recording industry typically works like this.
(31:20):
You're a musician, or you're in a band or something.
You play gigs whenever you can, You practice, you write songs,
you practice some more, you get better over time, you
develop your sound, your style, your voice, and generally you
figure out who the heck you are musically speaking. You
might submit your music to record labels, you might hire
a manager to try and take care of that for you,
(31:42):
or maybe you're super lucky and someone influential sees one
of your shows and you get a meeting with a
record label representative. Then you negotiate, you sign a deal,
and now bam, you get yourself a record contract, which
is a great fairy tale, and for some people it
does work out that way. But you've got thousands of
people for every success story who make music, but they're
(32:03):
not being heard by record labels, and that's not necessarily
out of malice or anything like that. And then there
are musicians who would rather stay independent than sign on
with a record company in the first place, since the
company might dictate what the musician can or can't record
or what they should sound like. The cassette tape gave
people but that were in that category a lot of
new chances. The recording equipment was relatively inexpensive. Blake cassettes
(32:27):
were likewise pretty darn cheap, and they also are pretty rugged.
You could record music to a cassette, you could duplicate
the cassette, and then you can mail off the duplicates
to people in the mail and the tape was probably
gonna survive because it's it's pretty hardy stuff. And indie
culture developed around this practice, with different musicians and music
enthusiasts trading tapes back and forth and spreading music that
(32:51):
way outside the recording industry system. So you had this
kind of thriving independent scene that was growing because of
the cassette tape. The cassette and the introduction of sound
systems like the boombox also allowed people to share music
with others in an unprecedented way. It was easy to
bring a boombox to a location, popping a cassette and
then blast out the tunes, so people nearby could hear
(33:11):
the music, you know, whether they wanted to or not.
But it allowed for the development of music communities and
cultures like hip hop, so whole new genres of music
we're growing out of the adoption and use of this
recorded medium. At first, the recording industry was totally on
board with cassette culture, but this gradually changed as executives
(33:32):
realized the format allowed people to easily reproduce prerecorded cassettes.
They feared a hit to the bottom line. So here's
how their doomsday scenario might play out. A music fan
let's call him Jonathan, decides to purchase a brand new
cassette copy of the album Speaking in Tongues by Talking
Heads because he really digs the song this must be
(33:52):
the Place, which is pretty much all true because that
song is perfect, okay, But Jonathan, loving this song, gets
an idea. He bought this cassette for let's say the
princely sum of twelve dollars, and he goes out and
buys a whole bunch of blank cassettes for twenty bucks,
so he's brought his investment up to thirty two dollars.
Then he starts duplicating his copy of Speaking in Tongues
(34:15):
and then sells the copies for just five dollars each.
And after selling seven copies he's recaptured all the costs
of both the blank cassettes and the original tape, and
undercutting local music stores and the recording label. Sire Records,
which was the recording label doesn't get the benefit from
all those copies that Jonathan is selling. So music industry
(34:37):
executives were understandably concerned. They hated this idea with a
passion hotter than a thousand exploding suns. Several companies than
the British Phonographic Industry Trade Group decided to launch a
pr campaign against the practice, with a claim that quote
home taping is killing music end quote music, by the way,
(34:57):
is still alive and well today, just in case were worried,
And I'm sure this argument sounds familiar to you. If
it doesn't, it will by the end of the series,
because it's gonna come up again and again in different forms.
So while the record labels were freaking out, lots of
musicians were actually encouraging the practice of copying music and
sharing it with others. Lots of musicians were concerned more
(35:18):
with their music being heard by a larger number of
people than with the actual record sales numbers, and the
slogan home taping is killing music became sort of a
joke among a certain set of musicians, particularly in the
punk rock music scene, which was just really taking off
in the in the late seventies, and that was already
firmly in the anti establishment headspace. Dead Kennedy's were famous
(35:41):
for doing this. Now, music piracy was possible, it could happen,
but it wasn't really rampant in the cassette days. In
most places, hired in music still took money and time
and effort. You had to get hold of a copy
of the music. You had to get hold of blank cassettes,
and then you had to spend the time record hoarding
from the original onto a copy, and most recorders would
(36:04):
only allow you to do that at playback speed, So
if you have an hour long album, it would take
an hour for you to copy it onto a single
blank cassette. So it wasn't exactly uh, something that was
easy to mass manufacture, and I think most of those
fears were largely unwarranted. Something that happened more frequently were
(36:25):
mixtapes made recently famous by the guardians of the Galaxy movies.
People began to rifle through their music collections and put
together a series of songs for folks they knew, and
there was a real art to this. According to some people,
there were even rules you should absolutely follow to get
the best result. For example, some officionados will tell you
that a mix tape should never feature the same artist
(36:46):
or group on it twice, no repeats. So if you
open with the Kinks All Day and All of the Night,
which came out in nineteen sixty five, and then you
ended the mixtape with the Kinks song Apeman, which came
out in you would technically be breaking that rule. Now, personally,
I think that's silly because some bands like the Kinks
can change their sound dramatically over the course of their careers.
(37:09):
It almost sounds like two totally different bands. But never
mind all that. Anyway, you can search the internet to
find out about the rules of making mixtapes. Everyone has
their own set, and these days those same rules carry
over into making playlists, so it still has relevance. The
mixtape culture became an important social interaction. It provided a
new way to clue people in as to what kind
(37:32):
of person you are, and it gave folks a chance
to put something together for someone else, showing that they
were thinking about them. So if you received a mixtape,
particularly a really good one, it was a huge thrill
because it showed that someone else was thinking about you
and trying to craft an experience that you would really enjoy.
So the eight track had a rain of around nineteen
(37:53):
sixty six to nineteen seventy, and then the compact cassette.
The cassette tape took over from there and really caught
on in the nineteen eighties, but it too would have
a short run as the king of media, because the
compact disc would debut in the late nineteen eighties and
by the following decade would all but annihilate the compact cassette.
(38:13):
During this same era, there was another huge change that
was taking place in the United States as well as
other parts of the world, but I'm mainly going to
focus on the US, and that was the nature of
copyright law. In the US. The government had passed a
Copyright Act way back in nineteen o nine, but it
hadn't really touched it since. But in the decades following
nineteen o nine, it became clear that copyright law would
(38:35):
need an update. Technology was allowing for the broadcast and
preservation of intellectual property in new ways, from radio to television,
two recorded media like vinyl albums and cassettes, and the
Universal Copyright Convention and International Agreement on Copyright had debuted
back in nineteen fifty two in Switzerland, and the United
States joined that convention in nineteen fifty five, but it
(38:57):
wasn't until nineteen seventies six that the US government was
ready to pass some new copyright rules in the nineteen
seventy six Copyright Act. The new act created protections of
all sorts of intellectual property, and it also extended the
terms of protection. Under the nineteen o nine Act, a
copyrighted work would receive protection for twenty eight years since
(39:21):
from the date of its origin, with the possibility of
a twenty eight year extension, so ultimately you could protect
it for fifty six years total. The nineteen seventy six
Act changed that. Under the nineteen seventy six Act, a
work is protected by copyright for the length of the
author's life plus fifty years. That would get changed again
(39:42):
in nineteen with the Copyright Term Extension Act that pushed
it to the author's life plus seventy years, and for
works created before nineteen seventy eight. The rules are a
little different. There are several factors that determine the length
of copyright protection, but many works were given seventy six
years of protection from the year of their creation or publication.
(40:03):
The extension would push that to ninety five years. And
if you're wondering why is this happening, what what's important
about this? And and how is or how are all
these changes happening, Well, it's largely because of really big
companies that rely on intellectual property for their value. For example,
the Walt Disney Company. A lot of people refer to
(40:24):
these extensions as Walt Disney extensions. The Walt Disney Company
certainly does not want it's it's formative works falling into
the public domain if it can help it, because then
once they're in the public domain, anyone can use them
under certain circumstances. There are other protections that are in
place as well, but you know, copyrights goes into public
domain and then anyone can can show this stuff without
(40:49):
any fear of the mouse House coming down on them.
So without the extension, Mickey Mouse would have gone into
the public domain in two thousand four. Under the Original
Copyright Act of nineteen seventy six. Now he's set to
skip off into the public domain in twenty twenty four,
and as of right now, there has not been another
(41:09):
change to copyright law to change that date. So we're
looking at mickeymails going into the public domain unless something
changes within the next few years. My point with all
of that is to say, the changing technology from the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant that suddenly things that used
to be ephemeral, you know, like a performance, could now
(41:30):
be made permanent. People could have a permanent record of that,
a permanent way of recreating those performances, when before you
just had to be there when it happened, and and
if you weren't, you missed it. And these things have
value not just to the creators, but to the audiences
as well, and that this drove changes in technology, in culture,
(41:51):
and in law. But we're not done yet. In our
next episode, I'm going to talk a bit about how
the videotape made a similar impact in film and television
as the cassette did in the music industry, and we'll
also look at the rise of the compact disc. Still
to come is the transition to digital formats and then
(42:12):
beyond DVDs and things of that nature, and blue rays.
We're going to talk about digital files, and then we're
going to talk about different ways of delivering it, from
downloading it to streaming it, and how all of this
has affected our behaviors, business, and even the process of
creating the entertainment in the first place. I hope you
guys are enjoying this series of episodes. I've really enjoyed
(42:33):
jumping into it. I like doing the sort of thematic
approach and a deep dive on a specific topic. But
once we're done with these, will be going back to
lots of other kind of one off tech stuffs, So
don't worry if this wasn't your cup of tea, we're
gonna be getting back to other tech stuff stuff in
the near future. Tech stuff stuff, I should make a
sure about that. Meanwhile, if you guys want to get
(42:55):
in touch with me, you can send me an email
the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com,
or you can pop on over to our website that's
tech stuff podcast dot com. You'll find links to our
social media presence as well as to the store and
an archive of all of our past episodes. I hope
you guys can go check that out. I look forward
to hearing from you, and I'll talk to you again
(43:17):
really soon. Y tech Stuff is a production of I
Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I am your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer
with How Stuff Works and I heart Radio and I
love all things tech. And it has been about two
(00:25):
weeks since I've been in the studio, even though this
episode is going to go right behind one that I
recorded two weeks ago. So in our last episode, which
was ages ago for me, I teased a bit about
the emergence of the audio cassette tape, and I think
you could argue that the cassette split the path of
audio consumption into two sort of broad philosophies. On one side,
(00:51):
you have the audiophile dream of a format and a
system capable of producing sound from a recording that would
be indistinguishable from the original performance. So would be as
if you, the listener, were actually in the recording studio
when the tracks were first laid down, or at the
very least, that you would be hearing the sound that
(01:12):
the producers intended for you to hear, because if they
put a lot of effects on it or anything like
that in post production, then obviously you're not going to
hear exactly the thing that was performed when it was
being recorded. But you get my point. The other philosophy
would sacrifice some quality in return for added convenience. So
(01:32):
these this isn't just one format, but sort of a
group of formats that are not the highest in audio
quality compared to things like vinyl albums, for example. These
formats can't provide the fidelity of the ones that are
beloved by audio files, but they do allow for more
versatile listening experiences, such as portable devices capable of playing
(01:54):
back audio. These two philosophies would continue on from the
nineteen sixties through to today, and they have an impact
on the actual practices of audio recording. But we'll get
into all of that in this and future episodes. So first,
let's talk about magnetic tape. I mentioned it a bit
(02:14):
in the previous episode, like when I talked about recording
multiple tracks to the same tape, making it possible for
a single musician to accompany him or herself on different
instruments or even the same instrument, playing different parts of
a song. With enough tracks and a versatile enough musician,
you could have one person play virtually all the instruments
(02:37):
and provide lead and backing vocals on a single piece
of music. So, for example, this isn't a song, but
a piece of music. In the piece tubular Bells, which
was made famous in The Exorcist, Mike Oldfield played acoustic guitar,
bass guitar, electric guitar, three different kinds of organs, fuzz guitars, glockenspiel, mandolin,
(03:00):
and piano, and timpani. Oh, and also the tubular bells,
plus some other stuff. And obviously he wasn't playing all
of that simultaneously during the recording session, he was able
to lay that down track by track into a full piece.
So let's talk a bit about the tech of magnetic
tape and how all of this is possible. So this
(03:21):
is gonna mean backtracking again through our history, but I
feel like this is easier to understand if we tackle
each topic individually, as opposed to going year by year
and kind of leap frogging back and forth between different
technologies evolving at different rates. Um, that was just the
call I made when I was building out these episodes. So, uh,
(03:43):
you've gotta remember that the progress of magnetic tape is
also connected in many ways to other technologies. Including stuff
like the evolution of the microphone and the development of
amplification tubes and later amplification transistors. But we're gonna start
with a Danish engineer named valdam Our Poulson. Though some
other smarty pants had already been theorizing that magnetic recording
(04:05):
could be a possibility, but it was Poulson's work that
would produce the first actual working devices. Everything else was
kind of theoretical. Sometime around nine, Poulson developed a machine
that could record sound onto a length of steel wire
through means a magnetism. He called it the telegraphone. I'm
guessing it's telegraphone perhaps, But how the heck does the
(04:28):
darn thing work? Let alone? How is it pronounced? Well,
imagine you've got a ferro magnetic material. So this is like,
you know, something like iron. This is a material that
if you expose it to a magnetic field, it will
remain magnetized by that field. You take the field away,
the material still remains magnetized, so it doesn't just have
(04:49):
magnetic effect in the presence of a magnetic field. The
magnetic field itself will magnetize the material, at least until
some other magnetic force acts upon it. Now before you
record anything onto a fresh strip of magnetic tape or
in the case of Poulson's device, steel wire, the material
isn't magnetized. It's in its raw state, so it's just
(05:12):
waiting as a blank medium. You take a microphone and
you play sound into the microphone. Maybe you're singing into it,
maybe you're playing an acoustic guitar. But the vibrations from
the sound cause a small diaphragm inside the microphone to vibrate,
and the diaphragm transfers those vibrations to other elements in
the microphone. Those elements depend upon the type of microphones,
(05:34):
so not all microphones are exactly the same. They all
work on a similar principle, but the details are different. However,
for simplicity sake, let's talk about dynamic microphones for the
purposes of this discussion. The diaphragm would cause a coil
of conductive wire to move around a magnetic core. So
imagine you've got a coil and the coil is uh
(05:57):
is wrapped around a magnetic core loose wrapped around and
the coil can move back and forth laterally along this core.
If you remember how electro magnetism works. You'll remember that
if you happen to move a conductor in and out
of a magnetic field, or you subject the conductive material
(06:17):
to a fluctuating magnetic field, it induces current to flow
through that conductor. The electric current is pretty weak coming
out of a microphone, but it represents the fluctuations of
the diaphragm, which in turn are representations of the sound
vibrations that hit that diaphragm. So think of it this way.
Sound hits the diaphragm, diaphragm vibrates, the vibrates cause vibrations,
(06:40):
cause this coil to move back and forth across this
magnetic core. That induces current to flow through the wire,
and then you've got an electric current. You can use
that current to drive a different electro magnet. Typically you
would wrap the wire around a ferromagnetic or iron lie core,
(07:00):
and as the current flows through the wire coiled around
this core, the electro magnet generates a magnetic field. So
it's kind of recreating the magnetic field that was uh
fluctuating when the coil was vibrating in the microphone side.
So it's sort of the same thing I just described earlier,
but in reverse magnetic recording devices use such an electro
(07:23):
magnet too imprint a magnetic recording onto the medium. So
typically the core is actually a disc or a ring.
It's very small, and there is a wire coiled around
one side of the ring. Think of like a washer,
like a washer that you would get from a hardware store,
(07:45):
a little round disc. And imagine that you've wrapped this
particular little round disk happens to be magnet or at
least it's feral magnetic, and you've wrapped a wire, a
conductive wire, around one side of that disk, and then
you cut a gap at the bottom of that disk.
(08:05):
That that gap is what is going to be very
close to the recording medium. The gap actually causes the
magnetic field that will be generated when electric current flows
through the wire to fringe outward, and it's this that
magnetizes the recording medium passing below. So you've generated this
magnetic fluctuation by feeding an electrical signal that you had
(08:27):
generated with the microphone. And remember that electric signal represents
the original sound. You need the recording medium to pass
by that electromagnet at a regular speed to get a clear,
undistorted recording. So it's very important that the speed at
which the medium passes under this recording head is is
(08:48):
nice and regular. As the medium passes by this electromagnet,
the material in the medium is magnetized according to those
fluctuations from the magnetic field. When you're on you've got
a length of that medium, whether it's tape or it's
steel wire that has imprinted on it, those magnetized particles,
and they will stay in those magnetic orientations unless you
(09:12):
expose them to a more powerful magnetic field, in which
case they will re orient. This, by the way, is
why if you've ever worked with any sort of magnetic storage,
people would tell you make sure you don't have any
powerful magnets nearby it. That's why, because the powerful magnets
could re orient the magnetic particles in that material and
(09:32):
thus erase whatever was recorded on them. That's why if
you are destroying magnetic storage, you typically expose it to
a very powerful magnet first. To play back recorded sound.
You would then take this medium where you've got these
magnetized particles, and you would run them under a tape head. Uh.
(09:54):
It's essentially it's exactly the same thing. In fact, it
could be the same head as the recording tape head.
And in this case, you don't actually have a current
running through that wire. It's the ferromagnetic core and it's
the coil wrapped around up. But the coil at the
moment is inert, there's no electricity running through it. When
you run the magnetic material past this, then you create
(10:19):
those magnetic fluctuations which induce electricity to flow through the
wire wrapped around the ferro magnetic core, and you reproduce
the electric current that was used to create the magnetic
fluctuations that were imprinted on the material in the first place.
So you're just you're reversing the whole process. And again
(10:39):
it's because of that electromagnetic phenomena where you have the
magnetized material running past a conductor that's wrapped around ferro
magnetic core. You technically don't even need the ferro magnetic
core to do this. It's just it makes it easier.
It kind of it almost acts like amplifier, so that's
(11:01):
really why it's there. And then that current that's generated
can be then sent to amplifiers which will take in
that signal and boost its strength so that that signal
can then drive something like speakers and then you get
the sound. So the steel wire approach worked, but it
produced recordings of pretty low sound quality. It was not
(11:23):
something you could use for music or for performance. Recorders
using magnetic wire did find their way into some products
with later innovators. They took that same idea that Pulson had,
and mostly you would get dictation machines that were used
by hoity toity executive types who would dictate their words
(11:43):
to be preserved on wire for later transcription. Then you
have a German businessman named Louis Blattner who wanted to
take this technology and to develop it further. Well, not
not himself personally, he actually told the engineers in his
company to get to work on doing that. He wanted
to try and have a product he could sell to
the BBC. And they made the switch from steel wire
(12:05):
to steal tape, so it's flat piece of tape, but
it's made out of steel, and they produced a device
that was called the Blattner Phone, which is probably the
most attractive name for a piece of technology I've ever heard.
Lou would present this gadget to the BBC and they
decided it's good enough for recording speech, but it was
(12:26):
not good enough to record sound of other stuff like
like music, and a high enough quality to be considered broadcastable.
The tape was, or at least the original machines the
first two use tape that was six millimeters wide, so
not very wide at all, and it ran through the
machine at a rate of five ft per second. That's
(12:47):
about a meter and a half per second, which is
pretty darn fast. Think about this. You've got this thin
steel tape moving at that speed. You might be thinking, oh, my,
Drew gees, that's pretty darn dangerous, and you would be right.
You would not want to get too close to this thing,
or you could get pretty badly cut. And it didn't
(13:08):
get much better. When Blattner's team created a version that
used tape. It was only three millimeters wide, but the
tape was actually better than steel wire. You've got better
quality recordings, but still not to the level that could
be used for broadcast, and certainly a far cry from
anything that could be used for consumers. Now. While the
Blatner phone was terrorizing the BBC, there was a German
(13:30):
Austrian engineer named Dr Fritz Floimer, and he had been
experimenting with a paper tape coated with lacquer and an
iron oxide powder. So iron oxide is ferro magnetic and
would serve as the actual recording medium, and iron eyed
oxide for a very very long time would become the
(13:52):
go to material. There were different iron oxides that different
inventors would use over the years to get better and
better results, but iron oxide became kind of ve go
to powder that you would use to create this kind
of magnetic tape. So the A E. G Company in
Berlin negotiated with floim Er Uh to develop a device
(14:14):
based off of his work back in ninety two, and
they also collaborated with a different company called B A
SF to create a magnetic recording materials and equipment. This
collaboration led to a tape made from cellulose acetate rather
than papers, still coated with lacquer and iron oxide, and
using another cellulos acetate type of material to act as
(14:38):
a binder agent. The two companies presented their collaboration, which
they called the Magneto Phone, which is not something you
used to call the head of evil mutants, and they
showed it off at the nineteen thirty five Radio Fair
in Berlin. Now floim er had a bit of a
sad outcome to this whole thing. Everything was done on
(15:00):
the up and up, but his patents were later overturned
by the German National Court. They court determined that the
ideas he had patented had already been presented way back
in the late eighteen hundreds by none other than Valdemar Poulson,
the guy who came up with that steel wire contraption
that he had already described a tape based system. It's
(15:23):
just that he wasn't able to make that one work
during his lifetime. But because there was prior art, the
patents that Floeimer had had registered were overturned. German engineers
continued to improve the technology, and by the early nineteen
forties it was at the point where it was a
legitimate alternative to the other recording methods of the time.
(15:46):
Magnetic tape made a huge impact on that recording industry. So,
for one thing, you could record way more information on
a reel of tape than you could on a wax
cylinder or a shellack disc, which of the other media
at the time. For another, with tape, you could edit
if you're recording to a wax disc or a shell
(16:09):
act disc, and you make a mistake, it's there and
you pretty much have to scrap everything and start over,
or you have to live with the mistake. With tape,
you could actually record and you could literally cut and
paste if you needed to the tape so that you
could get rid of accidents. You could loop things if
(16:30):
you wanted to. There are a lot of different tricks
you could do. And as we listened to the last episode,
you could do multi track recordings. You could put multiple
tracks side by side on the same length of tape.
You know, imagine you've got a piece of tape and
it's several feet long and it's maybe a couple of
inches wide. You could actually fit multiple tracks side by side,
(16:54):
and each track is a different recording, and they're all
synchronized by just being next to each other on this tape.
So that allowed for a lot of versatility in the
recording process and it really freed things up. Shifting the
recording head over slightly allows you to record a second
track or a third track. Um you could even record
(17:15):
tracks for specific speakers. That's what allowed for stereo sound.
And like I said in the last episode, Less Paul
played a really big part in getting multi track recording
off the ground running. Uh Ampex would actually build the
device based on less Paul's requests, and they built the
first eight track recording system. So soon you had the
(17:35):
entire recording industry relying on magnetic tape for recording, mixing,
and mastering. At the time, they were mostly relying on
three track systems, and then a little bit later four
track systems. The eight track actually didn't come into play
until a bit later, but people began to figure out
how to work with those, Like you could record four
tracks onto a tape, then you can take that tape
(17:57):
of four tracks and transfer the recording to one track
of another four track recorder, and thus you could start
to build a piece that way. It was more time consuming,
but it was also still more versatile than the you know,
just getting everybody in the same room at the same
time and hope that no one makes a mistake. So
the real impact of magnetic tape I want to feature
(18:20):
on this episode hit consumers, and we're gonna talk about
that in just a second, But first let's take a
quick break from the nineteen thirties to the early nineteen sixties,
the format of the tape recorder was huge. It was
(18:41):
a big, big machine. You are working with real to
real tapes. That meant that you would have one reel
that would have all of your audio stored on magnetic tape.
It's wrapped around this reel, and then you have a
second empty reel, and you would put both of those
reels on spokes on your tape recorder. Then you would
take the magnetic tape from the main reel. You would
(19:02):
carefully feed the magnetic tape through the machine so that
the tape is going to pass under the tape head
or over the tape head, depending upon the design of
the machine, but that the tape head would it would
pass across it. Then you would feed it continuing through
the machine until you could wrap it and tuck it
into the secondary reel. You turn on the machine, and
(19:27):
then the secondary reel starts to turn and starts to
pull the tape through the recorder. And that meant that
the magnetic tape would pass over or under the tape head,
and that would create that electrical signal in the tape
head that could be amplified to drive a speaker and
you could play it back. It was big, it was bulky.
(19:47):
It required deft hands to thread the tape, and it
meant it was not typically very user friendly for most people,
and it was pretty expensive. There were consumer models of
reel to reel tape players. You could out and buy
one yourself, but very few people actually owned one, just
because it was kind of a hassle to use them
and they were very expensive. Also, the reels took up
(20:10):
a lot of space, and depending upon which model you got,
you might be stuck with specific types of reels that
you could use, and you couldn't use other ones because
they weren't compatible. Our c A, the Radio Corporation of
America that has factored so heavily in these histories, developed
a reversible cassette tape as early as the late nineteen fifties,
(20:31):
but it didn't look like the cassette tapes that were
all the rage in the nineteen eighties. The r C
A cassette tape was much larger. It was about the
size of a video cassette. And now I'm realizing that
I'm comparing one obsolete technology against a different obsolete technology,
and some of you may have no idea what I'm
talking about. But the cassettes were about the size of
(20:54):
your average paperback book. They were big and the form
factor didn't really catch on, so our ci A would
scrap it. After a short while, the company Phillips created
the format that would become the cassette tape that those
of us who grew up in the eighties no and love.
It was called a compact cassette in the early days,
and Phillips developed these much smaller cassettes filled with magnetic
(21:17):
storage back in nineteen sixty two. They unveiled the technology
at the nineteen sixty three Berlin radio show, the same
radio show where we got to see the earlier forms
of magnetic tape playback. So these cassettes were about the
size of a credit card, much much smaller than our
Cier's version. At the time, there were other magnetic storage
(21:39):
formats that were vying for the top spot in the market,
and the early versions of the Phillips cassette weren't able
to produce very high quality recordings, and so they were
marketed more as something to record speech to rather than music.
You would buy a tape recorder and you would buy
the cassettes and you would use it to dictate, very
(22:02):
much like the steel wire devices from decades earlier. So
how the heck did the cassette become the standard with
these kind of drawbacks, Well, it was largely because Phillips
made a very shrewd move. The company licensed the technology
to other companies for free. So if you had the
means to manufacture cassettes, you could get a free license
(22:24):
from Phillips and then you could do it. Phillips wasn't
going to take any sort of licensing fee or royalties.
That way, they could make money selling machines capable of
recording and playing back the stuff on tapes. And it
was a savvy move that paid off, and the cassette,
despite its early limitations, received widespread adoption. Engineers would continue
to work on the technology and it didn't take terribly
(22:46):
long for the recording quality to improve to the point
where it was at least feasible to use cassettes to
record music. By nineteen sixty five, European companies were doing that,
and the following year in sixty six, saw the United
States doing the same, and right away companies were selling
machines that could not only play a cassette, but also
record to blank cassettes. And this would be another thing
(23:08):
that would make an enormous impact on the recording industry.
For two decades, Vinyl would still hold out over prerecorded cassettes.
It's not like prerecorded cassettes immediately displaced vinyl records, but
in the nighties, prerecorded music cassettes overtook vinyl sales and
things changed dramatically. The compact cassettes quality was pretty much
(23:31):
always held up as inferior to a good vinyl album.
Cheap cassettes had a lot of tape hiss, and tape
hiss is produced by the magnetic particles that are on
the tape. The larger the particles are, the more hiss
you will hear during a recording. It's kind of the
base level or the the room noise of a tape.
(23:51):
And you can reduce tape hiss a couple of different ways.
One is by recording sound at a higher tape speed,
which effectively uses more tape to cord the same amount
of sounds. So instead of saying, let's say that one
version would have a second equals you know, let's say
eight inches of tape, which is pretty fast, and another
(24:15):
one a second equal sixteen inches of tape, Well, you're
using twice as much tape to record the same amount
of sound, and you also reduce hiss that way. You
can also reduce hiss by reducing the size of the
magnetic particles themselves. If you get finer grains of iron
oxide than it brings down hiss, and then other technologies
(24:37):
later on would reduce hiss further. But early in the time,
the early days of cassette tapes, hiss was one of
those issues, and cheaper tapes would still kind of create
a hissing sound even late in the cassette tape era.
That sound quality issue allowed another type of tape cassette
to emerge as a contender for a relatively short while.
(25:00):
So you had the compact cassette that was pretty versatile
but not giving you the best sound quality. This rival
had much better sound quality but less versatility, and that
was the famed eight track tape. The eight track was
able to take a spot the cassette wasn't quite ready
for in nineteen as a format for prerecorded content, specifically music,
(25:24):
and it was the product of an odd collaboration. The
partners of that collaboration included Ampex. That was the company
that made the eight track recorder for Les Paul, and
it also included r C A Records as a prime contributor.
And then there was the Lear Jet Company, which, yeah,
that's kind of weird, right, company known for making jets,
(25:45):
played a major role in developing a magnetic tape technology
for music, and William Lear, the head of the company,
used his connections to convince executives at Ford Motors to
come on board and make an eight track player and
option on every single nineteen sixties six Ford model, and
that was a huge boost for the eight track, and
it was considered a great solution. You could take your
(26:10):
music with you and you could listen to it in
the car. So there's something else that I gotta talk about,
just briefly before I get into more about the eight tracks,
which was that in the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties,
leading up to the introduction of the eight track, a
few companies had experimented with vinyl turntable systems for cars,
which sounds crazy for understandable reasons. It was not an
(26:33):
easy thing to do. You have to rely on a
format that has a physical needle or stylus moving through
a tiny groove on a spinning disk. Meanwhile, you're driving
a vehicle on different surfaces, it's probably not the most
reliable way of hearing high fidelity tunes. So while some
companies tried that, including CBS, which introduced a record format
(26:56):
just for cars that spun at sixteen and two thirds
rp ms than a specific player that spun at that speed,
which meant that you had to have discs recorded at
that speed to be able to use it. They these
systems never got much momentum, and that's a pun. So
eight track tapes are portable. You could have a few
(27:16):
in your car. You can plug them into your system
listen to tunes, and that came in handy if your
radio wasn't picking up any strong signals, or if the
stuff playing in your area didn't meet your personal musical tastes.
And this was a time when FM stereo wasn't really
widely available in the nineteen sixties. You know, you couldn't
get it everywhere, So there was a niche to be
filled for for higher quality sound in cars, and the
(27:40):
eight track one out over another format, the four track.
There was a four track tape as well, but the
quality of an eight track was far superior to cassettes
of the same era, and it would take more advances
in cassette technology for the cassette format to surpass that
of the eight track, and music labels jumped on board.
They gave a lot of port for eight track tapes
(28:01):
in the early days, and it had a pretty strong
run for about a decade. But by the mid nineteen seventies,
improvements in cassette technology, including reducing tape hiss and Dolby
invented a noise reduction approach, along with the introduction of
high bias tape coding UH that really made cassettes viable
against eight tracks. Plus, cassette tapes were easy to record on.
(28:23):
If you wanted, you could buy blank tapes, put them
in a tape recorder and take music from some other
source like the radio, which is what I used to
do as a kid. And man, did I hate it
when DJs would start talking at the end or beginning
of songs and ruining my song. Man, shut up, does
let it play? The eight track faded from the consumer
space over the course of another decade, so cassettes took
(28:46):
over after about ten years, but the eight track held on.
It didn't just disappear immediately. By the mid nineteen seventies,
the major companies had stopped making eight track players, but
the format itself hung on a little bit longer than that.
Companies were still produced seeing eight track albums for several
years after that. Um though, it was actually a challenge
to find a store that would carry eight tracks while
(29:08):
the cassette was taking off because stores loved cassettes. They
took up very little space, so you can have a
pretty wide selection of music without requiring an enormous amount
of physical store space, and cassettes didn't have some of
the capacity limitations that eight track tapes had. An eight
track typically divided up an album into four stretches of
tape called programs, and there was an audible gap between programs.
(29:30):
There was a limited amount of tape that the eight
track could hold, and it usually meant that at least
one song on an album wouldn't make it onto the
eight track version, and some songs would fall right on
that break between two programs. Typically that would mean that
the song you were listening to would fade out, then
there would be an audible click, then there would be
(29:51):
a pause of silence while the next program was getting
pulled through the player, and then the song would fade
up again, essentially where it left off, which wasn't ideal.
Cassettes had a bit more versatility, allowing record labels to
fit an entire side of a vinyl album onto one
side of a cassette tape. Cassettes were also seen as
more portable than eight tracks. It was possible to have
(30:13):
a cassette player in a car or stereo system, or
a boom box, or a portable cassette player like the
famed Sony Walkman. People could have their music on the go.
They could jog while listening to music. The convenience and portability,
paired with the capability of recording stuff of your own
choosing onto tape whether it was someone else's stuff or
(30:34):
your own, that made cassettes the clear winner over eight tracks,
And while those early cassettes still weren't necessarily viewed by
audio files as being particularly good, they also were winning
out over vinyl for those same reasons with the general consumer.
The philosophy of convenience and accessibility over fidelity was winning
(30:55):
in the mainstream public, much to the chagrin of many
audio files out there, and the cassette gave opportunities to
independent musicians that they otherwise never would have had more
about that in just a second. But first let's take
another quick break. So the recording industry typically works like this.
(31:20):
You're a musician, or you're in a band or something.
You play gigs whenever you can, You practice, you write songs,
you practice some more, you get better over time, you
develop your sound, your style, your voice, and generally you
figure out who the heck you are musically speaking. You
might submit your music to record labels, you might hire
a manager to try and take care of that for you,
(31:42):
or maybe you're super lucky and someone influential sees one
of your shows and you get a meeting with a
record label representative. Then you negotiate, you sign a deal,
and now bam, you get yourself a record contract, which
is a great fairy tale, and for some people it
does work out that way. But you've got thousands of
people for every success story who make music, but they're
(32:03):
not being heard by record labels, and that's not necessarily
out of malice or anything like that. And then there
are musicians who would rather stay independent than sign on
with a record company in the first place, since the
company might dictate what the musician can or can't record
or what they should sound like. The cassette tape gave
people but that were in that category a lot of
new chances. The recording equipment was relatively inexpensive. Blake cassettes
(32:27):
were likewise pretty darn cheap, and they also are pretty rugged.
You could record music to a cassette, you could duplicate
the cassette, and then you can mail off the duplicates
to people in the mail and the tape was probably
gonna survive because it's it's pretty hardy stuff. And indie
culture developed around this practice, with different musicians and music
enthusiasts trading tapes back and forth and spreading music that
(32:51):
way outside the recording industry system. So you had this
kind of thriving independent scene that was growing because of
the cassette tape. The cassette and the introduction of sound
systems like the boombox also allowed people to share music
with others in an unprecedented way. It was easy to
bring a boombox to a location, popping a cassette and
then blast out the tunes, so people nearby could hear
(33:11):
the music, you know, whether they wanted to or not.
But it allowed for the development of music communities and
cultures like hip hop, so whole new genres of music
we're growing out of the adoption and use of this
recorded medium. At first, the recording industry was totally on
board with cassette culture, but this gradually changed as executives
(33:32):
realized the format allowed people to easily reproduce prerecorded cassettes.
They feared a hit to the bottom line. So here's
how their doomsday scenario might play out. A music fan
let's call him Jonathan, decides to purchase a brand new
cassette copy of the album Speaking in Tongues by Talking
Heads because he really digs the song this must be
(33:52):
the Place, which is pretty much all true because that
song is perfect, okay, But Jonathan, loving this song, gets
an idea. He bought this cassette for let's say the
princely sum of twelve dollars, and he goes out and
buys a whole bunch of blank cassettes for twenty bucks,
so he's brought his investment up to thirty two dollars.
Then he starts duplicating his copy of Speaking in Tongues
(34:15):
and then sells the copies for just five dollars each.
And after selling seven copies he's recaptured all the costs
of both the blank cassettes and the original tape, and
undercutting local music stores and the recording label. Sire Records,
which was the recording label doesn't get the benefit from
all those copies that Jonathan is selling. So music industry
(34:37):
executives were understandably concerned. They hated this idea with a
passion hotter than a thousand exploding suns. Several companies than
the British Phonographic Industry Trade Group decided to launch a
pr campaign against the practice, with a claim that quote
home taping is killing music end quote music, by the way,
(34:57):
is still alive and well today, just in case were worried,
And I'm sure this argument sounds familiar to you. If
it doesn't, it will by the end of the series,
because it's gonna come up again and again in different forms.
So while the record labels were freaking out, lots of
musicians were actually encouraging the practice of copying music and
sharing it with others. Lots of musicians were concerned more
(35:18):
with their music being heard by a larger number of
people than with the actual record sales numbers, and the
slogan home taping is killing music became sort of a
joke among a certain set of musicians, particularly in the
punk rock music scene, which was just really taking off
in the in the late seventies, and that was already
firmly in the anti establishment headspace. Dead Kennedy's were famous
(35:41):
for doing this. Now, music piracy was possible, it could happen,
but it wasn't really rampant in the cassette days. In
most places, hired in music still took money and time
and effort. You had to get hold of a copy
of the music. You had to get hold of blank cassettes,
and then you had to spend the time record hoarding
from the original onto a copy, and most recorders would
(36:04):
only allow you to do that at playback speed, So
if you have an hour long album, it would take
an hour for you to copy it onto a single
blank cassette. So it wasn't exactly uh, something that was
easy to mass manufacture, and I think most of those
fears were largely unwarranted. Something that happened more frequently were
(36:25):
mixtapes made recently famous by the guardians of the Galaxy movies.
People began to rifle through their music collections and put
together a series of songs for folks they knew, and
there was a real art to this. According to some people,
there were even rules you should absolutely follow to get
the best result. For example, some officionados will tell you
that a mix tape should never feature the same artist
(36:46):
or group on it twice, no repeats. So if you
open with the Kinks All Day and All of the Night,
which came out in nineteen sixty five, and then you
ended the mixtape with the Kinks song Apeman, which came
out in you would technically be breaking that rule. Now, personally,
I think that's silly because some bands like the Kinks
can change their sound dramatically over the course of their careers.
(37:09):
It almost sounds like two totally different bands. But never
mind all that. Anyway, you can search the internet to
find out about the rules of making mixtapes. Everyone has
their own set, and these days those same rules carry
over into making playlists, so it still has relevance. The
mixtape culture became an important social interaction. It provided a
new way to clue people in as to what kind
(37:32):
of person you are, and it gave folks a chance
to put something together for someone else, showing that they
were thinking about them. So if you received a mixtape,
particularly a really good one, it was a huge thrill
because it showed that someone else was thinking about you
and trying to craft an experience that you would really enjoy.
So the eight track had a rain of around nineteen
(37:53):
sixty six to nineteen seventy, and then the compact cassette.
The cassette tape took over from there and really caught
on in the nineteen eighties, but it too would have
a short run as the king of media, because the
compact disc would debut in the late nineteen eighties and
by the following decade would all but annihilate the compact cassette.
(38:13):
During this same era, there was another huge change that
was taking place in the United States as well as
other parts of the world, but I'm mainly going to
focus on the US, and that was the nature of
copyright law. In the US. The government had passed a
Copyright Act way back in nineteen o nine, but it
hadn't really touched it since. But in the decades following
nineteen o nine, it became clear that copyright law would
(38:35):
need an update. Technology was allowing for the broadcast and
preservation of intellectual property in new ways, from radio to television,
two recorded media like vinyl albums and cassettes, and the
Universal Copyright Convention and International Agreement on Copyright had debuted
back in nineteen fifty two in Switzerland, and the United
States joined that convention in nineteen fifty five, but it
(38:57):
wasn't until nineteen seventies six that the US government was
ready to pass some new copyright rules in the nineteen
seventy six Copyright Act. The new act created protections of
all sorts of intellectual property, and it also extended the
terms of protection. Under the nineteen o nine Act, a
copyrighted work would receive protection for twenty eight years since
(39:21):
from the date of its origin, with the possibility of
a twenty eight year extension, so ultimately you could protect
it for fifty six years total. The nineteen seventy six
Act changed that. Under the nineteen seventy six Act, a
work is protected by copyright for the length of the
author's life plus fifty years. That would get changed again
(39:42):
in nineteen with the Copyright Term Extension Act that pushed
it to the author's life plus seventy years, and for
works created before nineteen seventy eight. The rules are a
little different. There are several factors that determine the length
of copyright protection, but many works were given seventy six
years of protection from the year of their creation or publication.
(40:03):
The extension would push that to ninety five years. And
if you're wondering why is this happening, what what's important
about this? And and how is or how are all
these changes happening, Well, it's largely because of really big
companies that rely on intellectual property for their value. For example,
the Walt Disney Company. A lot of people refer to
(40:24):
these extensions as Walt Disney extensions. The Walt Disney Company
certainly does not want it's it's formative works falling into
the public domain if it can help it, because then
once they're in the public domain, anyone can use them
under certain circumstances. There are other protections that are in
place as well, but you know, copyrights goes into public
domain and then anyone can can show this stuff without
(40:49):
any fear of the mouse House coming down on them.
So without the extension, Mickey Mouse would have gone into
the public domain in two thousand four. Under the Original
Copyright Act of nineteen seventy six. Now he's set to
skip off into the public domain in twenty twenty four,
and as of right now, there has not been another
(41:09):
change to copyright law to change that date. So we're
looking at mickeymails going into the public domain unless something
changes within the next few years. My point with all
of that is to say, the changing technology from the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant that suddenly things that used
to be ephemeral, you know, like a performance, could now
(41:30):
be made permanent. People could have a permanent record of that,
a permanent way of recreating those performances, when before you
just had to be there when it happened, and and
if you weren't, you missed it. And these things have
value not just to the creators, but to the audiences
as well, and that this drove changes in technology, in culture,
(41:51):
and in law. But we're not done yet. In our
next episode, I'm going to talk a bit about how
the videotape made a similar impact in film and television
as the cassette did in the music industry, and we'll
also look at the rise of the compact disc. Still
to come is the transition to digital formats and then
(42:12):
beyond DVDs and things of that nature, and blue rays.
We're going to talk about digital files, and then we're
going to talk about different ways of delivering it, from
downloading it to streaming it, and how all of this
has affected our behaviors, business, and even the process of
creating the entertainment in the first place. I hope you
guys are enjoying this series of episodes. I've really enjoyed
(42:33):
jumping into it. I like doing the sort of thematic
approach and a deep dive on a specific topic. But
once we're done with these, will be going back to
lots of other kind of one off tech stuffs, So
don't worry if this wasn't your cup of tea, we're
gonna be getting back to other tech stuff stuff in
the near future. Tech stuff stuff, I should make a
sure about that. Meanwhile, if you guys want to get
(42:55):
in touch with me, you can send me an email
the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com,
or you can pop on over to our website that's
tech stuff podcast dot com. You'll find links to our
social media presence as well as to the store and
an archive of all of our past episodes. I hope
you guys can go check that out. I look forward
to hearing from you, and I'll talk to you again
(43:17):
really soon. Y tech Stuff is a production of I
Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my
heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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