Two Turntables and a TechStuff Episode

technology and how it affects us. Now. In our last episode, we followed the development of the predecessors to the modern turntable leading up to the conclusion of World War One, and I'm gonna have to do a little bit of backtracking in this episode, because oddly enough, history does not unfold as a single series of events one after the other. There's a lot of stuff that's all happening concurrently, and

that makes it difficult to talk about various developments. But we're gonna chat a little bit about what was happening at the end of that era. At that time, due to the war, manufacturing facilities were ready to go into full production mode for non war time use, and you suddenly had all these factories and pieces of equipment and processes and stuff like that in place to make stuff.

Originally it was going to be military stuff, but now it could be turned to making consumer stuff for the average citizen, and people finally finding themselves with more spare time at their disposal thanks to industrialization. It was the perfect time for entertainment technology to make its way into the home. Now. If it hadn't been for radio, the predecessors to the modern turntable would likely have found their

foothold in the common household at that time. But radio gave people the chance to experience all sorts of different programming. They weren't limited to whatever songs they could find pressed on record discs or carved into wax cylinders, and the recording media at that time was still limited in how much information it could actually carry. Typically, a recording could be no longer than a couple of minutes on either

cylinders or discs. Even in nineteen o one, when Eldridge Johnson produced the ten inch record disc, you could only fit about three minutes of audio on the records. The playback speed for recorded media was not standardized at this time and could range between sixty and a hundred thirty revolutions per minute. Now, that depended both on the medium

and the equipment you played the media on. Right, so a wax cylinder might say that it needs to be played back at seventy revolutions per minute, so you'd have to have a player that could play at that speed. And there were a lot of issues at that time of these non standard formats, and it created a lot of incompatibilities across systems. The physical records just could not hold more than a couple of minutes of audio, largely because the grooves in the records. We could talk about cylinders,

but I'm specifically talking about record discs. The groups were pretty large by today's standards, so you couldn't fit as many lines of grooves. Remember, a group is essentially a spiral carved into the surface of a disk, and it spirals from the outer edge to the inner edge, and you couldn't make those grooves too tight. Back in those days, we didn't have the precision there. So the gramophone and phonograph and other such devices started to fall out of

favor as far as home use is concerned. While the recording and playback speeds weren't standardized yet. The technology that would make that possible did emerge in eight so this is before well before World War One. That tech was called a governor, and the governor is a general term for various types of mechanical devices. Typically it is something that regulates speed within a system. So you have governors

and all sorts of things, including vehicles. There are governors that are in place and vehicles that top out how fast a car can go, for example, and if you were to remove that governor, you could, in theory, push your vehicle to move faster than what it was rated for, although you do so at your own peril because you could cause some pretty bad damage, and not to mention, have a vehicle that doesn't control very well at those

high speeds. Now, the governor in would eventually allow for standardized playback speeds, but it took a few decades to become adopted universally. So people started to put them into their various machines like the phonograph and the gramophone to make sure that the revolutions per minute we were regular, that that they kept at that specific speed, because otherwise you would have issues where the revolutions might speed up or they might slow down, and that would affect the

playback recording, the playback quality. You would have the playback speed up or slow down, so suddenly everyone starts sounding like their chipmunks or that they're on barbiturous or whatever, so you wanted to have a way of regulating that and keeping it nice and steady. Another limitation in the

technology g was in sound quality and amplification. From their introduction to the nineteen twenties, these various gadgets relied on either stethoscope like earpieces which you would plug into your ears, kind of like earbuds, or they would have an acoustic

horn that would convey sound from a diaphragm to a room. Now, in some implementations of the invention, the vibrations passed directly from a needle to a membrane, So you would have a membrane and there'd be a needle mounted to the middle of the membrane, and as the needle moved across the recording service and vibrated due to the actual recording in the groove, it would transmit those vibrations to the membrane, which would then create the sound that you would hear,

but it would be a very low volume because there was no amplification there apart from acoustic amplification due to there being a horn. In other implementations, however, there was another component in which compressed air would cause the membrane to vibrate, allowing you to have a separate horn speaker connected by cable to the device. So you could have this implemented directly into the case for a phonograph or

a gramaphone, or it could be a separate thing. But it might make you wonder how these things actually work. How did this compressed air speaker function. Well, first, imagine that you have a cabinet. We're going to talk about a big integrated system. Here on the top of the cabinet is the platter. That's the surface upon which you would place a record, uh, and it's the surface that rotates around. There's the arm that has the stylus or needle at the end of it. There it is connected

to a horn apparatus. The horn access your loud speaker. Now, depending upon the model of device you might have, you might wind up a spring motor by turning a crank and that would allow there the spring motor to coil and then provide the energy necessary to rotate the platter. Or you might have it connected to an elect motor, in which case the electric motor provides the rotational force. But either way you get something that's going to turn

the platter around. That's only the tip of the iceberg. Though. Inside the cabinet, if you were to open up, you would find a blower, which in turn would typically be connected to an air canister. Uh, that would be your compressor part. And in earlier versions of the technology, you'd have a hand crank and a spring motor for the blower itself, whereas later versions used an electric motor to

operate the blower. Turning on the motor would cause it to blow air into the canister, thus compressing the air. Now this gives me a chance to talk about how blowers work. In these early incarnations, the blowers would typically use a centrifugal fan. Now, imagine a fan sort of like a water wheel. In fact, a water wheel isn't a bad analogy. The fan is made up of two parallel discs joined together by blades set between the two discs. Now,

that's the fan wheel. The fan wheel is set inside a housing which has an intake and an output section. Air comes into the fan through the central hub the intake, and as the fan rotates, it changes the directional force of the air into a rotational forces. Trivigal force pushes it out. I know that that's being really free with the term force there, but just bear with me, and the air gets pushed out towards the edge and then

it makes its way through the output. So imagine air coming straight into the center of this wheel inside of housing, then being forced out towards the edges of the housing interior. But you've only got one way out of the housing, which is the output valve, and that's all the incoming air is forced out of there. The canister acts as the holding space for compressed air, and valves allow air to pass from the intake, but not to go back out, so air keeps coming into the canister cannot escape back

the way it came in. As you crambore air into the canister, of the pressure inside the canister increases. That creates potential energy to do work, and we use compressors for all sorts of stuff. Compressed air at very high pressure can provide the energy needed to operate a jackhammer, for example, but your typical record player didn't need quite that much power, even for heavy metal music, which had not been invented yet. A connector from the canister would lead to a part of the horn on the top

of the whole apparatus. Typically, the needle on the record would control a valve and that would allow compressed air to pass through, impacting a membrane and creating the vibrations. So the compressed air was able to create the same sort of vibrations that the needle would if it were directly connected to the membrane, but it would do so with much more force, and that would result with higher amplitude sounds. Thus you would have louder sounds of increase

the volume considerably. Uh it was really loud. Actually, the motor and blower would be really loud. The sound was really loud. So you ended up with a very noisy device overall, and there was no way to control the volume apart from turning off the compressor. And if you did that, the only power you would get for sound would be from the needle creating vibrations and the membrane alone, just by making the air molecules vibrate a little, making the membrane vibrate a little, So any sound that came

out of the horn would be really really quiet. If you turned on the compressor, that sound would be increased dramatically. But so you would also get the noise of the the blower and the compressor UH as well as whatever the the music was or the audio was, so it was either too quiet for you to really hear, or so loud that you would never want it in your house. It was more meant for large public spaces than for UH inside a home. It had just been a really

loud nuisance inside any house. An example of this type of setup. By the way, if you ever want to look it up, there are videos on YouTube where you can actually listen to one of these devices and see a full explanation of how it works. Look up the Victor oxta phone a U x E T O P H O N E that was produced in the early nineteen hundreds, and there are videos on YouTube of restorers who have these and have shown how they work, and

it's pretty fascinating stuff. Now, the lack of volume control was another limitation that made those early record blayers less than ideal for your average consumer, and to be honest, earlier radio had the same problem. Earlier radio was also using speakers similar to what these early phonographs and gramophones were using. It wasn't until the invention of the electric

driven amplification that things really got going now. I'll go more into detail about that in the upcoming tech stuff episode on speakers and headphones, but here's a quick overview. Experiments and electromagnetic loudspeakers began in the late nineteenth century, but the first practical ones arrived on the scene about two decades later in nineteen fifteen, and then um those were made by Peter Jensen and Edwin Priddham, who get

the credit for making those. It took another decade for refinements and improvements to the tech to make it not just practical on its own, but also preferable to the air compressor amplifiers that were already in use. In general. Electric got a patent for such an implementation, designed by researchers Chester Rice and Edward Kellogg, and i'll talk more about all of these people in the speakers episode. The

benefits of this technology were huge. Eventually they get playback audio at different volume levels without compromising on sound quality. Audio distortion wasn't nearly as big an issue with these

speakers as was the case with earlier ones. In fact, the basic design that ge patented is still pretty much how speakers work to this day, more or less I say more or less because they become more sophisticated over time, but they still work on the same principles, and you don't need an acoustic horn louds loudspeaker anymore, which is pretty cool. This is as good a time as any to address something else that purists get particular about. Now.

I've used turntable and record player a bit interchangeably here, and that's largely because a lot of people do the same thing. It's a common practice where people will use one or the other to refer to the same sort of thing. But I need to acknowledge there is a technical distinction. A record player contains a turntable as one of its components, but also has a built in amplifier

and speakers. A turntable by itself does not have those elements, and instead it's a component that you would hook up to a larger sound system in order to listen to the output. But let's face it, y'all, I'm probably gonna end up using these terms interchangeably, so just prepare yourselves for slight misinformation in that respect, because a lot of people do it, and and and old habits die hard. At the same time, it became possible to make electrical

recordings of music using microphones. Microphones has been around for a while. People started to understand the microphone effect towards the end of the ninet century, but again it hadn't really been perfected until about the nineteen twenties. And I know I've said before, I'll just repeat it here. A microphone is essentially a speaker in reverse. The two technologies

are closely related. Before the microphone, all recordings were made directly into acoustic horns to create the vibrations used to cut a master record. So you would have a big horn uh connected down to a membrane that had a needle attached to it, and you would uh move a blank record that was easily etched um around in a circle. The needle would continue through the groove in the record. You would shout or play music or whatever into the

acoustic horn. That would make the membrane vibrate, and that vibration would be transmitted to the needle, which would carve into the record as it went through the groove the little bitty notches that would represent sound. So it's the exact opposite approach as what was happening when the needle was reading sound off of a record. Some of the biggest stars in those early years of sound recordings were

opera singers. Henrico Caruso was particularly popular as the tenor could sing in very clear tones at a very high volume, and that was great for those early recording sessions. Other famous stars were Billy Murray, not the comedic actor, but the guy Who's Sang Over There, which was written by George M. Cohen in support of America's war effort in World War One. The first jazz record was the Livery Stable Blues by the original Dixie Land Jazz Band in

nineteen seventeen. The first hit country record was Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane by Fiddland John Carson, which debuted in nineteen twenty three. Using the microphones would then really transform things. Those early recordings were mostly done through the acoustic corn section, but the microphones changed things up dramatically. I'll get to that in just a second. With the invention of the electric loud speakers and microphones, uh, we

really started seeing the recording industry transform. And this is sort of tangentially related to turntables, but you have to understand that the development of the recording industry is largely what made the turntable business possible. So it's really hard to cover one without also talking at least a little

bit about the other. So I'm gonna try and keep the recording industry history stuff to a minimum, but I need to incorporate it a little bit in this discussion to understand why the record player and turntable industries developed as they did. So just a little bit more before I go back to talking about record players. In the famous crooner Bing Crosby recorded his first record, which is called I've Got the Girl, and he used a carbon microphone for the recording. I'll talk more about that in

the Speakers and Headphones episode as well. Bell Labs developed this microphone, and Crosby would go on to become a superstar in recording with expanding not only music but also film. His popularity helped drive a lot of interest in the recording industry. And while all this was happening, there was another revolution, so to speak, in the record player world, and this has had to do with the transition from

spring motors to electric motors. One of the earliest such record players was the Brunswick Panetrope, which debuted in nineteen had an electrically driven turntable as well as vacuum tube amplifiers and electric speakers, and even had an apparatus that could drop a new disk down once an old one finished, and this would become a common feature and a lot of record players moving forward, this sort of automatic record changer,

which would just hold records at a certain height. When the arm had reached the end of its of its uh motion moving inwards from the outer edge of a record, then that would automatically make the arm move back to its original starting position, up a new album on top of the first one, and then you could start again.

So the pane trope actually allowed you to have up to five discs stored in this way, which was helpful because again, these discs could only hold a few minutes of music each, so if you wanted to listen to, say a symphony, you have to have a whole bunch of these to get from one section to the next, and this way you could line them all up and listen to them in sequence. Again, I'll cover vacuum tubes and why why they are important and amplification in an

upcoming episode. Just know that those were a very important invention to help make things like consumer radios and record players possible. Now we've set the stage for the rise of the DJ which happened in between the two World Wars, and when we come back, I'll talk about the original disc jockeys and how the record player was able to cover from the blow dealt by commercial radio stations. But first let's take a quick break and thank our sponsor.

Hey guys, it's Jonathan And before we jump into the rest of this show, I just want to give a quick shout out to a new podcast that's come out from How Stuff Works, the Soundtrack Show, hosted by David Collins, and I just thought it was thematically linked to the whole turntable idea. This is a show that's specifically about movie scores and soundtracks and how they affect the way we perceive the films, the life they have beyond films, the inspiration and influences that went into the creation of

those soundtracks. This is my jam, guys. I love soundtracks, So if you are really passionate about music in general and movie music in particular, check it out. It's the Soundtracks Show. You can find it on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts and now back to the show. Okay. So N was a huge year for the recording industry in general and ultimately for record player is in particular.

The development of electric amplification, coupled with the move to electric motors, helped bring sound quality up dramatically and reduce the amount of noise record players created. Meanwhile, companies like Edison, Columbia and Victor were working on extending the playing time of disks, making improvements to the technology to push three or four minutes of audio to seven or eight minutes.

Western Electric was able to squeeze ten minutes of audio on a disc when the company began to develop tech for real films, as in real to real films that would have sound accompanying them, so the record player industry

also actually ties in with the film industry. These improvements did increase the amount of audio you could record to a disc, but in general the sound quality was not as good as what was on the shorter earlier discs, and so the short form approach was preferable in most applications. In N Charles Brush offered the first piezo electric featherweight style lists. The stylist is what a lot of people would refer to as the needle, but it's more appropriately

called the stylus. This is the part of the record player that settles into the groove on the record. The information recorded in that groove causes the needle to vibrate. In a piece of electric stylus, the needle is made of a crystal or ceramic that generates an electric charge when it experiences applied mechanical stress. That's the piece of electric effect. So stuff like quartz experiences this. If you apply a mechanical stress to quartz, it will then generate

an electric charge. If you apply an electric charged quarts, it will actually exert a mechanical stress. It will actually vibrate, and so that's why quartz crystals are used in watches, for example. So as the stylus moves through the groove, it encounters the variations inside the groove that represent the audio recording. The stylist's movements caused the crystal to generate this electric charge, which then can drive the electric speaker.

Usually an amplifier in there too. But you get the idea. No longer did the needle have to transmit vibrations directly to a membrane, right, You didn't have to do that anymore. Now the energy can move from kinetic form into electric, so you didn't have just physical motions, you had electric ones. Later, cartridges which consists of the stylists and some other components, could have other types of pickups. So this was a

piece of electric pickup. But there are other kinds. There's magnetic, dynamic and capacityance, and I'll have to cover those in a different episode at some point, because honestly, I ran out of time to cover all the different types of pickups. But piece of electric is important because it meant that you could switch to a different method of playing back music.

This also meant that you can develop lighter types of stylus so that you weren't causing as much wear and tear on the discs every time you listen to them, and you increase the utility of those discs. All of these steps are things that made record players more attractive in the eyes of consumers. Further down the road, another big part of the problem with records was the physical stuff the records were made from. At this stage the

early twentieth century, the go to material was shellack. Shellac is a material that comes from bugs in India and Thailand. They're called lack bugs. Actually come from the female lack bug. The resin secreted by these bugs has been used in lots of stuff that we do process at first. So these bugs secrete this stuff, the female ones as they move along branches on trees in India, and it creates sort of a almost like a tunnel that allows the bug to adhere to the surface it's on as it

moves around. So to harvest it, workers will scrape the resin off of the bark of the trees where the lack bugs live. Then they'll heat it up and the resin will melt, and usually you have it in like a mesh bag, like a very tightly woven mesh bag, and as you heat it up, the liquid drains out like cheese cloth, and everything else stays inside. And then uh you use that, you process it and it becomes kind of a natural plastic. It's very similar to synthetic polymers,

but it is a it's actually natural. You don't have to synthesize it. But the material was ill suited for long playing records. The slower revolutions per minute, if for a long playing record, would create rumbly noises on the shellac, and the medium was not really well suited for narrow grooves, which would have effectively added more information to the disk by cramming work grooves onto the same sized plate of shellac. So record player manufacturers needed to find a different medium

to record upon. They also needed to find a different way to transmit vibrations to a speaker, because those heavy needles of the early record players would create a great deal of whear and tear on the discs. So that's where that piezo electric needle would come in play. Uh So,

let's get back to that in justice. Second, record players were still expensive at this time, so the industry was beginning to depend heavily on niche markets like jukeboxes and entertainment halls, and so you weren't seeing as many record players being sold to the average consumer. They were just out of the price range, and people still didn't think they were good enough to actually own when you could go out and buy a radio instead and tune into

different radio stations and listen to music that way. It's kind of similar again to the streaming world of today. Why go out and buy a song if you can listen to stuff streaming especially if you can listen to it on demand, which obviously you could not do just over the radio unless they have a call in line and you've just got that phone number memorized. That's beside

the point. Now. One of the pioneers of radio that would end up helping the recording industry down the line was Ray Knuby who got the nod from Charles doc Herold to play a stream of music on Harold Radio Station. Now, Harold's radio station was part of a school for radio operators. They were actually there to learn how to how to work these radios while on ships for example. This was back before there were any regulations of what could and

could not be broadcast on radio. Because the technology was so new, there were no laws to guide it, something else that we see today over and over, especially in

realms like the Internet. By playing this music, it was creating a new demand for record players, uh this time in radio stations, not in the homes, but the radio stations themselves needed the record players in order to play the music because they didn't always have live musicians in the studio to create whatever music they needed, so they

need to have prerecorded stuff. Over in the UK, Christopher Stone lobbied the British broad Broadcasting Company, or BBC, to allow him to broadcast a program in which he played recorded music. He even created a dual turntable set up so he could prepare one record while the second turntable was playing already another disc. So you start playing one song, you've got another turntable you can set up your next song, and then you just switch when it's time to go

from one to the other. You don't have any dead air that way. His program began to air all the way back in nine Other radio broadcasters began to follow suit. Many of them became known as pancake turners because they were dealing with flat discs all day long and turning them over whenever they wanted to play a song on the other side. The first person to get the title DJ or disc jockey was apparently Martin Block, who was

a radio show host. He had a show in America titled Make Believe Ballroom, and Block was covering a huge news story in nineteen thirty five that would be the disappearance of the Lendburg Baby, and between updates he would play records rather than drone on or repeat information that he had just broadcast. He would end up being called

a disc jockey by none other than Walter Winchell. All a man overseas, it's good old Transatlantic accent, Walter Winchell, and he described blocks work as being a disc jockey, and it became a general term to describe radio broadcasters who used musical records in the presentations. Alright, so back to the research work on playback media. One of the alternatives to shellack was a mixture of vinyl chloride and vinyl acetate, which was called vinyl light, although most people

just call it vinyl for short. The discovery of vinyl itself was pretty interesting, as it wasn't from the deliberate experimentation of engineers trying to find a new material for the recording industry. Instead, it was kind of discovered as an accident. Back in nine there was a guy named Waldo Seaman who was working for the B. F. Good Rich Company to find a way to bond rubber and

metal together. And Waldo was looking into creating a new type of adhesive for that purpose, and he decided to experiment with vinyl chloride, which had first technically been discovered in the eighteen seventies by a German chemist named Eugen Balman. The problem was this type of plastic was extremely rigid and difficult to work with, and no one had quite

figured out how to fix that. Like, you could make it, but it would just be in whatever shape you made it in and you couldn't really work it in any way. So Waldo got some powdered vinyl chloride and he dumped it into a boiling solvent, and he ended up inventing

plastic sized vinyl chloride, which today we call PVC. The result was a gel like substance that could be shaped however you liked before it would set into its rigid form, so you could actually work with the stuff while it was still hot, and then when it cooled it would be in the shape that you needed it to be in. Researchers found a lot of uses for vinyl. The Union Carbide Corporation was the first to create the co polymer of vinyl chloride and vinyl acetate to create vinyl light,

which the company then trademarked. The vinyl light was harder than shellac and could hold a finer groove as well, which meant you could have a higher number of grooves. Spirals around the disk to hold more information. So shell I album can hold between eighty two one hundred grooves per inch, and you had several inches from the outer edge to the inner edge of the record. Vinyl light, though, could hold more than double that amount. But cramming more grooves onto a disc was just one way to help

extend the playing time of a record. The other was to reduce the number of revolutions per minute. So it's easier to understand this if we use an analogy. Imagine that you have a long, straight road and it stretches out directly in front of you for about two hundred forty miles, and if you drive down that road at seventy eight miles an hour, he'll take you about three

hours to get to the end. But if you took a more leisurely pace, let's say you're driving at thirty three and a third miles per hour, it would take you seven hours to make that same journey. You're going the same distance, you're just going at a slower speed. Well, that's what's happening with records and RPMs. The road in this case is the groove spiral that's cut into the record disc. The car is the stylus and it travels the length of the road from the outer edge to

the inner edge in that spiral. So the faster the record spends, the last time it takes the stylus to make that journey. So by slowing down the revolutions, you extend the playing time. But of course this all depends on what speed you recorded the album at in the first place, because if you record the album at seventy RPMs and you play it back at thirty three and a third, it's gonna sound weird, super duper slowed down at that point because you're playing at a much slower

speed than what it was intended. Slowing down the revolutions wasn't really the big challenge. It wasn't like they couldn't figure out how to make a motor turn more slowly.

That was actually the easy part. The hard part was finding a way to record the information to a master disc at a slower speed without introducing a lot of noise in the process, and that took some time to solve because the slower they took the revolutions when they were when they were actually recording, the more a little noise could find its way into the recording system, especially if you didn't have a very clean duplication process. The first company to demonstrate what we would call a long

playing disc or LP was Columbia Records. Dr. Peter Goldmark, who was an electrical engineer originally from Hungary, led the effort. He and his team developed a micro groove record that could be played at a low speed, which necessitated an overhaul in the duplication processes I just mentioned. With those smaller grooves, you had to be way more careful about contaminants during that duplication process or you would have terrible

effects on the sound quality. And he pioneered a clean room approach to record duplication, which is not too different from what you would find in a microprocessor manufacturing facility today. That's why they do in order to eliminate errors due to contamination from dust and other particles. He also introduced a set a fire needle or sapphire stylists, and a

lightweight tone arm for a record player. This lightweight arm placed far less pressure on a disc than the standard needles had in the past, so you reduced wear and tear on the records. And on June twenty one, nineteen forty eight, Columbia Records invited press to come to a demonstration of a new record disc technology. They introduced a twelve inch record with micro grooves on both sides. The playing time for each side was about twenty three minutes, and it was played at a thirty three and a

third revolutions per minute speed. It was an incredible jump from the earlier formats. Remember, even Western Electric had only managed to get to ten minutes per side, so more

than doubling that and playing at a slower speed. To show how impactful this development was, Columbia Records took two sets of a collection of three five musical selections, and one set was made up of conventional shellac records, which each could hold maybe three minutes of music, and the other set was made up of old light records, which

could hold up to twenty three minutes per side. The shellac records ended up being a stack that was eight feet tall, the vinyl records ended up being fifteen inches tall. Because they could pack so much more music onto this new format, So the message was clear. This new approach greatly improved the utility of record players. You could have an entire collection that would have taken up a huge

shelf in a room. Now it takes up a fraction of a bookshelf because of the the amount of information you could store on a vinyl record compared to a shellac record. Columbia had approached competitor r C. A. Victor before they held this demonstration in an effort to create a new standard for records. They wanted to try and get this set so that the average consumer wouldn't be

faced with a terrible choice of proprietary formats. But executives that r C. A. Victor were not keen on this idea because they had already been working on their own

solution to the problem of creating long playing albums. They called them extended play albums, and they had settled on a different speed entirely of forty five revolutions per minute, which it introduced to the market in nineteen forty nine, so a year after when Columbia debuted their new record player format, and so began the Great Groove Wars, or the War of the Speeds. Columbia back thirty three and

a third revolutions per minute. Victor backed forty five revolutions per minute, and you still had seventy eight RPM albums out there too, not to mention a few sixteen rpm albums, not many, but a few, and the forums created some real chaos in the marketplace. Everyone was unsure which one to back. But it didn't last terribly long. So late

forties you've got these brutal format wars. But by nineteen fifty one, Columbia was selling forty five and Victor was selling LPs, so everyone was using both standards at that point, and several record players began to support both formats. They would include a switch that would let users choose which rpm playback speed they wanted to use, so you just had to make sure you matched the right rpm speed

switch setting to the album that you're listening to. The also led to people playing records on the wrong speed on purpose, like that's what I used to do on occasion with our record player back home, because there's nothing like listening to Black Sabbath as performed by the Chipmunks. The LP completely changed the recording industry. In the early days of record discs, you were dealing with a single sided disc capable of holding two or maybe three minutes

of audio. Even when double sided discs became a thing, that's still only necessitated two short recordings of two to three minutes each. So if you've ever wondered why so many songs stick to about three minutes in length, this is why the media we used was limited in the

earliest days, and it's sort of set the standard now. Granted, there are a lot of songs that go much longer than that these days, but the reason why we kind of have that three minute standard time link for a lot of songs is pretty much due to the limitations of the record industry back in the nine Dean vorties. But the LP could pack a lot more material on it, so now you had artists exploring the possibilities that this created.

You could use the extra space to make a collection of songs, so you could do like the Greatest Hits album. So instead of like recording all new material, you could say, well, I had all these hit records, let's put them all on a single LP, and then people can buy that and they get the whole collection on one album. You can charge more for it, or you could create an all new experience with songs that are written and arranged for the purpose of delivering a specific experience. This would

take a while. It wasn't something that everyone jumped on right away, but the LP actually changed music as a result. While you could listen to songs individually, more and more artists began to experiment with creating an album experience and which one song kind of led into another, either literally

or figuratively, so they are monumentally important albums. You know, groups like the Beach Boys or the Beatles were creating album experiences that would then be carried on in in future decades by groups like Pink Floyd and even today or you know, Michael Jackson's Thriller album you could argue is the sort of experience where you were meant to listen to a full album, not just necessarily a song

off the album. Create a new way to consume music and a new demand for music as a result, so the record player market began to make a comeback with the invention of the LP. Radio stations would not typically play an album in full. They might focus more on singles, which were the songs that producers identified as being the

most likely hits off an album's worth of music. But if you were a fan of a musician or a group, you would probably feel compelled to go out and buy the album so that you can listen to all the songs, not just the one that someone thought were going to be the most popular, and you needed a record player to do that. By the late nineteen fifties, the market had grown enough for a new era to begin. It was the Golden Age of vinyl, which would stretch into

the nineteen seventies. More to say on that in just a minute, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Now, as I mentioned before, technically a turntable is just a component of a larger system. It's an element that can convert the information on a vinyl record into an electrical signal, which went process through speakers turns back into audio information. But it does not have its own amplifier or speakers. Right, It's just a component.

So why would you go for just a turntable instead of an all in one player. Well, that started up in the late nineteen fifties and it all became the region of a group of people we call audio files. Audio files, I feel are very special group of human beings. They have very strong opinions, sometimes not based on any kind of scientifically backed data, but they feel very very strongly about them. I'm not saying that their feelings aren't valid.

I'm just saying that sometimes they're not necessarily evidence based. But they're very passionate about the listening experience, and it was all a question of control and quality. It's sort of like building your own computer system. You get to choose which components are part of your system, and you purchase all the different pieces and you hook them up to create the experience you want. So you might favor one type of speakers over another. You might say, well,

these speakers are really good. They have very crisp highs. You can hear those high pitches really well. The base is really strong, there's very little hiss. These sort of elements are really important. If you're an audiophile, you might favor one type of amplifier over another. You might be super old school and say I only want vacuum tubes in my amplified airs. Uh. That's more frequently the realm of professional musicians, particularly in the realm of guitar amplifiers.

But you might occasionally find an audio file who also argues that You also might discover the specific configuration of different components produces exactly what you feel is the best fidelity and sound with a minimum of noise. So a new industry grew up around this community, one of high fidelity or hi fi sound, And like I said, a lot of the stuff about hi fi ends up being a little wishy washy, And by that I mean there are audio files who will argue for hours on end

the virtues of one setup versus all others. But at a certain level of quality, you do reach the limit of what human hearing can perceive. So you might be able to put together a system that can, on paper outperform another system, but both systems are beyond the ability for humans to differentiate, which means that ultimately it's pointless. You might say, well, this instrumentation shows that that system over there is able to represent those lower those lower

frequencies much more accurately. But if you can't perceive the lower frequencies and they aren't really affecting the quality of the rest of the sound, it doesn't ultimately matter. Audiophiles, however, will argue to the grave that it matters a lot. That's a discussion for another day. In the nineteen fifties, the primary means of rotating the turntable, the actual mechanism that would make the platter rotate was using what was

called an idler drive or a rim drive. A typical idler drive had a rubber wheel called the idler and that was mounted to the shaft of an electric motor, so the motor would rotate the shaft, thus rotating the rubber idler wheel, and the idler wheel would be pressed against the inner rim of the platter wheel, the actual

platform that the record turns on. So it would usually use something like a tension spring, so it would hold the rubber wheel tightly against the platter wheel, and that way you would have it nice and nugs so that when the rubber wheel turned, it would force the platter to rotate. And uh when the electric motor spins that eidler wheel, the wheel and turn transfers that rotational force to the platter, but in the opposite direction of rotation.

So it's kind of like two gears turning against each other, only we're talking about smooth wheels. They don't have teeth. That would obviously create another issue. You would have it make more noise and it could transmit a lot of

vibration to the system, so you don't want that. It would be a smooth rubber wheel that's doing the turning, but otherwise it is a lot like gears moving with each other, or if you prefer, it's like if you had a bicycle and you had a treadmill, and you put the bicycle on top of the treadmill and you turn the treadmill on and the belt of the treadmill starts to transfer energy to the bike's wheels, causing the

wheels to rotate. UH. This is similar to what the idler drive would do with the platter, and it was popular for decades and in fact, there are still UH turntables stems out there that use idler drives. But in the late nineteen fifties some companies began to introduce a new drive system called the belt drive. And as the name suggests, a belt drive uses a belt to transfer energy from the electric motor to the platter. It's like

a pulley system. The belt wraps around the platter and a pulley that's connected to the shaft of the motor. And it's the simplest drive mechanism for turntables. That also means it's the cheapest, which also means it's the most

popular because it doesn't cost as much as other systems. Now, some people argue that the belt driven turntables are superior to all others because it decouples the platter from the electric motor, and the belt or the the line that connects the platter to the electric motor absorbs a lot of the vibrations that otherwise would be transferred to the

platter itself, so that could affect sound quality. So there are some audiophiles who say the belt systems might be the cheapest to implement, but they also create the best audio quality. Uh. Some audio files say that's hogwash and that there's no evidence that the belt driven systems are superior to other driver systems. So debate rages on in the audio file circles, as it will forever and ever amend.

There is a third drive system for turntables. I should mention this one came a little bit later, but it was really really important for DJs, and for a long time it was limited to professional turntables that professional DJs or radio stations would use. And it's the direct drive system. And in a direct drive system, the motor is directly connected to the platter, so you don't have an idler

wheel that then transfers the motions to the platter. You don't have a belt system that transfers motions to the platter. The platter itself is mounted on a rotor system of some sort, and it will turn in speed end time with the actual electric motor, so there's no intermediary there. The motor turns the turntable itself. Some direct drives actually use a magnetic drive system. The Technic twelve hundred, the famous turntable that was favored by professional DJs, uses such

a drive system. The big benefit of the magnetic drive system is that you can manipulate the platter manually without damaging the motor. If the motor is trying to turn the platter and you stop it or reverse it and it's using mechanical elements as opposed to this magnetic drive, you could strip out some components of the motor. One of the big benefits of direct drive turntables is that they get up to speed very quickly, so they reduced distortion.

You'd hear after doing some sick DJ work like scratching or pausing a record, if you pause it by holding down on the actual platter so you stop its rotation and you let up. With direct drive systems, it gets up to speed very very fast, so you have very little distortion from a full stop to playing at the right speed. Magnetic drives are actually pretty simple because they rely on something that electric motors already do. In an

electric motor, you have two major components. You have the stator or statter if you prefer, but stater is typically how I heard it pronounced. That's the stationary element of the motor. That's the part that's mounted into some sort of frame, and then you have the rotor that's the

element that actually does the rotation. The stater is a hollow cylinder essentially that's got uh usually plates of iron or steel in it, and that has wire wrapped around little protrusions that come down from the center of this cylinder. So you can think of it almost like a an inverted gear, where the teeth are on the inside of the circle, not the outside, and you've got wire wrapped around each of these teeth, which represents an electromagnet. And

the opposite sides of this stator have opposite poles. So let's say at the top it's the north pole and the bottom it's the south pole. When you pass the current through in one direction, what you're using alternating current. That means that the current goes back and forth right in directions. It goes one direction and then swaps and goes the other direction, and it cycles through this hundreds

of times per second. As it changes direction, the magnetic field shifts, so what was the north pole becomes the south pole, and vice versa. So you've got that element. The rotor also has a conductive coil inside of it, and when you place that inside the stator and you turn on the electricity, the magnetic field, the fluctuating magnetic field inside the stator induces current to flow through the coils and the rotor, which creates its own magnetic field.

And these two magnetic fields end up attracting and repulsing each other and creates the rotational force uh that turns the rotor. So that's your basic rotor in an electric motor. The magnetic turntable systems, the platter itself is the rotor. It's the it's mounted on the thing that is freely rotating inside of this electric motor itself, so there's no other parts to grind down. It's it's just the magnetism that keeps the platter from moving, So if you stop it,

the magnetism element keeps going. It's just your hand is stronger than the magnetic force, so you can stop the record from from rotating. And when you let go, everything is is fine because you don't have any moving parts that are grinding against each other. It's just stopped. It's like a break for that second, and then you release the break and everything can turn again, So that makes

it much easier to operate without any fear of breaking something. Now, jumping back to the nineteen fifties, in engineers figured out how to record to stereo in vinyl. Record player manufacturers rapidly responded to this development, creating players that could send different signals to the left and right channels. Though early record players that were stereo record players could not really send out truly discrete channels to the left and right speakers,

so you would have some bleed over. So if you were to turn one speaker completely off, uh you would still be able to hear a little bit of what was supposed to play in that speaker in the other one because there was some bleed over. There wasn't It wasn't pure left and right channels, Yet at that point.

Throughout the nineteen sixties, turntable technology evolved. In nineteen sixty nine, Technics introduced the SP ten that was a direct drive turntable, which became an early standard for professionals, and later models like the twelve hundred brought the direct drive technology into more hands and gave rise to a new art form of DJ work. Pioneers like cool Herk, grand Master Flash in Africa Bombada began to incorporate performance in music playback,

using turntables to interactively play up things. Instead of just simply queuing up a piece of music, they would create their own music and manipul you late music that had already been recorded, which was really interesting for the time. It still is to me today. I think it's fascinating

to watch a talented DJ work. So, for example, cool Hirk would use two turntables playing copies of the same record, and both turntables were hooked up to a mixer, and what cool Hirk would do is listen to the one album as it's playing while the second one is going out to the speakers in the room, and when it hit the break in a song like the climax of

a song. He could swap the mixer over so that while that break is ending on album number one, it's starting on album number two, and he could just keep on extending a segment repeatedly by switching from one copy to the other. He could just lift the stylus up on album one, put it back a little bit, queue it up, and then switch the mixer over again, and you could have the break of a song last indefinitely

this way. Grand Wizard Theodore was one of the early d j's to introduce scratching in DJ performances, and Grand Master Flash was the first who record such a performance on an album, and the song The Adventures of Grand Master Flash on the Wheels of Steel from one was the first to use scratching on an actual recorded LP on purpose at any rate, and not as just a comedic effect. By the way, if you've never listened to

that song, do yourself a favor. Look up The Adventures of Grand Master Flash on the Wheels of Steel and listen to it, because it is an awesome mashup of some amazing songs. Is incredible. The basic setup of two turntables and a mixer, not a microphone was the standard

for DJs for years. A skilled DJ could set up a que on one album and get it going with the mixer throwing the signal out to the speakers in the room, while simultaneously setting up another track to mix with it in real time, not just transition from one song to another, but to create new music from these

prerecorded tracks. You could argue convincingly that the hip hop genre of music owes its origins to the turntable, which is pretty remarkable for a piece of technology that was invented to playback music rather than to generate a brand new performance in of itself. And that kind of concludes the discussion of the analog turntables. There are digital turntables out there, and I'll cover those in another episode sometime further down the line. Also, analog turntables have continued on

for a long time. They started to become a niche product again largely because there were other form factors that came out that began to replace vinyl. You had cassette tapes which helped replace vinyl because they were more convenient, They were easier to carry around. You could get a cassette player for your car. Uh. They meant that you could take your music with you much more easily than

you could with vinyl. So even though the quality of cassette tapes for a long time really drag behind vinyl albums, the convenience meant more than the sound quality. For a while. Then you had compact discs that increase the quality of the recording, although again for a while, the digital aspect of it a lot of people felt didn't give you

the same experience as listening to an analog vinyl album. UH. There's some arguments that have been made that that a good CD player against a good analog record player, the comparison is UH is completely in favor of the analog record player. There are others who argue that if you were to do a double blind test where you're in the room you have no idea which system you're listening to.

The person a ministering the test also doesn't know which system you're listening to, then it may be that you're not able to tell the difference. Um, if you're listening to really really good systems, both for analog and digital. Obviously, if you're sampling digital music at a terrible bit rate, then you're gonna be able to tell because the quality is not going to be there, but an versus digital is another argument that will continue on forever, even to

this day. And of course vinyl albums have made a big comeback over recent years. It was to the point where if a band put out an album in vinyl it was almost like a publicity stunt um because record players had gone so out of fashion. But these days it's much more common. You see it happen frequently, and it it's easy to go out and buy a turntable or even a full record player system out on the

market and to go out and collect vinyl again. There are a lot of reissues of old albums that have been pressed on new vinyl, so you can actually start collecting classic albums again if you wanted to, and not have to go digging through old archives of music and hope that you find one that isn't all scratched up and ruined. So it's a pretty cool time if you are a fan of this music format, as i am, um, I find that there's something extra with the turntable record

player approach. It's not necessarily the quality of the music that's part of it, but another part of it is the experience of listening to a full album instead of just skipping to a specific song. Now, digital media make it really easy for us to skip over music, whereas analog you can't do that quite as easily. You have to you have to kind of either pick up a stylist and try to figure out where the next song begins,

or you just sit through it. But in many cases that means that you can have a true album experience. And also there's a bit of ritual to taking an album out of its sleeve, placing it on the platter, lifting the stylists, placing it down on the vinyl, hearing that that little bit of scratch hiss just before the music begins to play. There's something about that that I

think adds to the experience of enjoying music. Doesn't necessarily translate to every single track, but I find it really soothing in a way, even when I'm listening to my punk rock music, which I do often and with great enthusiasm. That was a great suggestion for an episode. Big thanks for all of you out there who have been asking me to cover more music tech. We will continue that.

We'll do an episode about speakers and headphones, but then We'll start to transition to other topics as well, so keep an ear out for those episodes will be coming up in the near future. If you have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, right to me and tell me what they are. The address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or draw me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is text stuff h s W. Join

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talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com.