The Scientific American article that introduced the tinfoil phonograph to the public mentioned Marey, Rosapelly and Barlow as well as Scott as creators of devices for recording but, importantly, not reproducing sound. The recording could be played back immediately. The tinfoil was wrapped around a grooved metal cylinder and a sound-vibrated stylus indented the tinfoil while the cylinder was rotated. Although the visible results made him confident that sound could be physically recorded and reproduced, his notes do not indicate that he actually reproduced sound before his first experiment using tinfoil as a recording medium several months later. Edison first tried recording sound on a wax-impregnated paper tape, with the idea of creating a " telephone repeater" analogous to the "telegraph repeater" he had been working on.
Despite the similarity of name, there is no documentary evidence that Edison's phonograph was based on Scott's phonautograph. Unlike the phonautograph, it was capable of both recording and reproducing sound. In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph. Along with a tuning fork tone and unintelligible snippets recorded as early as 1857, these are the earliest known recordings of sound. Phonautograms of singing and speech made by Scott in 1860 were played back as sound for the first time in 2008.
These tracings can now be scanned and digitally converted into audible sound. The phonautograph, patented by Léon Scott in 1857, used a vibrating diaphragm and stylus to graphically record sound waves as tracings on sheets of paper, purely for visual analysis and without any idea of playing them back. More mainstream pop music releases tend to be mostly sold in compact disc or other digital formats, but have still been released in vinyl in certain instances.
As of 2011, vinyl records continue to be used for distribution of independent and alternative music artists. They are especially used by DJs and audiophiles for many types of music. The vinyl record regained popularity by 2008, with nearly 2.9 million units shipped that year, the most in any year since 1998 and the format has continued to slowly regain popularity. However, they continue to be manufactured and sold in the 21st century. By the late 1980s, digital media had gained a larger market share, and the vinyl record left the mainstream in 1991. Gramophone records were the primary medium used for music reproduction for most of the 20th century, replacing the phonograph cylinder, with which it had co-existed, by the 1920s. Phonograph records are generally described by their diameter ("12-inch", "10-inch", "7-inch", etc.), the rotational speed at which they are played ("33⅓ r.p.m.", "78", "45", etc.), their time capacity ("Long Playing"), their reproductive accuracy, or " fidelity", or the number of channels of audio provided (" Mono", " Stereo", " Quadraphonic", etc.). The groove usually starts near the periphery and ends near the center of the disc (the opposite of the spiral of pits in the CD medium, which starts near the centre and works outwards). A 12-inch (30-cm) 33⅓ rpm record (left), a 7-inch 45 rpm record (right), and a CD (above)Ī gramophone record, commonly known as a phonograph record (in American English), vinyl record (in reference to vinyl, the material most commonly used after about 1950), or colloquially, a record, is an analog sound storage medium consisting of a flat disc with an inscribed, modulated spiral groove.