My Audio Timeline

What is Audio Sound, when recorded, transmitted, or reproduced: "audio equipment".

1700 Audio was invented.

1878 The first music is put on record: cornetist Jules Levy plays "Yankee Doodle."

1947 Colonel Richard Ranger begins to manufacture his version of a Magnetophon. Bing Crosby and his technical director, Murdo McKenzie, agree to audition tape recorders brought in by Jack Mullin and Richard Ranger. Mullin's is preferred, and he is brought back to record Crosby's Philco radio show. Ampex produces its first tape recorder, the Model 200. Major improvements are made in disk-cutting technology: the Presto 1D, Fairchild 542, and Cook feedback cutters. The Williamson high-fidelity power amplifier circuit is published. The first issue of Audio Engineering is published; its name is later shortened to Audio.

1975 Digital tape recording begins to take hold in professional audio studios. Michael Gerzon conceives of and Calrec (England) builds the "Soundfield Microphone," a coincident 4-capsule cluster with matrixed "B-format" outputs and decoded steerable 2- and 4-channel discrete outputs. EMT produces the first digital reverberation unit as its Model 250. Ampex introduces 456 high-output mastering tape

1995 The first "solid-state" audio recorder, the Nagra ARES-C, is introduced. It is a battery-operated field unit recording on PCMCIA cards using MPEG-2 audio compression. Iomega debuts high-capacity "Jaz" and "Zip" drives, useful as removable storage media for hard-disk recording.

1980 3M, Mitsubishi, Sony and Studer each introduces a multitrack digital recorder. EMT introduces its Model 450 hard- disk digital recorder. Sony introduces a palm-sized stereo cassette tape player called a "Walkman."

1987 Digidesign markets "Sound Tools," a Macintosh-based digital workstation using DAT as its source and storage medium

1985 Dolby introduces the "SR" Spectral Recording system.

1990 ISDN telephone links are offered for high-end studio use. Dolby proposes a 5-channel surround-sound scheme for home theater systems. The write-once CD-R becomes a commercial reality. 3M introduces 996 mastering tape, a 13 dB improvement over Scotch 111.

1996 Record labels begin to add multimedia files to new releases, calling them "enhanced CDs." Experimental digital recordings are made at 24 bits and 96 kHz.

1997 DVD videodiscs and players are introduced. An audio version with 6- channel surround sound is expected to eventually supplant the CD as the chosen playback medium in the home.

1998 The Winter Olympics open with a performance of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," played and sung by synchronizing live audio feeds from five continents with an orchestra and conductor at the Olympic stadium in Nagano, Japan, using satellite and ISDN technology. Golden Anniversary celebration held in New York on March 11, the exact date of the first AES meeting in 1948, with ten of the original members present. MP-3 players for downloaded Internet audio appear.