The first compact disc to be manufactured in America (as opposed to Germany or Japan) was Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA in 1984. In 1984, Sony became the first company to offer an in-dash CD player for cars. In 1985, Mercedes-Benz was the first automobile manufacturer to offer an in-dash CD player in its [...]
The first album transferred to CD for demonstration purposes was Living Eyes from the Bee Gees in 1981. Among the first CDs to go on sale to the general public in Japan when the format was first introduced on October 1, 1982, was 52nd Street by Billy Joel. The first CD to sell a million [...]
Unlike a vinyl record which revolves at a constant speed and plays from the outside in, a CD’s spin rate varies from 200 to 500 RPM and plays from the inside out. At first, there was great reluctance by the recording industry and by record retailers to the compact disc. Still suffering from both a [...]
Some things you may not have known about the ubiquitous CD: The first CDs rolled off the manufacturing line of a factory in Hanover, West Germany, on August 17, 1982. The first discs off the line seem to have been a recording of Alpensymphonie, Op. 64: Sonnenaugang by the Berliner Philharmonic conducted by Herbert Von [...]
By the middle 1970s, a new art form called the “music video” began to gain attention. Although short promotional films for songs or albums had been produced for decades (they were once known as “soundies” and Scopitone films that were sometimes played in special video jukeboxes), they experienced a renaissance following Beatles projects such as [...]
Although the technology had been around since the 1930s (the first FM radio for the car was introduced in 1952 by Blaupunkt and stereo broadcasting began in the US in 1961), the frequency spectrum languished in the shadow of immensely popular AM stations. Originally used for classical and jazz music because of its superior sound, [...]
The second consumer product to be made with transistors (right after the hearing aid) was the transistor radio, beginning with the Regency TR-1. It was produced in part by Texas Instruments which started production in October 1954. Although it was expensive—$49.95, well over $400 in today’s dollars—and went through batteries very quickly, it sold 150,000 [...]
What we would recognize as the first true electric guitar was invented in 1931 for musicians who needed help being heard amongst the other instrumentation in jazz bands and blues combos. Credit goes to George Beauchamp and Adolph Rickenbacker who created something they called The Frying Pan because, well, it looked like a frying pan [...]
It’s self-evident to most people that there are songs that sound “happy” and others that sound “sad.” This can be a function of key, which involves the importance and relationships between the notes in any given piece of music. Songs in major keys tend to sound “happy” while those in minor keys are perceived as [...]
Before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, it was impossible to capture sound for later playback. You’d think that Edison might consider this when he made the first-ever recording for his new machine. Nope. Edison was a practical person and just needed to prove that his new invention would work. Although that original recording [...]
