2. analog
  3. 1418633270

Would vinyl even be invented today?

Records, cartridges and tonearms seem like such an unlikely method to play music--a bit of Rube Goldberg. Would anyone even dream of this today? It's like the typewriter keyboard--the version we have may not be the best, but it stays due to the path dependence effect. If vinyl evolved from some crude wax cylinder to a piece of rock careening off walls of vinyl, hasn't it reached the limits of the approach? Not trying to be critical--just trying to get my head around it.
128x128jafreeman

Showing 3 responses by tonywinsc

tonywinsc
583 posts
 
Imagine a stylus rigged with cables tied directly to speaker cones through a system of levers and pulleys. No electronics to color the sound. Then we would have discussions about the advantages of different cable sizes, tension and materials and the affects of various bearing grades used in the pulleys. Oh, I just realized that I just described the first player pianos...
tonywinsc
583 posts
 
A mechanical means of recording sound vibrations was bound to happen eventually in history. Who knows? Perhaps past civilizations discovered a way to record vibrations but the technology was lost. Vacuum tubes were an extension of the light bulb. Electronic amplification was sought after to both extend the range of the wired telegraph as well as the newfangled telephone.

Color television has always had the limitation of having a screen door effect. ie. the picture tube had discreet dots (and lines of resolution). The change from analog to digital was really just the means of conveying the signal. HDTVs have the same screen door effect- just more dots, like 4-5 million now versus thousands in the early color TVs. So comparing analog/digital TV to audio isn't really an equal comparison.
tonywinsc
583 posts
 
Didn't Al Gore invent the LP?
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