Speaker 1: Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios,
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I am your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer
Speaker 1: with How Stuff Works and I heart Radio and I
Speaker 1: love all things tech. And it has been about two
Speaker 1: weeks since I've been in the studio, even though this
Speaker 1: episode is going to go right behind one that I
Speaker 1: recorded two weeks ago. So in our last episode, which
Speaker 1: was ages ago for me, I teased a bit about
Speaker 1: the emergence of the audio cassette tape, and I think
Speaker 1: you could argue that the cassette split the path of
Speaker 1: audio consumption into two sort of broad philosophies. On one side,
Speaker 1: you have the audiophile dream of a format and a
Speaker 1: system capable of producing sound from a recording that would
Speaker 1: be indistinguishable from the original performance. So would be as
Speaker 1: if you, the listener, were actually in the recording studio
Speaker 1: when the tracks were first laid down, or at the
Speaker 1: very least, that you would be hearing the sound that
Speaker 1: the producers intended for you to hear, because if they
Speaker 1: put a lot of effects on it or anything like
Speaker 1: that in post production, then obviously you're not going to
Speaker 1: hear exactly the thing that was performed when it was
Speaker 1: being recorded. But you get my point. The other philosophy
Speaker 1: would sacrifice some quality in return for added convenience. So
Speaker 1: these this isn't just one format, but sort of a
Speaker 1: group of formats that are not the highest in audio
Speaker 1: quality compared to things like vinyl albums, for example. These
Speaker 1: formats can't provide the fidelity of the ones that are
Speaker 1: beloved by audio files, but they do allow for more
Speaker 1: versatile listening experiences, such as portable devices capable of playing
Speaker 1: back audio. These two philosophies would continue on from the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties through to today, and they have an impact
Speaker 1: on the actual practices of audio recording. But we'll get
Speaker 1: into all of that in this and future episodes. So first,
Speaker 1: let's talk about magnetic tape. I mentioned it a bit
Speaker 1: in the previous episode, like when I talked about recording
Speaker 1: multiple tracks to the same tape, making it possible for
Speaker 1: a single musician to accompany him or herself on different
Speaker 1: instruments or even the same instrument, playing different parts of
Speaker 1: a song. With enough tracks and a versatile enough musician,
Speaker 1: you could have one person play virtually all the instruments
Speaker 1: and provide lead and backing vocals on a single piece
Speaker 1: of music. So, for example, this isn't a song, but
Speaker 1: a piece of music. In the piece tubular Bells, which
Speaker 1: was made famous in The Exorcist, Mike Oldfield played acoustic guitar,
Speaker 1: bass guitar, electric guitar, three different kinds of organs, fuzz guitars, glockenspiel, mandolin,
Speaker 1: and piano, and timpani. Oh, and also the tubular bells,
Speaker 1: plus some other stuff. And obviously he wasn't playing all
Speaker 1: of that simultaneously during the recording session, he was able
Speaker 1: to lay that down track by track into a full piece.
Speaker 1: So let's talk a bit about the tech of magnetic
Speaker 1: tape and how all of this is possible. So this
Speaker 1: is gonna mean backtracking again through our history, but I
Speaker 1: feel like this is easier to understand if we tackle
Speaker 1: each topic individually, as opposed to going year by year
Speaker 1: and kind of leap frogging back and forth between different
Speaker 1: technologies evolving at different rates. Um, that was just the
Speaker 1: call I made when I was building out these episodes. So, uh,
Speaker 1: you've gotta remember that the progress of magnetic tape is
Speaker 1: also connected in many ways to other technologies. Including stuff
Speaker 1: like the evolution of the microphone and the development of
Speaker 1: amplification tubes and later amplification transistors. But we're gonna start
Speaker 1: with a Danish engineer named valdam Our Poulson. Though some
Speaker 1: other smarty pants had already been theorizing that magnetic recording
Speaker 1: could be a possibility, but it was Poulson's work that
Speaker 1: would produce the first actual working devices. Everything else was
Speaker 1: kind of theoretical. Sometime around nine, Poulson developed a machine
Speaker 1: that could record sound onto a length of steel wire
Speaker 1: through means a magnetism. He called it the telegraphone. I'm
Speaker 1: guessing it's telegraphone perhaps, But how the heck does the
Speaker 1: darn thing work? Let alone? How is it pronounced? Well,
Speaker 1: imagine you've got a ferro magnetic material. So this is like,
Speaker 1: you know, something like iron. This is a material that
Speaker 1: if you expose it to a magnetic field, it will
Speaker 1: remain magnetized by that field. You take the field away,
Speaker 1: the material still remains magnetized, so it doesn't just have
Speaker 1: magnetic effect in the presence of a magnetic field. The
Speaker 1: magnetic field itself will magnetize the material, at least until
Speaker 1: some other magnetic force acts upon it. Now before you
Speaker 1: record anything onto a fresh strip of magnetic tape or
Speaker 1: in the case of Poulson's device, steel wire, the material
Speaker 1: isn't magnetized. It's in its raw state, so it's just
Speaker 1: waiting as a blank medium. You take a microphone and
Speaker 1: you play sound into the microphone. Maybe you're singing into it,
Speaker 1: maybe you're playing an acoustic guitar. But the vibrations from
Speaker 1: the sound cause a small diaphragm inside the microphone to vibrate,
Speaker 1: and the diaphragm transfers those vibrations to other elements in
Speaker 1: the microphone. Those elements depend upon the type of microphones,
Speaker 1: so not all microphones are exactly the same. They all
Speaker 1: work on a similar principle, but the details are different. However,
Speaker 1: for simplicity sake, let's talk about dynamic microphones for the
Speaker 1: purposes of this discussion. The diaphragm would cause a coil
Speaker 1: of conductive wire to move around a magnetic core. So
Speaker 1: imagine you've got a coil and the coil is uh
Speaker 1: is wrapped around a magnetic core loose wrapped around and
Speaker 1: the coil can move back and forth laterally along this core.
Speaker 1: If you remember how electro magnetism works. You'll remember that
Speaker 1: if you happen to move a conductor in and out
Speaker 1: of a magnetic field, or you subject the conductive material
Speaker 1: to a fluctuating magnetic field, it induces current to flow
Speaker 1: through that conductor. The electric current is pretty weak coming
Speaker 1: out of a microphone, but it represents the fluctuations of
Speaker 1: the diaphragm, which in turn are representations of the sound
Speaker 1: vibrations that hit that diaphragm. So think of it this way.
Speaker 1: Sound hits the diaphragm, diaphragm vibrates, the vibrates cause vibrations,
Speaker 1: cause this coil to move back and forth across this
Speaker 1: magnetic core. That induces current to flow through the wire,
Speaker 1: and then you've got an electric current. You can use
Speaker 1: that current to drive a different electro magnet. Typically you
Speaker 1: would wrap the wire around a ferromagnetic or iron lie core,
Speaker 1: and as the current flows through the wire coiled around
Speaker 1: this core, the electro magnet generates a magnetic field. So
Speaker 1: it's kind of recreating the magnetic field that was uh
Speaker 1: fluctuating when the coil was vibrating in the microphone side.
Speaker 1: So it's sort of the same thing I just described earlier,
Speaker 1: but in reverse magnetic recording devices use such an electro
Speaker 1: magnet too imprint a magnetic recording onto the medium. So
Speaker 1: typically the core is actually a disc or a ring.
Speaker 1: It's very small, and there is a wire coiled around
Speaker 1: one side of the ring. Think of like a washer,
Speaker 1: like a washer that you would get from a hardware store,
Speaker 1: a little round disc. And imagine that you've wrapped this
Speaker 1: particular little round disk happens to be magnet or at
Speaker 1: least it's feral magnetic, and you've wrapped a wire, a
Speaker 1: conductive wire, around one side of that disk, and then
Speaker 1: you cut a gap at the bottom of that disk.
Speaker 1: That that gap is what is going to be very
Speaker 1: close to the recording medium. The gap actually causes the
Speaker 1: magnetic field that will be generated when electric current flows
Speaker 1: through the wire to fringe outward, and it's this that
Speaker 1: magnetizes the recording medium passing below. So you've generated this
Speaker 1: magnetic fluctuation by feeding an electrical signal that you had
Speaker 1: generated with the microphone. And remember that electric signal represents
Speaker 1: the original sound. You need the recording medium to pass
Speaker 1: by that electromagnet at a regular speed to get a clear,
Speaker 1: undistorted recording. So it's very important that the speed at
Speaker 1: which the medium passes under this recording head is is
Speaker 1: nice and regular. As the medium passes by this electromagnet,
Speaker 1: the material in the medium is magnetized according to those
Speaker 1: fluctuations from the magnetic field. When you're on you've got
Speaker 1: a length of that medium, whether it's tape or it's
Speaker 1: steel wire that has imprinted on it, those magnetized particles,
Speaker 1: and they will stay in those magnetic orientations unless you
Speaker 1: expose them to a more powerful magnetic field, in which
Speaker 1: case they will re orient. This, by the way, is
Speaker 1: why if you've ever worked with any sort of magnetic storage,
Speaker 1: people would tell you make sure you don't have any
Speaker 1: powerful magnets nearby it. That's why, because the powerful magnets
Speaker 1: could re orient the magnetic particles in that material and
Speaker 1: thus erase whatever was recorded on them. That's why if
Speaker 1: you are destroying magnetic storage, you typically expose it to
Speaker 1: a very powerful magnet first. To play back recorded sound.
Speaker 1: You would then take this medium where you've got these
Speaker 1: magnetized particles, and you would run them under a tape head. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's essentially it's exactly the same thing. In fact, it
Speaker 1: could be the same head as the recording tape head.
Speaker 1: And in this case, you don't actually have a current
Speaker 1: running through that wire. It's the ferromagnetic core and it's
Speaker 1: the coil wrapped around up. But the coil at the
Speaker 1: moment is inert, there's no electricity running through it. When
Speaker 1: you run the magnetic material past this, then you create
Speaker 1: those magnetic fluctuations which induce electricity to flow through the
Speaker 1: wire wrapped around the ferro magnetic core, and you reproduce
Speaker 1: the electric current that was used to create the magnetic
Speaker 1: fluctuations that were imprinted on the material in the first place.
Speaker 1: So you're just you're reversing the whole process. And again
Speaker 1: it's because of that electromagnetic phenomena where you have the
Speaker 1: magnetized material running past a conductor that's wrapped around ferro
Speaker 1: magnetic core. You technically don't even need the ferro magnetic
Speaker 1: core to do this. It's just it makes it easier.
Speaker 1: It kind of it almost acts like amplifier, so that's
Speaker 1: really why it's there. And then that current that's generated
Speaker 1: can be then sent to amplifiers which will take in
Speaker 1: that signal and boost its strength so that that signal
Speaker 1: can then drive something like speakers and then you get
Speaker 1: the sound. So the steel wire approach worked, but it
Speaker 1: produced recordings of pretty low sound quality. It was not
Speaker 1: something you could use for music or for performance. Recorders
Speaker 1: using magnetic wire did find their way into some products
Speaker 1: with later innovators. They took that same idea that Pulson had,
Speaker 1: and mostly you would get dictation machines that were used
Speaker 1: by hoity toity executive types who would dictate their words
Speaker 1: to be preserved on wire for later transcription. Then you
Speaker 1: have a German businessman named Louis Blattner who wanted to
Speaker 1: take this technology and to develop it further. Well, not
Speaker 1: not himself personally, he actually told the engineers in his
Speaker 1: company to get to work on doing that. He wanted
Speaker 1: to try and have a product he could sell to
Speaker 1: the BBC. And they made the switch from steel wire
Speaker 1: to steal tape, so it's flat piece of tape, but
Speaker 1: it's made out of steel, and they produced a device
Speaker 1: that was called the Blattner Phone, which is probably the
Speaker 1: most attractive name for a piece of technology I've ever heard.
Speaker 1: Lou would present this gadget to the BBC and they
Speaker 1: decided it's good enough for recording speech, but it was
Speaker 1: not good enough to record sound of other stuff like
Speaker 1: like music, and a high enough quality to be considered broadcastable.
Speaker 1: The tape was, or at least the original machines the
Speaker 1: first two use tape that was six millimeters wide, so
Speaker 1: not very wide at all, and it ran through the
Speaker 1: machine at a rate of five ft per second. That's
Speaker 1: about a meter and a half per second, which is
Speaker 1: pretty darn fast. Think about this. You've got this thin
Speaker 1: steel tape moving at that speed. You might be thinking, oh, my,
Speaker 1: Drew gees, that's pretty darn dangerous, and you would be right.
Speaker 1: You would not want to get too close to this thing,
Speaker 1: or you could get pretty badly cut. And it didn't
Speaker 1: get much better. When Blattner's team created a version that
Speaker 1: used tape. It was only three millimeters wide, but the
Speaker 1: tape was actually better than steel wire. You've got better
Speaker 1: quality recordings, but still not to the level that could
Speaker 1: be used for broadcast, and certainly a far cry from
Speaker 1: anything that could be used for consumers. Now. While the
Speaker 1: Blatner phone was terrorizing the BBC, there was a German
Speaker 1: Austrian engineer named Dr Fritz Floimer, and he had been
Speaker 1: experimenting with a paper tape coated with lacquer and an
Speaker 1: iron oxide powder. So iron oxide is ferro magnetic and
Speaker 1: would serve as the actual recording medium, and iron eyed
Speaker 1: oxide for a very very long time would become the
Speaker 1: go to material. There were different iron oxides that different
Speaker 1: inventors would use over the years to get better and
Speaker 1: better results, but iron oxide became kind of ve go
Speaker 1: to powder that you would use to create this kind
Speaker 1: of magnetic tape. So the A E. G Company in
Speaker 1: Berlin negotiated with floim Er Uh to develop a device
Speaker 1: based off of his work back in ninety two, and
Speaker 1: they also collaborated with a different company called B A
Speaker 1: SF to create a magnetic recording materials and equipment. This
Speaker 1: collaboration led to a tape made from cellulose acetate rather
Speaker 1: than papers, still coated with lacquer and iron oxide, and
Speaker 1: using another cellulos acetate type of material to act as
Speaker 1: a binder agent. The two companies presented their collaboration, which
Speaker 1: they called the Magneto Phone, which is not something you
Speaker 1: used to call the head of evil mutants, and they
Speaker 1: showed it off at the nineteen thirty five Radio Fair
Speaker 1: in Berlin. Now floim er had a bit of a
Speaker 1: sad outcome to this whole thing. Everything was done on
Speaker 1: the up and up, but his patents were later overturned
Speaker 1: by the German National Court. They court determined that the
Speaker 1: ideas he had patented had already been presented way back
Speaker 1: in the late eighteen hundreds by none other than Valdemar Poulson,
Speaker 1: the guy who came up with that steel wire contraption
Speaker 1: that he had already described a tape based system. It's
Speaker 1: just that he wasn't able to make that one work
Speaker 1: during his lifetime. But because there was prior art, the
Speaker 1: patents that Floeimer had had registered were overturned. German engineers
Speaker 1: continued to improve the technology, and by the early nineteen
Speaker 1: forties it was at the point where it was a
Speaker 1: legitimate alternative to the other recording methods of the time.
Speaker 1: Magnetic tape made a huge impact on that recording industry. So,
Speaker 1: for one thing, you could record way more information on
Speaker 1: a reel of tape than you could on a wax
Speaker 1: cylinder or a shellack disc, which of the other media
Speaker 1: at the time. For another, with tape, you could edit
Speaker 1: if you're recording to a wax disc or a shell
Speaker 1: act disc, and you make a mistake, it's there and
Speaker 1: you pretty much have to scrap everything and start over,
Speaker 1: or you have to live with the mistake. With tape,
Speaker 1: you could actually record and you could literally cut and
Speaker 1: paste if you needed to the tape so that you
Speaker 1: could get rid of accidents. You could loop things if
Speaker 1: you wanted to. There are a lot of different tricks
Speaker 1: you could do. And as we listened to the last episode,
Speaker 1: you could do multi track recordings. You could put multiple
Speaker 1: tracks side by side on the same length of tape.
Speaker 1: You know, imagine you've got a piece of tape and
Speaker 1: it's several feet long and it's maybe a couple of
Speaker 1: inches wide. You could actually fit multiple tracks side by side,
Speaker 1: and each track is a different recording, and they're all
Speaker 1: synchronized by just being next to each other on this tape.
Speaker 1: So that allowed for a lot of versatility in the
Speaker 1: recording process and it really freed things up. Shifting the
Speaker 1: recording head over slightly allows you to record a second
Speaker 1: track or a third track. Um you could even record
Speaker 1: tracks for specific speakers. That's what allowed for stereo sound.
Speaker 1: And like I said in the last episode, Less Paul
Speaker 1: played a really big part in getting multi track recording
Speaker 1: off the ground running. Uh Ampex would actually build the
Speaker 1: device based on less Paul's requests, and they built the
Speaker 1: first eight track recording system. So soon you had the
Speaker 1: entire recording industry relying on magnetic tape for recording, mixing,
Speaker 1: and mastering. At the time, they were mostly relying on
Speaker 1: three track systems, and then a little bit later four
Speaker 1: track systems. The eight track actually didn't come into play
Speaker 1: until a bit later, but people began to figure out
Speaker 1: how to work with those, Like you could record four
Speaker 1: tracks onto a tape, then you can take that tape
Speaker 1: of four tracks and transfer the recording to one track
Speaker 1: of another four track recorder, and thus you could start
Speaker 1: to build a piece that way. It was more time consuming,
Speaker 1: but it was also still more versatile than the you know,
Speaker 1: just getting everybody in the same room at the same
Speaker 1: time and hope that no one makes a mistake. So
Speaker 1: the real impact of magnetic tape I want to feature
Speaker 1: on this episode hit consumers, and we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: that in just a second, But first let's take a
Speaker 1: quick break from the nineteen thirties to the early nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: the format of the tape recorder was huge. It was
Speaker 1: a big, big machine. You are working with real to
Speaker 1: real tapes. That meant that you would have one reel
Speaker 1: that would have all of your audio stored on magnetic tape.
Speaker 1: It's wrapped around this reel, and then you have a
Speaker 1: second empty reel, and you would put both of those
Speaker 1: reels on spokes on your tape recorder. Then you would
Speaker 1: take the magnetic tape from the main reel. You would
Speaker 1: carefully feed the magnetic tape through the machine so that
Speaker 1: the tape is going to pass under the tape head
Speaker 1: or over the tape head, depending upon the design of
Speaker 1: the machine, but that the tape head would it would
Speaker 1: pass across it. Then you would feed it continuing through
Speaker 1: the machine until you could wrap it and tuck it
Speaker 1: into the secondary reel. You turn on the machine, and
Speaker 1: then the secondary reel starts to turn and starts to
Speaker 1: pull the tape through the recorder. And that meant that
Speaker 1: the magnetic tape would pass over or under the tape head,
Speaker 1: and that would create that electrical signal in the tape
Speaker 1: head that could be amplified to drive a speaker and
Speaker 1: you could play it back. It was big, it was bulky.
Speaker 1: It required deft hands to thread the tape, and it
Speaker 1: meant it was not typically very user friendly for most people,
Speaker 1: and it was pretty expensive. There were consumer models of
Speaker 1: reel to reel tape players. You could out and buy
Speaker 1: one yourself, but very few people actually owned one, just
Speaker 1: because it was kind of a hassle to use them
Speaker 1: and they were very expensive. Also, the reels took up
Speaker 1: a lot of space, and depending upon which model you got,
Speaker 1: you might be stuck with specific types of reels that
Speaker 1: you could use, and you couldn't use other ones because
Speaker 1: they weren't compatible. Our c A, the Radio Corporation of
Speaker 1: America that has factored so heavily in these histories, developed
Speaker 1: a reversible cassette tape as early as the late nineteen fifties,
Speaker 1: but it didn't look like the cassette tapes that were
Speaker 1: all the rage in the nineteen eighties. The r C
Speaker 1: A cassette tape was much larger. It was about the
Speaker 1: size of a video cassette. And now I'm realizing that
Speaker 1: I'm comparing one obsolete technology against a different obsolete technology,
Speaker 1: and some of you may have no idea what I'm
Speaker 1: talking about. But the cassettes were about the size of
Speaker 1: your average paperback book. They were big and the form
Speaker 1: factor didn't really catch on, so our ci A would
Speaker 1: scrap it. After a short while, the company Phillips created
Speaker 1: the format that would become the cassette tape that those
Speaker 1: of us who grew up in the eighties no and love.
Speaker 1: It was called a compact cassette in the early days,
Speaker 1: and Phillips developed these much smaller cassettes filled with magnetic
Speaker 1: storage back in nineteen sixty two. They unveiled the technology
Speaker 1: at the nineteen sixty three Berlin radio show, the same
Speaker 1: radio show where we got to see the earlier forms
Speaker 1: of magnetic tape playback. So these cassettes were about the
Speaker 1: size of a credit card, much much smaller than our
Speaker 1: Cier's version. At the time, there were other magnetic storage
Speaker 1: formats that were vying for the top spot in the market,
Speaker 1: and the early versions of the Phillips cassette weren't able
Speaker 1: to produce very high quality recordings, and so they were
Speaker 1: marketed more as something to record speech to rather than music.
Speaker 1: You would buy a tape recorder and you would buy
Speaker 1: the cassettes and you would use it to dictate, very
Speaker 1: much like the steel wire devices from decades earlier. So
Speaker 1: how the heck did the cassette become the standard with
Speaker 1: these kind of drawbacks, Well, it was largely because Phillips
Speaker 1: made a very shrewd move. The company licensed the technology
Speaker 1: to other companies for free. So if you had the
Speaker 1: means to manufacture cassettes, you could get a free license
Speaker 1: from Phillips and then you could do it. Phillips wasn't
Speaker 1: going to take any sort of licensing fee or royalties.
Speaker 1: That way, they could make money selling machines capable of
Speaker 1: recording and playing back the stuff on tapes. And it
Speaker 1: was a savvy move that paid off, and the cassette,
Speaker 1: despite its early limitations, received widespread adoption. Engineers would continue
Speaker 1: to work on the technology and it didn't take terribly
Speaker 1: long for the recording quality to improve to the point
Speaker 1: where it was at least feasible to use cassettes to
Speaker 1: record music. By nineteen sixty five, European companies were doing that,
Speaker 1: and the following year in sixty six, saw the United
Speaker 1: States doing the same, and right away companies were selling
Speaker 1: machines that could not only play a cassette, but also
Speaker 1: record to blank cassettes. And this would be another thing
Speaker 1: that would make an enormous impact on the recording industry.
Speaker 1: For two decades, Vinyl would still hold out over prerecorded cassettes.
Speaker 1: It's not like prerecorded cassettes immediately displaced vinyl records, but
Speaker 1: in the nighties, prerecorded music cassettes overtook vinyl sales and
Speaker 1: things changed dramatically. The compact cassettes quality was pretty much
Speaker 1: always held up as inferior to a good vinyl album.
Speaker 1: Cheap cassettes had a lot of tape hiss, and tape
Speaker 1: hiss is produced by the magnetic particles that are on
Speaker 1: the tape. The larger the particles are, the more hiss
Speaker 1: you will hear during a recording. It's kind of the
Speaker 1: base level or the the room noise of a tape.
Speaker 1: And you can reduce tape hiss a couple of different ways.
Speaker 1: One is by recording sound at a higher tape speed,
Speaker 1: which effectively uses more tape to cord the same amount
Speaker 1: of sounds. So instead of saying, let's say that one
Speaker 1: version would have a second equals you know, let's say
Speaker 1: eight inches of tape, which is pretty fast, and another
Speaker 1: one a second equal sixteen inches of tape, Well, you're
Speaker 1: using twice as much tape to record the same amount
Speaker 1: of sound, and you also reduce hiss that way. You
Speaker 1: can also reduce hiss by reducing the size of the
Speaker 1: magnetic particles themselves. If you get finer grains of iron
Speaker 1: oxide than it brings down hiss, and then other technologies
Speaker 1: later on would reduce hiss further. But early in the time,
Speaker 1: the early days of cassette tapes, hiss was one of
Speaker 1: those issues, and cheaper tapes would still kind of create
Speaker 1: a hissing sound even late in the cassette tape era.
Speaker 1: That sound quality issue allowed another type of tape cassette
Speaker 1: to emerge as a contender for a relatively short while.
Speaker 1: So you had the compact cassette that was pretty versatile
Speaker 1: but not giving you the best sound quality. This rival
Speaker 1: had much better sound quality but less versatility, and that
Speaker 1: was the famed eight track tape. The eight track was
Speaker 1: able to take a spot the cassette wasn't quite ready
Speaker 1: for in nineteen as a format for prerecorded content, specifically music,
Speaker 1: and it was the product of an odd collaboration. The
Speaker 1: partners of that collaboration included Ampex. That was the company
Speaker 1: that made the eight track recorder for Les Paul, and
Speaker 1: it also included r C A Records as a prime contributor.
Speaker 1: And then there was the Lear Jet Company, which, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's kind of weird, right, company known for making jets,
Speaker 1: played a major role in developing a magnetic tape technology
Speaker 1: for music, and William Lear, the head of the company,
Speaker 1: used his connections to convince executives at Ford Motors to
Speaker 1: come on board and make an eight track player and
Speaker 1: option on every single nineteen sixties six Ford model, and
Speaker 1: that was a huge boost for the eight track, and
Speaker 1: it was considered a great solution. You could take your
Speaker 1: music with you and you could listen to it in
Speaker 1: the car. So there's something else that I gotta talk about,
Speaker 1: just briefly before I get into more about the eight tracks,
Speaker 1: which was that in the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: leading up to the introduction of the eight track, a
Speaker 1: few companies had experimented with vinyl turntable systems for cars,
Speaker 1: which sounds crazy for understandable reasons. It was not an
Speaker 1: easy thing to do. You have to rely on a
Speaker 1: format that has a physical needle or stylus moving through
Speaker 1: a tiny groove on a spinning disk. Meanwhile, you're driving
Speaker 1: a vehicle on different surfaces, it's probably not the most
Speaker 1: reliable way of hearing high fidelity tunes. So while some
Speaker 1: companies tried that, including CBS, which introduced a record format
Speaker 1: just for cars that spun at sixteen and two thirds
Speaker 1: rp ms than a specific player that spun at that speed,
Speaker 1: which meant that you had to have discs recorded at
Speaker 1: that speed to be able to use it. They these
Speaker 1: systems never got much momentum, and that's a pun. So
Speaker 1: eight track tapes are portable. You could have a few
Speaker 1: in your car. You can plug them into your system
Speaker 1: listen to tunes, and that came in handy if your
Speaker 1: radio wasn't picking up any strong signals, or if the
Speaker 1: stuff playing in your area didn't meet your personal musical tastes.
Speaker 1: And this was a time when FM stereo wasn't really
Speaker 1: widely available in the nineteen sixties. You know, you couldn't
Speaker 1: get it everywhere, So there was a niche to be
Speaker 1: filled for for higher quality sound in cars, and the
Speaker 1: eight track one out over another format, the four track.
Speaker 1: There was a four track tape as well, but the
Speaker 1: quality of an eight track was far superior to cassettes
Speaker 1: of the same era, and it would take more advances
Speaker 1: in cassette technology for the cassette format to surpass that
Speaker 1: of the eight track, and music labels jumped on board.
Speaker 1: They gave a lot of port for eight track tapes
Speaker 1: in the early days, and it had a pretty strong
Speaker 1: run for about a decade. But by the mid nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: improvements in cassette technology, including reducing tape hiss and Dolby
Speaker 1: invented a noise reduction approach, along with the introduction of
Speaker 1: high bias tape coding UH that really made cassettes viable
Speaker 1: against eight tracks. Plus, cassette tapes were easy to record on.
Speaker 1: If you wanted, you could buy blank tapes, put them
Speaker 1: in a tape recorder and take music from some other
Speaker 1: source like the radio, which is what I used to
Speaker 1: do as a kid. And man, did I hate it
Speaker 1: when DJs would start talking at the end or beginning
Speaker 1: of songs and ruining my song. Man, shut up, does
Speaker 1: let it play? The eight track faded from the consumer
Speaker 1: space over the course of another decade, so cassettes took
Speaker 1: over after about ten years, but the eight track held on.
Speaker 1: It didn't just disappear immediately. By the mid nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: the major companies had stopped making eight track players, but
Speaker 1: the format itself hung on a little bit longer than that.
Speaker 1: Companies were still produced seeing eight track albums for several
Speaker 1: years after that. Um though, it was actually a challenge
Speaker 1: to find a store that would carry eight tracks while
Speaker 1: the cassette was taking off because stores loved cassettes. They
Speaker 1: took up very little space, so you can have a
Speaker 1: pretty wide selection of music without requiring an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of physical store space, and cassettes didn't have some of
Speaker 1: the capacity limitations that eight track tapes had. An eight
Speaker 1: track typically divided up an album into four stretches of
Speaker 1: tape called programs, and there was an audible gap between programs.
Speaker 1: There was a limited amount of tape that the eight
Speaker 1: track could hold, and it usually meant that at least
Speaker 1: one song on an album wouldn't make it onto the
Speaker 1: eight track version, and some songs would fall right on
Speaker 1: that break between two programs. Typically that would mean that
Speaker 1: the song you were listening to would fade out, then
Speaker 1: there would be an audible click, then there would be
Speaker 1: a pause of silence while the next program was getting
Speaker 1: pulled through the player, and then the song would fade
Speaker 1: up again, essentially where it left off, which wasn't ideal.
Speaker 1: Cassettes had a bit more versatility, allowing record labels to
Speaker 1: fit an entire side of a vinyl album onto one
Speaker 1: side of a cassette tape. Cassettes were also seen as
Speaker 1: more portable than eight tracks. It was possible to have
Speaker 1: a cassette player in a car or stereo system, or
Speaker 1: a boom box, or a portable cassette player like the
Speaker 1: famed Sony Walkman. People could have their music on the go.
Speaker 1: They could jog while listening to music. The convenience and portability,
Speaker 1: paired with the capability of recording stuff of your own
Speaker 1: choosing onto tape whether it was someone else's stuff or
Speaker 1: your own, that made cassettes the clear winner over eight tracks,
Speaker 1: And while those early cassettes still weren't necessarily viewed by
Speaker 1: audio files as being particularly good, they also were winning
Speaker 1: out over vinyl for those same reasons with the general consumer.
Speaker 1: The philosophy of convenience and accessibility over fidelity was winning
Speaker 1: in the mainstream public, much to the chagrin of many
Speaker 1: audio files out there, and the cassette gave opportunities to
Speaker 1: independent musicians that they otherwise never would have had more
Speaker 1: about that in just a second. But first let's take
Speaker 1: another quick break. So the recording industry typically works like this.
Speaker 1: You're a musician, or you're in a band or something.
Speaker 1: You play gigs whenever you can, You practice, you write songs,
Speaker 1: you practice some more, you get better over time, you
Speaker 1: develop your sound, your style, your voice, and generally you
Speaker 1: figure out who the heck you are musically speaking. You
Speaker 1: might submit your music to record labels, you might hire
Speaker 1: a manager to try and take care of that for you,
Speaker 1: or maybe you're super lucky and someone influential sees one
Speaker 1: of your shows and you get a meeting with a
Speaker 1: record label representative. Then you negotiate, you sign a deal,
Speaker 1: and now bam, you get yourself a record contract, which
Speaker 1: is a great fairy tale, and for some people it
Speaker 1: does work out that way. But you've got thousands of
Speaker 1: people for every success story who make music, but they're
Speaker 1: not being heard by record labels, and that's not necessarily
Speaker 1: out of malice or anything like that. And then there
Speaker 1: are musicians who would rather stay independent than sign on
Speaker 1: with a record company in the first place, since the
Speaker 1: company might dictate what the musician can or can't record
Speaker 1: or what they should sound like. The cassette tape gave
Speaker 1: people but that were in that category a lot of
Speaker 1: new chances. The recording equipment was relatively inexpensive. Blake cassettes
Speaker 1: were likewise pretty darn cheap, and they also are pretty rugged.
Speaker 1: You could record music to a cassette, you could duplicate
Speaker 1: the cassette, and then you can mail off the duplicates
Speaker 1: to people in the mail and the tape was probably
Speaker 1: gonna survive because it's it's pretty hardy stuff. And indie
Speaker 1: culture developed around this practice, with different musicians and music
Speaker 1: enthusiasts trading tapes back and forth and spreading music that
Speaker 1: way outside the recording industry system. So you had this
Speaker 1: kind of thriving independent scene that was growing because of
Speaker 1: the cassette tape. The cassette and the introduction of sound
Speaker 1: systems like the boombox also allowed people to share music
Speaker 1: with others in an unprecedented way. It was easy to
Speaker 1: bring a boombox to a location, popping a cassette and
Speaker 1: then blast out the tunes, so people nearby could hear
Speaker 1: the music, you know, whether they wanted to or not.
Speaker 1: But it allowed for the development of music communities and
Speaker 1: cultures like hip hop, so whole new genres of music
Speaker 1: we're growing out of the adoption and use of this
Speaker 1: recorded medium. At first, the recording industry was totally on
Speaker 1: board with cassette culture, but this gradually changed as executives
Speaker 1: realized the format allowed people to easily reproduce prerecorded cassettes.
Speaker 1: They feared a hit to the bottom line. So here's
Speaker 1: how their doomsday scenario might play out. A music fan
Speaker 1: let's call him Jonathan, decides to purchase a brand new
Speaker 1: cassette copy of the album Speaking in Tongues by Talking
Speaker 1: Heads because he really digs the song this must be
Speaker 1: the Place, which is pretty much all true because that
Speaker 1: song is perfect, okay, But Jonathan, loving this song, gets
Speaker 1: an idea. He bought this cassette for let's say the
Speaker 1: princely sum of twelve dollars, and he goes out and
Speaker 1: buys a whole bunch of blank cassettes for twenty bucks,
Speaker 1: so he's brought his investment up to thirty two dollars.
Speaker 1: Then he starts duplicating his copy of Speaking in Tongues
Speaker 1: and then sells the copies for just five dollars each.
Speaker 1: And after selling seven copies he's recaptured all the costs
Speaker 1: of both the blank cassettes and the original tape, and
Speaker 1: undercutting local music stores and the recording label. Sire Records,
Speaker 1: which was the recording label doesn't get the benefit from
Speaker 1: all those copies that Jonathan is selling. So music industry
Speaker 1: executives were understandably concerned. They hated this idea with a
Speaker 1: passion hotter than a thousand exploding suns. Several companies than
Speaker 1: the British Phonographic Industry Trade Group decided to launch a
Speaker 1: pr campaign against the practice, with a claim that quote
Speaker 1: home taping is killing music end quote music, by the way,
Speaker 1: is still alive and well today, just in case were worried,
Speaker 1: And I'm sure this argument sounds familiar to you. If
Speaker 1: it doesn't, it will by the end of the series,
Speaker 1: because it's gonna come up again and again in different forms.
Speaker 1: So while the record labels were freaking out, lots of
Speaker 1: musicians were actually encouraging the practice of copying music and
Speaker 1: sharing it with others. Lots of musicians were concerned more
Speaker 1: with their music being heard by a larger number of
Speaker 1: people than with the actual record sales numbers, and the
Speaker 1: slogan home taping is killing music became sort of a
Speaker 1: joke among a certain set of musicians, particularly in the
Speaker 1: punk rock music scene, which was just really taking off
Speaker 1: in the in the late seventies, and that was already
Speaker 1: firmly in the anti establishment headspace. Dead Kennedy's were famous
Speaker 1: for doing this. Now, music piracy was possible, it could happen,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't really rampant in the cassette days. In
Speaker 1: most places, hired in music still took money and time
Speaker 1: and effort. You had to get hold of a copy
Speaker 1: of the music. You had to get hold of blank cassettes,
Speaker 1: and then you had to spend the time record hoarding
Speaker 1: from the original onto a copy, and most recorders would
Speaker 1: only allow you to do that at playback speed, So
Speaker 1: if you have an hour long album, it would take
Speaker 1: an hour for you to copy it onto a single
Speaker 1: blank cassette. So it wasn't exactly uh, something that was
Speaker 1: easy to mass manufacture, and I think most of those
Speaker 1: fears were largely unwarranted. Something that happened more frequently were
Speaker 1: mixtapes made recently famous by the guardians of the Galaxy movies.
Speaker 1: People began to rifle through their music collections and put
Speaker 1: together a series of songs for folks they knew, and
Speaker 1: there was a real art to this. According to some people,
Speaker 1: there were even rules you should absolutely follow to get
Speaker 1: the best result. For example, some officionados will tell you
Speaker 1: that a mix tape should never feature the same artist
Speaker 1: or group on it twice, no repeats. So if you
Speaker 1: open with the Kinks All Day and All of the Night,
Speaker 1: which came out in nineteen sixty five, and then you
Speaker 1: ended the mixtape with the Kinks song Apeman, which came
Speaker 1: out in you would technically be breaking that rule. Now, personally,
Speaker 1: I think that's silly because some bands like the Kinks
Speaker 1: can change their sound dramatically over the course of their careers.
Speaker 1: It almost sounds like two totally different bands. But never
Speaker 1: mind all that. Anyway, you can search the internet to
Speaker 1: find out about the rules of making mixtapes. Everyone has
Speaker 1: their own set, and these days those same rules carry
Speaker 1: over into making playlists, so it still has relevance. The
Speaker 1: mixtape culture became an important social interaction. It provided a
Speaker 1: new way to clue people in as to what kind
Speaker 1: of person you are, and it gave folks a chance
Speaker 1: to put something together for someone else, showing that they
Speaker 1: were thinking about them. So if you received a mixtape,
Speaker 1: particularly a really good one, it was a huge thrill
Speaker 1: because it showed that someone else was thinking about you
Speaker 1: and trying to craft an experience that you would really enjoy.
Speaker 1: So the eight track had a rain of around nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty six to nineteen seventy, and then the compact cassette.
Speaker 1: The cassette tape took over from there and really caught
Speaker 1: on in the nineteen eighties, but it too would have
Speaker 1: a short run as the king of media, because the
Speaker 1: compact disc would debut in the late nineteen eighties and
Speaker 1: by the following decade would all but annihilate the compact cassette.
Speaker 1: During this same era, there was another huge change that
Speaker 1: was taking place in the United States as well as
Speaker 1: other parts of the world, but I'm mainly going to
Speaker 1: focus on the US, and that was the nature of
Speaker 1: copyright law. In the US. The government had passed a
Speaker 1: Copyright Act way back in nineteen o nine, but it
Speaker 1: hadn't really touched it since. But in the decades following
Speaker 1: nineteen o nine, it became clear that copyright law would
Speaker 1: need an update. Technology was allowing for the broadcast and
Speaker 1: preservation of intellectual property in new ways, from radio to television,
Speaker 1: two recorded media like vinyl albums and cassettes, and the
Speaker 1: Universal Copyright Convention and International Agreement on Copyright had debuted
Speaker 1: back in nineteen fifty two in Switzerland, and the United
Speaker 1: States joined that convention in nineteen fifty five, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't until nineteen seventies six that the US government was
Speaker 1: ready to pass some new copyright rules in the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy six Copyright Act. The new act created protections of
Speaker 1: all sorts of intellectual property, and it also extended the
Speaker 1: terms of protection. Under the nineteen o nine Act, a
Speaker 1: copyrighted work would receive protection for twenty eight years since
Speaker 1: from the date of its origin, with the possibility of
Speaker 1: a twenty eight year extension, so ultimately you could protect
Speaker 1: it for fifty six years total. The nineteen seventy six
Speaker 1: Act changed that. Under the nineteen seventy six Act, a
Speaker 1: work is protected by copyright for the length of the
Speaker 1: author's life plus fifty years. That would get changed again
Speaker 1: in nineteen with the Copyright Term Extension Act that pushed
Speaker 1: it to the author's life plus seventy years, and for
Speaker 1: works created before nineteen seventy eight. The rules are a
Speaker 1: little different. There are several factors that determine the length
Speaker 1: of copyright protection, but many works were given seventy six
Speaker 1: years of protection from the year of their creation or publication.
Speaker 1: The extension would push that to ninety five years. And
Speaker 1: if you're wondering why is this happening, what what's important
Speaker 1: about this? And and how is or how are all
Speaker 1: these changes happening, Well, it's largely because of really big
Speaker 1: companies that rely on intellectual property for their value. For example,
Speaker 1: the Walt Disney Company. A lot of people refer to
Speaker 1: these extensions as Walt Disney extensions. The Walt Disney Company
Speaker 1: certainly does not want it's it's formative works falling into
Speaker 1: the public domain if it can help it, because then
Speaker 1: once they're in the public domain, anyone can use them
Speaker 1: under certain circumstances. There are other protections that are in
Speaker 1: place as well, but you know, copyrights goes into public
Speaker 1: domain and then anyone can can show this stuff without
Speaker 1: any fear of the mouse House coming down on them.
Speaker 1: So without the extension, Mickey Mouse would have gone into
Speaker 1: the public domain in two thousand four. Under the Original
Speaker 1: Copyright Act of nineteen seventy six. Now he's set to
Speaker 1: skip off into the public domain in twenty twenty four,
Speaker 1: and as of right now, there has not been another
Speaker 1: change to copyright law to change that date. So we're
Speaker 1: looking at mickeymails going into the public domain unless something
Speaker 1: changes within the next few years. My point with all
Speaker 1: of that is to say, the changing technology from the
Speaker 1: nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant that suddenly things that used
Speaker 1: to be ephemeral, you know, like a performance, could now
Speaker 1: be made permanent. People could have a permanent record of that,
Speaker 1: a permanent way of recreating those performances, when before you
Speaker 1: just had to be there when it happened, and and
Speaker 1: if you weren't, you missed it. And these things have
Speaker 1: value not just to the creators, but to the audiences
Speaker 1: as well, and that this drove changes in technology, in culture,
Speaker 1: and in law. But we're not done yet. In our
Speaker 1: next episode, I'm going to talk a bit about how
Speaker 1: the videotape made a similar impact in film and television
Speaker 1: as the cassette did in the music industry, and we'll
Speaker 1: also look at the rise of the compact disc. Still
Speaker 1: to come is the transition to digital formats and then
Speaker 1: beyond DVDs and things of that nature, and blue rays.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about digital files, and then we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about different ways of delivering it, from
Speaker 1: downloading it to streaming it, and how all of this
Speaker 1: has affected our behaviors, business, and even the process of
Speaker 1: creating the entertainment in the first place. I hope you
Speaker 1: guys are enjoying this series of episodes. I've really enjoyed
Speaker 1: jumping into it. I like doing the sort of thematic
Speaker 1: approach and a deep dive on a specific topic. But
Speaker 1: once we're done with these, will be going back to
Speaker 1: lots of other kind of one off tech stuffs, So
Speaker 1: don't worry if this wasn't your cup of tea, we're
Speaker 1: gonna be getting back to other tech stuff stuff in
Speaker 1: the near future. Tech stuff stuff, I should make a
Speaker 1: sure about that. Meanwhile, if you guys want to get
Speaker 1: in touch with me, you can send me an email
Speaker 1: the addresses tech stuff at how stuff works dot com,
Speaker 1: or you can pop on over to our website that's
Speaker 1: tech stuff podcast dot com. You'll find links to our
Speaker 1: social media presence as well as to the store and
Speaker 1: an archive of all of our past episodes. I hope
Speaker 1: you guys can go check that out. I look forward
Speaker 1: to hearing from you, and I'll talk to you again
Speaker 1: really soon. Y tech Stuff is a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from my
Speaker 1: heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.