Evolution of the personal portable stereo

Evolution of the personal portable stereo
Personal stereos have revolutionized the everyday experience of millions of people daily as they move through the city. They are first and foremost a very direct and powerful form of technological artifact which re-prioritizes the auditory nature of experience with an unusual directness and immediacy. Mobility is inscribed into the very design of personal stereos, enabling users to travel through any space accompanied by their own ‘individualized’ sound world. Since they were introduced by the Sony Corporation in 1979 they have sold consistently in their millions. This success has not been dependent upon massive advertising campaigns and neither are they a fad of the period. The sale of personal stereos continues to grow as they are being used by an increasingly wide user group, beyond teenagers and commuters who use them regularly as part of their daily routine. Personal stereos have become a truly international tool used in New York, Tokyo, Berlin, Paris or any metropolitan environment. Each morning millions of urban inhabitants place a pair of headphones over their heads, or place earpieces directly into their ears, and turn the music on as they leave home. They walk down streets, sit on tubes or buses and keep listening. In this paper we’ll discuss the importance of the portable stereo technology and evolution of portable stereo players.
Perhaps, we should start with the first transistor radio. The transistor radio, first marketed in 1954 and adapted for cars in 1956, made music more portable. Stereo recording of music commenced in 1954; by 1958, stereophonic records had become available to the public . These innovations demonstrated the importance of radios and recordings in making the hits of the day readily available to listeners.
Stereo disks were pioneered by Alan Blumlein of the EMI television research team . It took the industry a further decade after the introduction of the LP before it offered the public stereo using Blumlein’s recording technique .
This conservatism persisted when Sony and Philips immediately eschewed one advantage that would accrue from using the developed digital VLP for audio purposes, to wit the complete recordings of long musical works on a single platter. The 12 inches of the LP became the 12 centimetres of the CD and, armed with this device, the industry set about killing off the LP. In 1984, 800,000 CDs were shipped in America as opposed to 200 million LPs and 131 million vinyl singles . This was not surprising: initial sales of CD players, despite the superior sound reproduction they provided as well as the greater indestructibility of disks, were slow. Projections were not being met and by 1984 there were fewer than a million worldwide. In the UK fewer than 30,000 CD players were sold in the first year .
However, cheaper players began to appear in 1985 and sales started to pick up. The disks’ robustness made the technology attractive to boat and car owners and the adventurous affluent began to bite the bait. However, to effect (or force) the change from LPs and singles on the public, the recorded music industry showed itself to be quite willing to reduce its production of vinyl, despite this slow take-up. Vinyl was anyway already giving way to cassettes. In the first three years of the 1980s US production of LPs had fallen from 322 million to 209 million while cassettes had increased from 110 to 236 million . In that sense, the CD simply augments the change-over from vinyl already in hand. The difference is that the rise of the cassette was on the back of the solid success of the player, culminating in the Sony Walkman, a personal portable stereo which dramatically altered the practice of listening to recorded music.
The Walkman was a last logical step in a process which had been developing for the previous two decades and more. The record industry had objected to tape, which had been introduced in Germany in the early 1930s and was finally adopted by broadcasters in the early 1950s . The delay was attributable to their well-founded fears about home duplication. On the other hand, a market was opened up, significantly by an outsider, the aircraft manufacturer Lear, for portable systems to play pre-recorded material in cars—the eight-track cassette. This eventually broke through these solid objections to tape and Sony and Philips agreed a format for the audiocassette, thereby wiping out the intrusive eight-track. Sony then encouraged this liking for mobile recorded music in cars with the Walkman, which could be used anywhere; but it did not need to use industry pre-recorded cassettes. Because of this, the industry saw its worst fears of tape being realized. Audiocassette recorders were being manufactured which not only recorded vinyl on to tape but also had a second head for copying cassettes.
Some industrial opinion held that each record sold was being copied no less than five times. In Britain the audio disk business had peaked in 1978. By 1983 sales of singles had fallen by 13 per cent, and LPs by 27 per cent. Significantly, pre-recorded cassette sales were up by 75 per cent but this increase of 15 million units was not enough to balance the loss of nearly 32 million LPs and 15 million singles. In this half-decade, all sectors of the British record industry, which employed some 12,000 people in manufacture, distribution and retail, lost 1000 jobs a year .
In this situation, the CD, unrecordable in its original form by analogue cassette machines, represented nothing less than the long-term salvation of the industry and that was the supervening necessity underlying its development and introduction. The only problem was that the CD player, by contrast with the Walkman and despite its superior quality, was selling slowly. By 1990 still only one US house in five had one . The answer for the industry, cushioned to a certain extent by pre-recorded audiocassette sales, was to ignore comparative failure and simply switch from vinyl. Already by 1987 this starving of the LP market was underway as almost as many CDs as LPs were shipped—102 million to 107 million. By 1995, the change-over had been accomplished. A mere 2.2 million LPs were pressed but no less than 727 million CDs were sent to the American market. And cassettes, which had peaked at 450 million units in 1988, were back to their pre-CD level of some 250 million plus units . Almost no attention has been paid to this curious history which, on its face, would appear to be a completely effective manipulation of the market by a few international communication conglomerates.
The audio LP record faded away in the late 1980s, although some audiophiles claimed that analog recordings, however scratchy, had a “live” quality that digital recordings couldn't match . The audiotape cassette also was on its way out after a long and successful run, except for those with large collections of music in this format or radio stations that still found them useful in automated systems. Replacing both was the compact disc, or CD. When portable CD players, some little larger than the Walkman, and units for automobiles became available, more music listeners switched over. Perhaps because they had become the new standard, although at first they could be successfully duplicated only by professionals, the cost of CDs did not drop nearly as fast or as far as earlier formats did when mass produced. Enough money was being made that proposed improvements in the CD system largely were ignored, although devices that could hold and play up to 300 CDs (making selection easy while taking up little space) were available by the start of the new century, and the research lab held units of even higher audio quality.
The curious history of the suppression of domestic digital audiotape-recording systems in the period following the introduction of the CD can be found in the invention of DAT. Almost as soon as CDs were being marketed, the industry readied itself for another advance, d igital a udio t ape (DAT).
The digital audiotape (DAT) recorder and player was developed in Japan. It was originally priced around $2,000 per unit; the DAT obviously was seen as a menace by record companies concerned that consumers or well-organized pirates with a DAT could make digital copies of CDs without losing any of their vaunted sound quality . (To record from a borrowed CD onto a conventional analog cassette tape, besides being a probable violation of the copyright law, introduced hiss and other noise that even the best cassette systems couldn't avoid). Fearful of heavy sales losses if DAT machines became popular, the recording industry pressured Congress to ban the sale of DATs or, failing that, to require limiting their ability to record copyrighted material. Columbia Records, the largest record company in the world, spearheaded the move toward a “notch” system of recording that would ruin any attempted DAT dubbing. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), however, found the system delivered inferior sound and was easily circumvented. (Columbia Records may not have been too distressed; early in 1988, CBS sold its record company to Sony for a billion dollars—and Sony was an early backer of DAT ) . But until Congress acted, no major Asian manufacturer risked tariff retaliation by exporting DAT equipment to the United States. Although some DATs are being sold, most of the public, perhaps mindful of the costs of switching to yet another format, has ignored it.
In the late 1990s, two further technological developments caused the recording industry to again fear for its future. The first, bypassing DAT technology, was the availability of blank CD disks that anyone could “burn” or record on. The second, later in the decade, was MP3 computer software that enabled many of the anti-piracy codes on musical recordings to be ignored and the recordings of choice downloaded from the Internet. The providers of such music to the public, such as Napster, claimed that they only allowed people who could demonstrate that they had legally purchased the recording to download it for their convenience, but this was questioned and nullified by the courts in 2000.
According to a Harvard Law School Berkman Center report, by 1999 “MP3” had replaced “sex” as the Internet's most searched term . Although the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) fought back in court against “pirating” and “bootlegging, ” the use of MP3 already has led to such varied results as a billion-dollar business and restrictions imposed by several university computer centers because computer resources were being swamped by students downloading music. Despite all legal issues related to MP3, MP3 players are portable and convenient in use. The main advantage of MP3 players is that they have large storage capacities.
In conclusion, we discussed the main aspects in history of the portable personal stereo. Different factors influenced the development of advanced of stereo technology. Nevertheless, the main factor is a consumer. Consumers prefer to hear their ‘own’ music whilst on the move. They may or may not take notice of their environment but more often than not they merely attend to their music. Personal portable stereo which has smaller size is convenient because users do not notice the player; the only thing that they pay attention to is the music that surrounds them and satisfies their wishes for their chosen sound accompaniment wherever they might be.
Produced by ProfEssays ( www.professays.com ) - professional custom essay writing service: custom essays, custom term papers, custom academic papers, custom admission essays, custom research papers, compositions, book reports, case study. No plagiarism, high quality, prompt delivery.

Produced by ProfEssays ( www.professays.com ) - professional custom essay writing service: custom essays, custom term papers, custom academic papers, custom admission essays, custom research papers, compositions, book reports, case study. No plagiarism, high quality, prompt delivery.