Even though there had been other inventors working on cylinder recorders , Edison was the one who came up with product that could function well in a commercial environment . The concept is somewhat similar to the fact that Steve Jobs didn ’ t come up with the MP3 player , but he did design an MP3 player ( the iPod ) that was superior in every way to its predecessors .
A recording session in the late 1800s involved gathering everyone in a performing group around a single cone . The cone focused the sound entering the tube , increasing its energy enough to vibrate a thin metal diaphragm . Attached to the diaphragm was a needle that carved out the wax in grooves on the phonograph cylinder in direct correlation to the musical wave form . After the recording was etched into the cylinder , the cutting stylus was replaced by a lighter playback stylus , which road through the precut grooves , vibrating the diaphragm enough to reproduce the recorded sound and amplify it out the end of the cone .
Thomas Edison and his Phonograph
EMILE BERLINER Brilliant but virtually uneducated inventor and scientist , Emile Berliner invented the carbon disc and carbon button microphones in 1877 .
His microphone design incorporated a thin layer of carbon between two contacts , with one acting as the diaphragm , moving in sympathetic vibration with the surrounding sound waves . The variations in the diaphragm movement varied the amount of electricity passing between the two contacts . Berliner called this a loose contact system because the loose contact was connected to the vibrating diaphragm and the other contact was connected to the microphone output .
Balances were all set depending on the placement of the musicians around the bell . Instruments had to be loud enough to sufficiently move the recording stylus . The Stroh violin ( or Stroviol ) is a member of the violin family that ’ s mechanically amplified by a metal resonator and horn attached to its body . It had a negative effect on the sound of the instrument but it did make the instrument louder .
It was his design that produced a strong enough current to make the telephone system viable on a large scale , plus his technology accommodated mechanical re-amplification ( boosting ) of the signal level along the telephone lines ! The process basically played the output of one receiver into the audio input of another . Some accounts indicate that one could actually