Thursday, April 7, 2011

The Next Step

The First Editable Audio

Following the tin foil recording was the first recording style that allowed the engineers to edit the audio, steel wire recording. The Telegraphone was a system created by a Danish engineer named Valdemar Poulsen. The system looked much like the inside of an electric generator, but instead of using the magnetic energy created to develop electricity, the charge was stored in the wire in different amounts and increments to store information. This information could be played back as sound, just like a cassette tape, by starting at the beginning of the wire and playing it down the entire spool. The fact that the audio information was now being stored on something that could be physically moved meant that engineers could now also edit out the pieces they did not like and replace them with new pieces of wire. The problem with this recording style is that the wire was not a very reliable and the data would frequently get erase. On top of all of that the editing style was very rough and tended to modify the audio that was already recorded.


More information on wire recoding and its process can be found at

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