Phonograph

A phonograph, in its later forms also called a gramophone (as a trademark since 1887, as a
generic name in the UK since 1910) or since the 1940s called a record player, or more recently
a turntable,[a] is a device for the mechanical and analogue recording and
reproduction of sound. The sound vibration waveforms are recorded as corresponding physical
deviations of a spiral groove engraved, etched, incised, or impressed into the surface of a
rotating cylinder or disc, called a "record". To recreate the sound, the surface is similarly
rotated while a playback stylus traces the groove and is therefore vibrated by it, very faintly
reproducing the recorded sound. In early acoustic phonographs, the stylus vibrated
a diaphragm which produced sound waves which were coupled to the open air through a
flaring horn, or directly to the listener's ears through stethoscope-type earphones.

The phonograph was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison.[1][2][3][4] Alexander Graham

Bell's Volta Laboratory made several improvements in the 1880s and introduced
the graphophone, including the use of wax-coated cardboard cylinders and a cutting stylus that
moved from side to side in a zigzag groove around the record. In the 1890s, Emile
Berliner initiated the transition from phonograph cylinders to flat discs with a spiral groove
running from the periphery to near the center, coining the term gramophone for disc record
players, which is predominantly used in many languages. Later improvements through the
years included modifications to the turntable and its drive system, the stylus or needle, pickup
system, and the sound and equalization systems.

The disc phonograph record was the dominant commercial audio distribution format
throughout most of the 20th century. In the 1960s, the use of 8-track cartridges and cassette
tapes were introduced as alternatives. In the 1980s, phonograph use declined sharply due to
the popularity of cassettes and the rise of the compact disc, as well as the later introduction
of digital music distribution in the 2000s, both audio file downloads and streaming. However,
records are still a favorite format for some audiophiles, DJs, collectors,
and turntablists (particularly in hip hop and electronic dance music), and have undergone
a revival since the 2000s. This resurgence has a lot to do with "vinyl's" sparing use of audio
processing, intending more natural sound on high-quality replay equipment, compared to
many digital releases that are highly processed for portable players in high environmental
noise. However unlike "plug-and-play" digital audio, vinyl has "user-serviceable parts inside"
which require attention to tonearm alignment and the wear and choice of stylus, the most
critical component affecting turntable sound.[5]

Terminology[edit]

Usage of terminology is not uniform across the English-speaking world (see below). In more
modern usage, the playback device is often called a "turntable", "record player", or "record
changer", although each of these terms denote categorically distinct items. When used in
conjunction with a mixer as part of a DJ setup, turntables are often colloquially called
"decks".[6] In later electric phonographs (more often known since the 1940s as record
players or turntables), the motions of the stylus are converted into an analogous electrical
signal by a transducer, then converted back into sound by a loudspeaker.[7]
 Close up of the mechanism of an Edison
Amberola, c. 1915

The term phonograph ("sound writing") was derived from the Greek words φωνή (phonē,
'sound' or 'voice') and γραφή (graphē, 'writing'). The similar related terms gramophone (from
the Greek γράμμα gramma 'letter' and φωνή phōnē 'voice') and graphophone have similar root
meanings.[8]

In British English, "gramophone" may refer to any sound-reproducing machine using disc
records, which were introduced and popularized in the UK by the Gramophone Company.
Originally, "gramophone" was a proprietary trademark of that company and any use of the
name by competing makers of disc records was vigorously prosecuted in the courts, but in
1910 an English court decision decreed that it had become a generic term;[9]

United States[edit]

Early phonograph at Deaf Smith County Historical

Museum in Hereford, Texas

In American English, "phonograph", properly specific to machines made by Edison, was

sometimes used in a generic sense as early as the 1890s to include cylinder-playing machines
made by others. But it was then considered strictly incorrect to apply it to Emile Berliner's
Gramophone, a very different machine which played nonrecordable discs (although Edison's
original Phonograph patent included the use of discs.[10])

Australia[edit]
 Wood engraving published in The Illustrated Australian
News, depicting a public demonstration of new technology at the Royal Society of Victoria
(Melbourne, Australia) on 8 August 1878.

In Australian English, "record player" was the term; "turntable" was a more technical term;
"gramophone" was restricted to the old mechanical (i.e., wind-up) players; and "phonograph"
was used as in British English. The "phonograph" was first demonstrated in Australia on 14 June
1878 to a meeting of the Royal Society of Victoria by the Society's Honorary Secretary, Alex
Sutherland who published "The Sounds of the Consonants, as Indicated by the Phonograph" in
the Society's journal in November that year.[11] On 8 August 1878 the phonograph was
publicly demonstrated at the Society's annual conversazione, along with a range of other new
inventions, including the microphone.[12]

Early history[edit]

Dictionary illustration of a phonautograph. This version

uses a barrel made of plaster of Paris.

Phonautograph[edit]

Main article: Phonautograph

The phonautograph was invented on March 25, 1857, by Frenchman Édouard-Léon Scott de
Martinville,[13] an editor and typographer of manuscripts at a scientific publishing house in
Paris.[14] One day while editing Professor Longet's Traité de Physiologie, he happened upon
that customer's engraved illustration of the anatomy of the human ear, and conceived of "the
imprudent idea of photographing the word." In 1853 or 1854 (Scott cited both years) he began
working on "le problème de la parole s'écrivant elle-même" ("the problem of speech writing
itself"), aiming to build a device that could replicate the function of the human ear.[14][15]

Scott coated a plate of glass with a thin layer of lampblack. He then took an acoustic trumpet,
and at its tapered end affixed a thin membrane that served as the analog to the eardrum. At
the center of that membrane, he attached a rigid boar's bristle approximately a centimeter
long, placed so that it just grazed the lampblack. As the glass plate was slid horizontally in a
well formed groove at a speed of one meter per second, a person would speak into the
trumpet, causing the membrane to vibrate and the stylus to trace figures[14] that were
scratched into the lampblack.[16] On March 25, 1857, Scott received the French
patent[17] #17,897/31,470 for his device, which he called a phonautograph.[18] The earliest
known surviving recorded sound of a human voice was conducted on April 9, 1860, when Scott
recorded[16] someone singing the song "Au Clair de la Lune" ("By the Light of the Moon") on
the device.[19] However, the device was not designed to play back sounds,[16][20] as Scott
intended for people to read back the tracings,[21] which he called phonautograms.[15] This
was not the first time someone had used a device to create direct tracings of the vibrations of
sound-producing objects, as tuning forks had been used in this way by English physicist Thomas
Young in 1807.[22] By late 1857, with support from the Société d'encouragement pour
l'industrie nationale, Scott's phonautograph was recording sounds with sufficient precision to
be adopted by the scientific community, paving the way for the nascent science of
acoustics.[15]

The device's true significance in the history of recorded sound was not fully realized prior to
March 2008, when it was discovered and resurrected in a Paris patent office by First Sounds, an
informal collaborative of American audio historians, recording engineers, and sound archivists
founded to make the earliest sound recordings available to the public. The phonautograms
were then digitally converted by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in
California, who were able to play back the recorded sounds, something Scott had never
conceived of. Prior to this point, the earliest known record of a human voice was thought to be
an 1877 phonograph recording by Thomas Edison.[16][23] The phonautograph would play a
role in the development of the gramophone, whose inventor, Emile Berliner, worked with the
phonautograph in the course of developing his own device.[24]

Paleophone[edit]

Charles Cros, a French poet and amateur scientist, is the first person known to have made the
conceptual leap from recording sound as a traced line to the theoretical possibility of
reproducing the sound from the tracing and then to devising a definite method for
accomplishing the reproduction. On April 30, 1877, he deposited a sealed envelope containing
a summary of his ideas with the French Academy of Sciences, a standard procedure used by
scientists and inventors to establish priority of conception of unpublished ideas in the event of
any later dispute.[25]

An account of his invention was published on October 10, 1877, by which date Cros had
devised a more direct procedure: the recording stylus could scribe its tracing through a thin
coating of acid-resistant material on a metal surface and the surface could then be etched in an
acid bath, producing the desired groove without the complication of an intermediate
photographic procedure.[26] The author of this article called the device a phonographe, but
Cros himself favored the word paleophone, sometimes rendered in French as voix du
passé ('voice of the past').[citation needed]

Cros was a poet of meager means, not in a position to pay a machinist to build a working
model, and largely content to bequeath his ideas to the public domain free of charge and let
others reduce them to practice, but after the earliest reports of Edison's presumably
independent invention crossed the Atlantic he had his sealed letter of April 30 opened and
read at the December 3, 1877 meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, claiming due
scientific credit for priority of conception.[27]

Throughout the first decade (1890–1900) of commercial production of the earliest crude disc
records, the direct acid-etch method first invented by Cros was used to create the metal master
discs, but Cros was not around to claim any credit or to witness the humble beginnings of the
eventually rich phonographic library he had foreseen. He had died in 1888 at the age of 45.[28]

The early phonographs[edit]

Patent drawing for Edison's phonograph, May 18, 1880

Thomas Edison conceived the principle of recording and reproducing sound between May and
July 1877 as a byproduct of his efforts to "play back" recorded telegraph messages and to
automate speech sounds for transmission by telephone.[29] His first experiments were with
waxed paper.[30] He announced his invention of the first phonograph, a device for recording
and replaying sound, on November 21, 1877 (early reports appear in Scientific American and
several newspapers in the beginning of November, and an even earlier announcement of
Edison working on a 'talking-machine' can be found in the Chicago Daily Tribune on May
9 [31]), and he demonstrated the device for the first time on November 29 (it was patented on
February 19, 1878, as US Patent 200,521). "In December, 1877, a young man came into the
office of the Scientific American, and placed before the editors a small, simple machine about
which very few preliminary remarks were offered. The visitor without any ceremony whatever
turned the crank, and to the astonishment of all present the machine said: 'Good morning.
How do you do? How do you like the phonograph?' The machine thus spoke for itself, and
made known the fact that it was the phonograph..."[32]

The music critic Herman Klein attended an early demonstration (1881–2) of a similar machine.
On the early phonograph's reproductive capabilities he writes "It sounded to my ear like
someone singing about half a mile away, or talking at the other end of a big hall; but the effect
was rather pleasant, save for a peculiar nasal quality wholly due to the mechanism, though
there was little of the scratching which later was a prominent feature of the flat disc. Recording
for that primitive machine was a comparatively simple matter. I had to keep my mouth about
six inches away from the horn and remember not to make my voice too loud if I wanted
anything approximating to a clear reproduction; that was all. When it was played over to me
and I heard my own voice for the first time, one or two friends who were present said that it
sounded rather like mine; others declared that they would never have recognised it. I daresay
both opinions were correct."[33]

The Argus newspaper from Melbourne, Australia, reported on an 1878 demonstration at

the Royal Society of Victoria, writing "There was a large attendance of ladies and gentlemen,
who appeared greatly interested in the various scientific instruments exhibited. Among these
the most interesting, perhaps, was the trial made by Mr. Sutherland with the phonograph,
which was most amusing. Several trials were made, and were all more or less successful. "Rule
Britannia" was distinctly repeated, but great laughter was caused by the repetition of the
convivial song of "He's a jolly good fellow," which sounded as if it was being sung by an old man
of 80 with a very cracked voice."[34]

Early machines[edit]

Phonograph cabinet built with Edison cement, 1912. The

clockwork portion of the phonograph is concealed in the base beneath the statue; the
amplifying horn is the shell behind the human figure.

Edison's early phonographs recorded onto a thin sheet of metal, normally tinfoil, which was
temporarily wrapped around a helically grooved cylinder mounted on a
correspondingly threaded rod supported by plain and threaded bearings. While the cylinder
was rotated and slowly progressed along its axis, the airborne sound vibrated
a diaphragm connected to a stylus that indented the foil into the cylinder's groove, thereby
recording the vibrations as "hill-and-dale" variations of the depth of the indentation.[35]

Introduction of the disc record[edit]

"I Am The Edison Phonograph"

Duration: 2 minutes and 24 seconds.2:24

This 1906 recording (with the character being voiced by Len Spencer) enticed store customers
with the wonders of the invention.
2 minutes, 23 seconds.

Problems playing this file? See media help.

By 1890, record manufacturers had begun using a rudimentary duplication process to mass-
produce their product. While the live performers recorded the master phonograph, up to ten
tubes led to blank cylinders in other phonographs. Until this development, each record had to
be custom-made. Before long, a more advanced pantograph-based process made it possible to
simultaneously produce 90–150 copies of each record. However, as demand for certain records
grew, popular artists still needed to re-record and re-re-record their songs. Reportedly, the
medium's first major African-American star George Washington Johnson was obliged to
perform his "The Laughing Song" (or the separate "The Whistling Coon")[36] literally thousands
of times in a studio during his recording career. Sometimes he would sing "The Laughing Song"
more than fifty times in a day, at twenty cents per rendition. (The average price of a single
cylinder in the mid-1890s was about fifty cents.)[citation needed]

Oldest surviving recordings[edit]

Lambert's lead cylinder recording for an experimental talking clock is often identified as the
oldest surviving playable sound recording,[37] although the evidence advanced for its early
date is controversial.[38] Wax phonograph cylinder recordings of Handel's choral music made
on June 29, 1888, at The Crystal Palace in London were thought to be the oldest-known
surviving musical recordings,[39] until the recent playback by a group of American historians of
a phonautograph recording of Au clair de la lune made on April 9, 1860.[40]

The 1860 phonautogram had not until then been played, as it was only a transcription of sound
waves into graphic form on paper for visual study. Recently developed optical scanning and
image processing techniques have given new life to early recordings by making it possible to
play unusually delicate or physically unplayable media without physical contact.[41]

A recording made on a sheet of tinfoil at an 1878 demonstration of Edison's phonograph in St.

Louis, Missouri, has been played back by optical scanning and digital analysis. A few other early
tinfoil recordings are known to survive, including a slightly earlier one which is believed to
preserve the voice of U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, but as of May 2014 they have not yet
been scanned.[clarification needed] These antique tinfoil recordings, which have typically been
stored folded, are too fragile to be played back with a stylus without seriously damaging them.
Edison's 1877 tinfoil recording of Mary Had a Little Lamb, not preserved, has been called the
first instance of recorded verse.[42]

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the phonograph, Edison recounted reciting Mary
Had a Little Lamb to test his first machine. The 1927 event was filmed by an early sound-on-
film newsreel camera, and an audio clip from that film's soundtrack is sometimes mistakenly
presented as the original 1877 recording.[43] Wax cylinder recordings made by 19th-century
media legends such as P. T. Barnum and Shakespearean actor Edwin Booth are amongst the
earliest verified recordings by the famous that have survived to the present.[44][45]

Improvements at the Volta Laboratory[edit]

Main article: Volta Laboratory and Bureau § Sound recording and phonograph development

Alexander Graham Bell and his two associates took Edison's tinfoil phonograph and modified it
considerably to make it reproduce sound from wax instead of tinfoil. They began their work at
Bell's Volta Laboratory in Washington, D. C., in 1879, and continued until they were granted
basic patents in 1886 for recording in wax.[46]

Although Edison had invented the phonograph in 1877, the fame bestowed on him for this
invention was not due to its efficiency. Recording with his tinfoil phonograph was too difficult
to be practical, as the tinfoil tore easily, and even when the stylus was properly adjusted, its
reproduction of sound was distorted, and good for only a few playbacks; nevertheless Edison
had discovered the idea of sound recording. However immediately after his discovery he did
not improve it, allegedly because of an agreement to spend the next five years developing
the New York City electric light and power system.[46]

Volta's early challenge[edit]

Meanwhile, Bell, a scientist and experimenter at heart, was looking for new worlds to conquer
after having patented the telephone. According to Sumner Tainter, it was through Gardiner
Green Hubbard that Bell took up the phonograph challenge. Bell had married Hubbard's
daughter Mabel in 1879 while Hubbard was president of the Edison Speaking Phonograph Co.,
and his organization, which had purchased the Edison patent, was financially troubled because
people did not want to buy a machine which seldom worked well and proved difficult for the
average person to operate.[46]

Volta Graphophone[edit]

See also: Graphophone

A 'G' (Graham Bell) model Graphophone being played

back by a typist after its cylinder had recorded dictation.

The sound vibrations had been indented in the wax which had been applied to the Edison
phonograph. The following was the text of one of their recordings: "There are more things in
heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy. I am a Graphophone and
my mother was a phonograph."[47] Most of the disc machines designed at the Volta Lab had
their disc mounted on vertical turntables. The explanation is that in the early experiments, the
turntable, with disc, was mounted on the shop lathe, along with the recording and reproducing
heads. Later, when the complete models were built, most of them featured vertical
turntables.[46]
One interesting exception was a horizontal seven inch turntable. The machine, although made
in 1886, was a duplicate of one made earlier but taken to Europe by Chichester Bell. Tainter
was granted U.S. Patent 385,886 on July 10, 1888. The playing arm is rigid, except for a pivoted
vertical motion of 90 degrees to allow removal of the record or a return to starting position.
While recording or playing, the record not only rotated, but moved laterally under the stylus,
which thus described a spiral, recording 150 grooves to the inch.[46]

The basic distinction between the Edison's first phonograph patent and the Bell and Tainter
patent of 1886 was the method of recording. Edison's method was to indent the sound waves
on a piece of tin foil, while Bell and Tainter's invention called for cutting, or "engraving", the
sound waves into a wax record with a sharp recording stylus.[46]

Graphophone commercialization[edit]

A later-model Columbia Graphophone of 1901Duration: 3

minutes and 52 seconds.3:52Edison-Phonograph playing: Iola by the Edison Military Band
(video, 3 min 51 s)

In 1885, when the Volta Associates were sure that they had a number of practical inventions,
they filed patent applications and began to seek out investors. The Volta Graphophone
Company of Alexandria, Virginia, was created on January 6, 1886, and incorporated on
February 3, 1886. It was formed to control the patents and to handle the commercial
development of their sound recording and reproduction inventions, one of which became the
first Dictaphone.[46]

After the Volta Associates gave several demonstrations in the City of Washington, businessmen
from Philadelphia created the American Graphophone Company on March 28, 1887, in order
to produce and sell the machines for the budding phonograph marketplace.[48] The Volta
Graphophone Company then merged with American Graphophone,[48] which itself later
evolved into Columbia Records.[49][50]

A coin-operated version of the Graphophone, U.S. Patent 506,348, was developed by Tainter in
1893 to compete with nickel-in-the-slot entertainment phonograph U.S. Patent
428,750 demonstrated in 1889 by Louis T. Glass, manager of the Pacific Phonograph
Company.[51]

The work of the Volta Associates laid the foundation for the successful use of dictating
machines in business, because their wax recording process was practical and their machines
were durable. But it would take several more years and the renewed efforts of Edison and the
further improvements of Emile Berliner and many others, before the recording
industry became a major factor in home entertainment.[46]

Disc vs. cylinder as a recording medium[edit]

Discs (that aren't re-recordable) are not inherently better than cylinders at providing audio
fidelity. Rather, the advantages of the format are seen in the manufacturing process: discs can
be stamped, and the matrixes to stamp disc can be shipped to other printing plants for a global
distribution of recordings; cylinders could not be stamped until 1901–1902, when the gold
moulding process was introduced by Edison.[52]

A Victor V phonograph, circa 1907

Through experimentation, in 1892 Berliner began commercial production of his disc records
and "gramophones". His "gramophone record" was the first disc record to be offered to the
public. They were five inches (13 cm) in diameter and recorded on one side only. Seven-inch
(17.5 cm) records followed in 1895. Also in 1895 Berliner replaced the hard rubber used to
make the discs with a shellac compound.[53] Berliner's early records had very poor sound
quality, however. Work by Eldridge R. Johnson eventually improved the sound fidelity to a point
where it was as good as the cylinder.[54]

Dominance of the disc record[edit]

 A 1930s portable wind-up gramophone from EMI (His
Master's Voice)

In the 1930s, vinyl (originally known as vinylite) was introduced as a record material for
radio transcription discs, and for radio commercials. At that time, virtually no discs for home
use were made from this material. Vinyl was used for the popular 78-rpm V-discs issued to US
soldiers during World War II. This significantly reduced breakage during transport. The first
commercial vinylite record was the set of five 12" discs "Prince Igor" (Asch Records album S-
800, dubbed from Soviet masters in 1945). Victor began selling some home-use vinyl 78s in late
1945; but most 78s were made of a shellac compound until the 78-rpm format was completely
phased out. (Shellac records were heavier and more brittle.) 33s and 45s were, however, made
exclusively of vinyl, with the exception of some 45s manufactured out of polystyrene.[55]

First all-transistor phonograph[edit]

 Philco all-transistor model TPA-1 phonograph, developed

and produced in 1955 Philco all-transistor model TPA-1

phonograph – Radio and Television News magazine, issue October 1955

In 1955, Philco developed and produced the world's first all-transistor phonograph models TPA-
1 and TPA-2, which were announced in the June 28, 1955 edition of The Wall Street
Journal.[56] Philco started to sell these all-transistor phonographs in the fall of 1955, for the
price of $59.95. The October 1955 issue of Radio & Television News magazine (page 41), had a
full page detailed article on Philco's new consumer product. The all-transistor portable
phonograph TPA-1 and TPA-2 models played only 45rpm records and used four 1.5 volt "D"
batteries for their power supply. The "TPA" stands for "Transistor Phonograph Amplifier". Their
circuitry used three Philco germanium PNP alloy-fused junction audio frequency transistors.
After the 1956 season had ended, Philco decided to discontinue both models, for transistors
were too expensive compared to vacuum tubes,[57][58] but by 1961 a $49.95 ($489.15 in
2021) portable, battery-powered radio-phonograph with seven transistors was available.[59]

First direct-drive turntable[edit]

 A Technics SL-1200 direct-drive turntable

The direct-drive turntable was invented by Shuichi Obata, an engineer at Matsushita (now
Panasonic).[60] In 1969, Matsushita released it as the Technics SP-10,[61] the first direct-drive
turntable on the market.[62]

The most influential direct-drive turntable was the Technics SL-1200,[63] which, following the
spread of turntablism in hip hop culture, became the most widely-used turntable in DJ culture
for several decades.[63]

Cue lever[edit]

More sophisticated turntables were (and still are) frequently manufactured so as to

incorporate a "cue lever", a device which mechanically lowers the tonearm on to the record. It
enables the user to locate an individual track more easily, to pause a record, and to avoid the
risk of scratching the record which it may take practice to avoid when lowering the tonearm
manually.[64]

Arm systems[edit]

A SME 3012 tonearm fitted on a Thorens TD124 MkII

turntable

In some high quality equipment the arm carrying the pickup, known as a tonearm, is
manufactured separately from the motor and turntable unit. Companies specialising in the
manufacture of tonearms include the English company SME.

Linear tracking[edit]

Early developments in linear turntables were from Rek-O-Kut (portable lathe/phonograph) and
Ortho-Sonic in the 1950s, and Acoustical in the early 1960s. These were eclipsed by more
successful implementations of the concept from the late 1960s through the early 1980s.[65]

Pickup systems[edit]
 Typical magnetic cartridge

The pickup or cartridge is a transducer that converts mechanical vibrations from a stylus into
an electrical signal. The electrical signal is amplified and converted into sound by one or
more loudspeakers. Crystal and ceramic pickups that use the piezoelectric effect have largely
been replaced by magnetic cartridges.

The pickup includes a stylus with a small diamond or sapphire tip which runs in the record
groove. The stylus eventually becomes worn by contact with the groove, and it is usually
replaceable.

Styli are classified as spherical or elliptical, although the tip is actually shaped as a half-sphere
or a half-ellipsoid. Spherical styli are generally more robust than other types, but do not follow
the groove as accurately, giving diminished high frequency response. Elliptical styli usually track
the groove more accurately, with increased high frequency response and less distortion. For DJ
use, the relative robustness of spherical styli make them generally preferred for back-cuing and
scratching. There are a number of derivations of the basic elliptical type, including the shibata
or fine line stylus, which can more accurately reproduce high frequency information contained
in the record groove. This is especially important for playback of quadraphonic recordings.[66]

Optical readout[edit]

A few specialist laser turntables read the groove optically using a laser pickup. Since there is no
physical contact with the record, no wear is incurred. However, this "no wear" advantage is
debatable, since vinyl records have been tested to withstand even 1200 plays with no
significant audio degradation, provided that it is played with a high quality cartridge and that
the surfaces are clean.[67]

An alternative approach is to take a high-resolution photograph or scan of each side of the

record and interpret the image of the grooves using computer software. An amateur attempt
using a flatbed scanner lacked satisfactory fidelity.[68] A professional system employed by
the Library of Congress produces excellent quality.[69]

Stylus[edit]
 Stylus for jukebox using shellac 78 rpm records, 1940s

A development in stylus form came about by the attention to the CD-4 quadraphonic sound
modulation process, which requires up to 50 kHz frequency response, with cartridges
like Technics EPC-100CMK4 capable of playback on frequencies up to 100 kHz. This requires a
stylus with a narrow side radius, such as 5 µm (or 0.2 mil). A narrow-profile elliptical stylus is
able to read the higher frequencies (greater than 20 kHz), but at an increased wear, since the
contact surface is narrower. For overcoming this problem, the Shibata stylus was invented
around 1972 in Japan by Norio Shibata of JVC.[70]

The Shibata-designed stylus offers a greater contact surface with the groove, which in turn
means less pressure over the vinyl surface and thus less wear. A positive side effect is that the
greater contact surface also means the stylus will read sections of the vinyl that were not
touched (or "worn") by the common spherical stylus. In a demonstration by JVC[71] records
"worn" after 500 plays at a relatively very high 4.5 gf tracking force with a spherical stylus,
played "as new" with the Shibata profile.[citation needed]

Other advanced stylus shapes appeared following the same goal of increasing contact surface,
improving on the Shibata. Chronologically: "Hughes" Shibata variant (1975),[72] "Ogura"
(1978),[73] Van den Hul (1982).[74] Such a stylus may be marketed as "Hyperelliptical" (Shure),
"Alliptic", "Fine Line" (Ortofon), "Line contact" (Audio Technica), "Polyhedron", "LAC", or
"Stereohedron" (Stanton).[75]

A keel-shaped diamond stylus appeared as a byproduct of the invention of the CED Videodisc.
This, together with laser-diamond-cutting technologies, made possible the "ridge" shaped
stylus, such as the Namiki (1985)[76] design, and Fritz Gyger (1989)[77] design. This type of
stylus is marketed as "MicroLine" (Audio technica), "Micro-Ridge" (Shure), or "Replicant"
(Ortofon).[75]

Record materials[edit]

To address the problem of steel needle wear upon records, which resulted in the cracking of
the latter, RCA Victor devised unbreakable records in 1930, by mixing polyvinyl chloride with
plasticisers, in a proprietary formula they called Victrolac, which was first used in 1931, in
motion picture discs.[78]

Equalization[edit]

Since the late 1950s, almost all phono input stages have used the RIAA equalization standard.
Before settling on that standard, there were many different equalizations in use, including EMI,
HMV, Columbia, Decca FFRR, NAB, Ortho, BBC transcription, etc. Recordings made using these
other equalization schemes will typically sound odd if they are played through a RIAA-equalized
preamplifier. High-performance (so-called "multicurve disc") preamplifiers, which include
multiple, selectable equalizations, are no longer commonly available. However, some vintage
preamplifiers, such as the LEAK varislope series, are still obtainable and can be refurbished.
Newer preamplifiers like the Esoteric Sound Re-Equalizer or the K-A-B MK2 Vintage Signal
Processor are also available.[79]