TurtleTone wrote on Sun, 31 July 2005 18:53 |
djwayne wrote on Sun, 31 July 2005 15:14 | Well, cassettes were the pinacle of analog for the end retail market for years, before cd's came out, for portable sound, and home recordings, ....how many people could afford to make their own vinyl records at home ?? But today, you can burn your own cd.
|
I remember having a 1/4" reel to reel at home. You could even buy albums on reel to reel, but not many that I remember. Mostly used for compiling your favorite songs on to one reel. Then when that died we got a cassette deck and it didn't sound nearly as good. So we went back to listening to vinyl. But I still have a handfull of these 1/4" tapes that still play and still sound good.
I also have old wax records that my grandparents recorded in their home on a home recorder. I have a couple that seem to be compilations of something he recorded from vinyl records. For a nickle, you could also go into a booth and record something to these wax discs and mail them to relatives, I have about 15 of these that were recorded in hawaii during WWII that I can still play on my record player. So the concept of recording at home is not all that new. I have CD's that I've burned that won't play and they're only a few years old.
|
I have a one off that my sister and her friend recorded in 1957 on a field trip to the Empire State Building, it was one of those booth studios, cut it to vinyl as you perform. Tune was Faith, Hope and Charity and the quality is piss poor, but it was great novelty for the family at the time.
There were scads and scads of albums commercially available on 1/4" reel-to-reel, not all of the rock and doo-wop bands, but all of the jazz bands and contempory stuff like Sinatra, Torme and Bennett. Middle of the road pop like Herb Albert and TJ brass came out later on reel and I seem to remember the Beatles had some reels too on some of their early albums. The swingsters like Bennie Goodman and Glenn Miller, Les Paul and Mary Ford, Ella, the Count, lots of that stuff was on reel. The first commercially released stereo recordings were on 1/4", I don't remember stereo vinyl coming out for 5 years after I heard stereo on 1/4".