¿ªÔÆÌåÓý

How are records made? How does a record player make sound? Why are we still listening to and buying records when there are so many digital ways to listen to music?! But Why visits Gold Rush Vinyl in Austin, Texas to learn how little plastic beads become brightly colored records that can play back your favorite music or sounds.

Download our learning guides: | |

Jane Lindholm

/

¿ªÔÆÌåÓý

• Thomas Edison was the person to figure out how to capture (record) sound and play it back later when he created the phonograph in 1877. (He wasn’t the first to record sound–Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville did that about 20 years earlier, but Edison was the first to make a machine that could play sound back in a recognizable way.)
• A few years later, Emile Berliner built on Edison’s invention to make the gramophone. Unlike the phonograph, which used circular tubes or cylinders to hold the recordings, the gramophone used flat discs.
• While new technology like cassette tapes, CDs, and now digital recording devices have since been invented, records never really went away (unlike the cassette tape!). 
• Vinyl became a popular material for making  records around the middle of the 20th century.
• Vinyl is a type of plastic called polyvinyl chloride, or PVC. This material is used in all kinds of things, from pipes to flooring materials to shower curtains and raincoats. 
• When vinyl is used to make records, it starts in the form of little plastic pellets. The pellets get put into a machine that melts them into a shape kind of like a hockey puck. And then the machine presses that vinyl down into a flat disc. While it’s pressing, the shape of the music is stamped into the warm plastic by metal plates.
• Those grooves in the record are unique to each musical recording. (But all the records made from that recording will have the same exact grooves.)
• Sound travels through the air as a wave of vibrating air molecules. You can’t see it, but your ears turn those vibrations into electrical signals that your brain can interpret.
• When you make a recording, you’re capturing that soundwave and turning it into an electrical signal, and then capturing that electrical signal so it can be recreated again and again. 
• Sound was first recorded by dragging a vibrating needle through warmed up wax to press the waveform into the wax. Then, when the wax was cool and hard, you could play back that recording by dragging the needle through the grooves that had been created and amplifying the sound. 
• The first amplifiers were cone shaped. Now most amplifiers are speakers. 
• People like to collect records because they want to have a physical copy of their music, or because they like the packaging, which usually has art and lyrics. 
• Some people buy records because they want to support their favorite musicians, and musicians make more money off of records than digital recordings.