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IU Media Historian’s Find in Stacks at Wells Library Could Represent Oldest Record in World

Vor seinem Löwengarten Das Kampfspiel zu erwarten Saß König Franz Und um ihn die Großen der Krone Und rings auf hohem Balkone Die Damen in schönem Kranz The voice of the father of the gramophone, Emile Berliner, is only slightly muffled as he recites Friedrich Schiller’s ballad “Der Handschuh.” ButRead More…

At the Margins of Music: The Early LPs of Prestige Records

Viewed from the present, the LP era began in June 1948 when Columbia Records introduced their long-playing microgroove technology. The reality for listeners in the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, was much more uncertain. As vinyl LPs came to replace the shellac discs of the previous recording era, recordRead More…

Turn your Digital into Vinyl

A German company, vinylrecorder.com,  has come up with a home record lathe that takes any digital file and cuts it onto a vinyl disk. You can see an entertaining video about the process at the link below. The man in the video is entirely wrong about digital files and stairsteppingRead More…

The Work of Vinyl in the Age of Digital Reproduction

n.b. from the Editors: The original presentation of this piece contained pop-up annotations by the authors throughout the text. Those annotations have been converted to footnotes for the purpose of this reproduction. n.b. from Ted: I posed my responses in the form of interleaved paraphrasings of what Njoroge and Rich wrote. ConsiderRead More…

A Surprising Advantage of Vinyl

I am emphatically not an audiophile. My home contains neither $500 ethernet cables nor “acoustic isolation platforms.” I am absolutely not here to convince you that vinyl recordings sound inherently better than the same data on CD. But: there is one absolutely irrefutable advantage to many modern vinyl releases, andRead More…