A History of Music Technology in the Home

Radio
After nearly thirty years of experimentation in wireless telegraphy, the identification of radio waves in 1886 by Heinrich Hertz, and developments in valve technology, radio broadcasting finally became viable in 1920.

Guglielmo Marconi opened the world’s first purpose-built radio factory in Chelmsford, in 1912. Eight years later the first entertainment radio broadcast was heard from the Marconi Research Centre in Writtle, just outside Chelmsford in Essex.

Listening to the radio ‘on the move’ became possible after the invention of the transistor in 1947. The transistor radio was at its most popular In the 1960s and 1970s.

Record player
While gramophone technology continued to develop, the next major technical advance was the creation of the Long Play ‘microgroove’ disc developed by Columbia Records in 1948. Longer pieces of music could now be recorded on each side of the record, a format more suited to the classical repertoire and later, to the development of the ‘pop’ album.

Sales of record players dipped during the 1950s in favour of the radio but became popular again in the 1960s with the creation of the automatic turntable and later the reproduction of stereo sound.

Cassette tape players
Cassette tape players were first made by Philips in 1963. Cassettes were originally designed for dictation machines, but it soon became apparent that as sound quality improved there was a wider application.

Smaller and not as fragile as their record counterparts, cassettes could either be pre-recorded or blank. Each side could be from 30 (C60) to 60 (C120) minutes long. Now, you could record an entire music album on just one side or even create your own mix-tape. By the mid-1980s music cassette sales outnumbered those of vinyl records.

Compact disc (CD) players
Philips and Sony were first developing Compact Disc technology in the late 1970s. In 1982 they worked together to produce the first Compact Disc player. As the price of CD players came down, the popularity of CDs grew; they were durable, cheap, of high quality and now it was possible to skip or preselect tracks.

Initially popular with classical music fans, the introduction of the portable CD Walkman in 1984 ensured that the CD format increased appeal to the larger popular music markets. In 1985, Dire Straits’ album, ‘Brothers in Arms’ was the first to sell over a million copies on CD. By 2007, over 200 billion compact discs had been bought and sold globally.

Digital technology
Since the1990s, the invention of the internet and the development of personal technology has completely changed the way most of us listen to music.

Karlheinz Brandenburg developed the digital file format, MP3, in the 1980s, with MP3 players being developed for the commercial market in the late 1990s. With far greater capacities than either cassettes or CDs, people could now carry hundreds of tracks around with them and listen to them on the go.

As digital music downloads grew in popularity, people no longer had to buy whole albums and could just purchase the songs they liked. And the ‘mix tape’ was back, renamed the ‘playlist’.

Today, digital streaming services provide the potential to listen to any track at any time and in any place. Musical connectivity is everywhere - through blue-tooth speakers in your home, your smart phone or your car's infotainment system. Music is everywhere!