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Word: sound (lookup in dictionary) (lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
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Usage:

Computer records glorify sound by the binary numbers...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Music: His Master's Digital Voice | 7/9/1979 | See Source »

Digital recording-a process that radically improves the sound of conventional phonograph records and could eventually make them obsolete-may be the single biggest sound advance since technicians discovered that two speakers were better than one. "I won't say when it will happen," says RCA Records Division Vice President Thomas Z. Shepard, "but digital is definitely on its way." Robert Ingebretsen, vice president of a digital recording company called Soundstream, Inc., compares conventional record listening to "looking out a dirty window: you can see, but not perfectly. Listening to a digital recording is like looking out the same...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Music: His Master's Digital Voice | 7/9/1979 | See Source »

...this euphoria is not the moon-gazing of laboratory visionaries, nor a spiel for still another arcane piece of audio equipment. Digital recordings do sound amazingly better, even in the hybrid form available today. Recording apparatus is beginning to be widely used, though hardware for full playback is not yet available outside the lab. Even heard on conventional equipment, the new hybrid records bring a full panorama of sound rushing from the speakers. In rock, digital is like scoring a studio seat next to the microphone. In classical, the sound is like a symphonic apotheosis. Floors vibrate; paint could crack...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Music: His Master's Digital Voice | 7/9/1979 | See Source »

This is how it works. Even the best records available today are recorded by the analog method invented by Thomas Edison about a century ago. With analog, sound is reproduced by recording the vibrations made by the sound waves, which were collected by young Tom and his associates through a horn, and then directed to a needle pressed against a metal cylinder wrapped in tin foil. The sound waves caused the needle to vibrate and to trace a wavy groove on the soft surface of the cylinder. This is kindergarten stuff, even allowing for the introduction of magnetic tape...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Music: His Master's Digital Voice | 7/9/1979 | See Source »

Digital recording shows up analog recording for the late-Victorian process it is. The new technique does not attempt to record directly the vibrations of sound waves. The sound is picked up by microphones and fed through amplifiers to a computer, which then translates the waves into a series of numbers representing the character of the wave form. These numbers are stored as binary "words." Then, when the recording is played, the computer translates these numbers back and the re-created sound waves cause the membranes of speakers to vibrate-possibly with joy. In any case, those vibrations from...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Music: His Master's Digital Voice | 7/9/1979 | See Source »

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