Vintage Digita

The earliest digital music recordings were done in the '70's already: The 16-bit, 37kHz digital recorder by Soundstream Inc. Was used in 1976 to record the Santa Fe Opera's performance of Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All...

Mind the gap!

The phrase "mind the gap" was coined around 1968 for a planned automated announcement after it had become impractical for drivers and station attendants to warn passengers. The Underground chose digital recording using solid state equipment with no moving parts. As storage capacity was expensive, the phrase had to be short. A short warning was also easier to write on the platform.

The equipment was supplied by AEG Telefunken. According to the Independent on

Sunday, sound engineer Peter Lodge, who owned Redan Recorders in Bayswater, working with a Scottish Telefunken engineer, recorded an actor reading "mind the gap" and "stand clear of the doors please", but the actor insisted on royalties and the phrases had to be re-recorded. Lodge read the phrases to line up the recording equipment for level and those were used.

While Lodge's recording is still in use, some lines use other recordings. One was recorded by Manchester voice artist Emma Clarke. Others, on the Piccadilly line, are by Tim Bentinck, who plays David Archer in The Archers.

History

After the Soundstream prototype, critique led to a new model:

Frequency Response Wow and Flutter Total Harmonic Distortion Signal-to-Noise Ratio

Dynamic Range

Crosstalk Print-through Sampling Rate Digital Format

Flat from 0Hz to 21kHz Unmeasurable Less than 0.004% at 0VU Better than 90dB RMS, Unweighted

Better than 90dB RMS, Unweighted Less than -85dB None

50,000 per second 16 bits linear encoding / decoding

History

History

The first entirely digitally recorded (DDD) popular music album was Ry Cooder's Bop Till You Drop, recorded in late 1978. Since then, we've seen a lot of formats coming and going. This all sped up after the Compact Disc became available as a commercial digital format in 1982!

Recording formats:

●DAT ●ADAT ●DASH ●HDD recording ●...and many more

Histor