Did you really know?

Without the confidence of its dealers in 1923, RCA Victor, founder of the phonograph and record business, could never have started radio down its billion-dollar road. Countless other improvements could never have reached the market if it were not for the great confidence RCA Victor dealers have in RCA Victor products. Include Television! Here is a 50-million dollar RCA investment which is today establishing itself as another billion-dollar business for dealers across the country.

American English, phonograph was the most common generic term for any early sound reproducing machine, until the second half of the 20th century, when it became archaic and record player became the universal term for disc record machines. In contemporary American usage phonograph most usually refers to disc record machines or turntables, the most common type of analogue recording from the 1910s on.

Long playing (LP) record albums are either 10 or 12-inch diameter, 33-1/3 rpm vinyl phonograph records. They were first introduced in 1948 and served as a primary release format for recorded music until the compact disc began to significantly displace them in the late 1980s.

The long-playing record is an analog format. The digital recording of sound was only made practical by the technical advances in microprocessors and computing which occurred in the 1970s and 1980s.

This is the first of two articles that I have written on what I have seen as the beginning of the 45 as we know it.

There are some contradictions as to when 45s actually started. I have an advertisement from RCA that I copied out of the April 2, 1949 Billboard magazine. It explains a lot of things about the "New" system. I also have a follow up ad from a May 14, 1949 Billboard that gives some new releases.

I also have a few actual (not copies) issues of the RCA DISTRIBUTOR'S RECORD BULLETIN, that gives the RCA distributors all the information on upcoming events and releases. There is a lot of great information about the "New" 45s. These ads should enlighten a lot of people, and rid a lot of misconceptions about the start of the 45.

Here is the Apr. 2 1949 Advertisement in Billboard. This was the week, or pretty darn close to it, for the initial release of the 45. Actually March 31, 1949 was the kick-off day.

The Eight Track tape recording system was popular from 1965 to the late 1970s. While today it has become an icon of obsolescence, it was a great commercial success and paved the way for all sorts of innovations in portable listening. The eight track tape consisted of an endless loop of standard 1/4-inch magnetic tape, housed in a plastic cartridge. On the tape were eight parallel soundtracks, corresponding to four stereo programs. For many people old enough to have owned an eight track system, it is a technology associated with the automobile and in-car listening. Ironically, however, it was first developed not by the auto industry, but by a leading aircraft manufacturer: the Learjet Corporation.

The reel-to-reel format was used in the very earliest tape recorders, including the pioneering German Magnetophons of the 1930s. Originally, this format had no name, since all forms of magnetic tape recorders used it. The name arose only with the need to distinguish it from the several kinds of tape cartridges or cassettes which were introduced in the early 1960s. Thus,the term "reel-to-reel" is an example of a retronym.

The Compact Cassette, often referred to as audio cassette, cassette tape, cassette, or simply tape, is a magnetic tape sound recording format. Although it was originally intended as a medium for dictation, improvements in fidelity led the Compact Cassette to supplant reel-to-reel tape recording in most non-professional applications.^[1] Its uses ranged from portable audio to home recording to data storage for early microcomputers. Between the early 1970s and late 1990s, the cassette was one of the two most common formats for prerecorded music, first alongside the LP and later the Compact Disc.^[2] The word cassette is a French word meaning "little box."

A Compact Disc (or CD) is an optical disc used to store digital data, originally developed for storing digital audio. The CD, available on the market since late 1982, remains the standard playback medium for commercial audio recordings to the present day.