record player

US inventor Thomas Edison, who became known internationally after his invention of the phonograph (pictured). His original instrument used a cylinder coated with tinfoil to record sounds and was patented in 1878. Edison did not initially think of using the machine to record music for pleasure but as an office dictating machine.

Device for reproducing recorded sound stored as a spiral groove on a vinyl disc. A motor-driven turntable rotates the record at a constant speed, and a stylus or needle on the head of a pick-up is made to vibrate by the undulations in the record groove. These vibrations are then converted to electrical signals by a transducer in the head (often a piezoelectric crystal). After amplification, the signals pass to one or more loudspeakers, which convert them into sound. The vinyl disc has been almost wholly superseded by the compact disc. Alternative sound-recording formats include magnetic tape recording and the hard discs and memory cards found in computers and in personal music players.

The pioneers of the record player were Thomas Edison, with his phonograph playing recordings on cylinders, and Emile Berliner (1851-1929), who invented the predecessor of the vinyl record 1896.