When the key is in the car's ignition switch and the Voice Warning switch is activated, the little record inside the Voice Warning box spins; this record has six parallel grooves, each with a ...

Thomas Alva Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park whose genius ushered in a new era of light and sound for humankind, invented the phonograph at his New Jersey laboratory on this day in history, Aug. 12, ...

November 21 is a date rich with pivotal moments that have shaped the course of history across the globe.

If you think of records as platters, you are of a certain age. If you don’t remember records at all, you are even younger. But there was a time when audio records were not flat — they were drums, ...

Just the other day, I heard one of the earliest popular recorded sambas, Donga’s “Pelo Telefone,” from 1916 and released on an Edison talking record, probably a wax cylinder. A few years later the ...

But there’s one man – and a very strange invention we would likely never have listened to music without – who we have to thank for it all. The story of sound recording, and reproduction, began 143 ...

Audio historians have found a sound recording that predates Edison's phonograph by nearly 20 years. The "phonautograph" was patented in 1857 by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville; the device recorded ...

These days music is increasingly free—in just about every sense of the word. Right now, if you decided you wanted to hear, say, “Uptown Funk,” you could be listening to it in seconds. It’s up free on ...

[Jan Derogee] pulled out his phonograph the other day to hear the 100+ year old wax cylinder warble of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”, but couldn’t locate the reproducer — this is the small circular ...