Tunes You Can Eat

This week retro-gadget collector and video blogger [Techmoan] featured perhaps the most delicious audio recording format that we know of — a chocolate gramophone record. Compared to his typical media format explorations, the chocolate record is of quite recent vintage. He first heard of them back in 2015 when Tasmanian …read more

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Talking Clock? That’s Nothing New

Do you talk to your alarm clock? I do. I was recently in a hotel room, woke up in the middle of the night and said, “Computer. What time is it?” Since my Amazon Echo (which responds to the name Computer) was at home, I was greeted with silence. Isn’t the future great?

Of course, there have been a variety of talking clocks over the years. You used to be able to call a phone number and a voice would tell you the time. But how old do you think the talking clock really is? Would you guess that this …read more

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Who Made the First Human Audio Recordings? Edison? Not so Fast!

You probably learned in school that Thomas Edison was the first human voice recorded, reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb. As it turns out though, that’s not strictly true. Edison might have been the first person to play his voice back, but he wasn’t the first to deliberately record. That honor goes to a French inventor named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. He wanted to study sound and created the phonautograph — a device which visualized sound on soot-covered paper. They were not made to be played back, but the information is there. These recordings were made around 1860. There’s a …read more

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Retrotechtacular: Stereo Records

The 20th century saw some amazing technological developments. We went from airplanes to the moon. We went from slide rules to digital computers. Crank telephones to cell phones. But two of the most amazing feats of that era were ones that non-technical people probably hardly think about. The transformation of radio and TV from mono and black and white, to stereo and color. What was interesting about both of these is that engineers managed to find a way to push the new better result into the same form as the old version and — this is the amazing part — …read more

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