1.
Personal stereo
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A personal stereo is a portable audio player using an audiocassette player, battery power and in some cases an AM/FM radio. This allows the user to listen to music through headphones while walking, jogging or relaxing, personal stereos typically have a belt clip or a shoulder strap so a user can attach the device to a belt or wear it over his or her shoulder. Some personal stereos came with a separate battery case, the first personal stereo was the Stereobelt invented and patented by West German-Brazilian inventor Andreas Pavel in 1977. Pavel attempted to commercialise this invention but failed to do so, the first commercial personal stereo was the Sony Walkman released in 1979, created by Akio Morita, Masaru Ibuka and Kozo Ohsone. It became a popular and widely imitated consumer item in the 1980s, in the 1990s, portable CD players became the most popular personal stereos. In the 2000s, digital players like the iPod became the dominant personal stereos, during this period, smart phones like the iPhone also became popular music listening devices. Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, New York, chapter 9, Thinking About Sound, Proximity, and Distance in Western Experience, The Case of Odysseuss Walkman by Michael Bull
2.
Sony
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Sony Corporation is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation that is headquartered in Kōnan, Minato, Tokyo. Its diversified business includes consumer and professional electronics, gaming, entertainment, the company is one of the leading manufacturers of electronic products for the consumer and professional markets. Sony was ranked 116th on the 2015 list of Fortune Global 500 and these make Sony one of the most comprehensive entertainment companies in the world. The group consists of Sony Corporation, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Music Entertainment, Sony Financial Holdings and others. Sony is among the Semiconductor sales leaders by year and as of 2013, the companys current slogan is BE MOVED. Their former slogans were make. believe, like. no. other, Sony has a weak tie to the SMFG keiretsu, the successor to the Mitsui keiretsu. Sony began in the wake of World War II, in 1946, Masaru Ibuka started an electronics shop in a department store building in Tokyo. The company had $530 in capital and a total of eight employees, in the following year he was joined by his colleague, Akio Morita, and they founded a company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo 東京通信工業. The company built Japans first tape recorder, called the Type-G, in 1958 the company changed its name to Sony. When Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo was looking for a name to use to market themselves, they strongly considered using their initials. The primary reason they did not is that the railway company Tokyo Kyuko was known as TTK, the company occasionally used the acronym Totsuko in Japan, but during his visit to the United States, Morita discovered that Americans had trouble pronouncing that name. Another early name that was tried out for a while was Tokyo Teletech until Akio Morita discovered that there was an American company already using Teletech as a brand name, the name Sony was chosen for the brand as a mix of two words. One was the Latin word sonus, which is the root of sonic and sound, and the other was sonny, a common slang term used in 1950s America to call a boy. In the 1950s Japan sonny boys, was a word into Japanese which connoted smart and presentable young men. The first Sony-branded product, the TR-55 transistor radio, appeared in 1955, at the time of the change, it was extremely unusual for a Japanese company to use Roman letters to spell its name instead of writing it in kanji. The move was not without opposition, TTKs principal bank at the time and they pushed for a name such as Sony Electronic Industries, or Sony Teletech. Akio Morita was firm, however, as he did not want the company tied to any particular industry. Eventually, both Ibuka and Mitsui Banks chairman gave their approval, according to Schiffer, Sonys TR-63 radio cracked open the U. S. market and launched the new industry of consumer microelectronics
3.
Portable media player
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A portable media player or digital audio player is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. The data is stored on a CD, DVD, flash memory, microdrive. Most portable media players are equipped with a 3.5 mm headphone jack, in contrast, analog portable audio players play music from non-digital media that use analog signal storage, such as cassette tapes or vinyl records. Often mobile digital audio players are marketed and sold as portable MP3 players, even if they support other file formats. Portable DVD players are still manufactured by brands across the world and this article focuses on portable devices that have the main function of playing media. The immediate predecessor in the place of the digital audio player was the portable CD player and prior to that. British scientist Kane Kramer invented the first digital audio player, which he called the IXI and his 1979 prototypes were capable of approximately one hour of audio playback but did not enter commercial production. His UK patent application was not filed until 1981 and was issued in 1985 in the UK and 1987 in the US. However, in 1988 Kramers failure to raise the £60,000 required to renew the patent meant it entering the public domain, but he still owns the designs. Apple Inc. hired Kramer as a consultant and presented his work as an example of art in the field of digital audio players during their litigation with Burst. com almost two decades later. At about the same time AT&T also developed an internal Web based music streaming service that had the ability to download music to FlashPAC, AAC and such music downloading services later formed the foundation for the Apple iPod and iTunes. The first portable MP3 player was launched in 1997 by Saehan Information Systems, in mid-1998, the South Korean company licensed the players for North American distribution to Eiger Labs, which rebranded them as the EigerMan F10 and F20. The flash-based players were available in 32 MB or 64 MB storage capacity and had a LCD screen to tell the user the song currently playing. The first production-volume portable digital audio player was The Audible Player from Audible. com available for sale in January 1998 and it only supported playback of digital audio in Audibles proprietary, low-bitrate format which was developed for spoken word recordings. Capacity was limited to 4 MB of internal memory, or about 2 hours of play. The unit had no display and rudimentary controls, the Rio PMP300 from Diamond Multimedia was introduced in September 1998, a few months after the MPMan, and also featured a 32 MB storage capacity. It was a success during the season, with sales exceeding expectations. Interest and investment in digital music were subsequently spurred from it, because of the players notoriety as the target of a major lawsuit, the Rio is erroneously assumed to be the first digital audio player
4.
Compact Cassette
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The Compact Cassette or Musicassette, also commonly called cassette tape, audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. It was released by Philips in 1962, having developed in Hasselt. Compact cassettes come in two forms, either already containing content as a cassette, or as a fully recordable blank cassette. Its uses ranged from portable audio to home recording to data storage for early microcomputers, the first cassette player designed for use in car dashes was introduced in 1968. Between the early 1970s and the early 2000s, the cassette was one of the two most common formats for prerecorded music, first alongside the LP record and later the compact disc. Compact Cassettes contain two miniature spools, between which a magnetically coated, polyester-type plastic film is passed and wound and these spools and their attendant parts are held inside a protective plastic shell. This reversal is achieved either by flipping the cassette, or by having the machine itself change the direction of tape movement. In 1935, decades before the introduction of the Compact Cassette, AEG released the first reel-to-reel tape recorder and it was based on the invention of the magnetic tape by Fritz Pfleumer, which used similar technology but with open reels. These instruments were expensive and relatively difficult to use and were therefore used mostly by professionals in radio stations. In 1958, following four years of development, RCA Victor introduced the stereo, quarter-inch, reversible, however, it was a large cassette, and offered few pre-recorded tapes. Despite the multiple versions, it failed, consumer use of tape only took off in the early 1960s, after playback machines reached a comfortable, user-friendly design. This was achieved primarily by the introduction of transistors which replaced the bulky, fragile, reel-to-reel tape then became more suitable to household use, but still remained an esoteric product. The team at Philips was led by Lou Ottens in Hasselt, Philips was competing with Telefunken and Grundig in a race to establish its cassette tape as the worldwide standard, and it wanted support from Japanese electronics manufacturers. However, the Philips Compact Cassette became dominant as a result of Philips decision to license the format free of charge, Philips also released the Norelco Carry-Corder 150 recorder/player in the US in November 1964. By 1966 over 250,000 recorders had been sold in the US alone, by 1968,85 manufacturers had sold over 2.4 million players. By the end of the 1960s, the business was worth an estimated 150 million dollars. In the early years sound quality was mediocre, but it improved dramatically by the early 1970s when it caught up with the quality of 8-track tape, the Compact Cassette went on to become a popular alternative to the 12-inch vinyl LP during the late 1970s. The mass production of blank Compact Cassettes began in 1964 in Hanover, prerecorded music cassettes were launched in Europe in late 1965
5.
Sony Mobile
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Sony Mobile is a multinational telecommunications company founded on October 1,2001 as a joint venture between Sony and Ericsson, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan and wholly owned by Sony. It was originally incorporated as Sony Ericsson, but Sony acquired Ericssons share in the venture on February 16,2012, Sony Mobile Communications has research and development facilities in Kenya, Africa, Chennai, India, Lund, Sweden, Beijing, China and Silicon Valley, USA. Sony Mobile was the fourth-largest smartphone manufacturer by market share in the quarter of 2012 with 9.8 million units shipped. In the United States, Ericsson partnered with General Electric in the nineties as Ericsson Mobile Communications, primarily to establish a US presence. Ericsson had decided to obtain chips for its phones from a single source—a Philips facility in New Mexico, on March 17,2000, a fire at the Philips factory contaminated the sterile facility. Philips assured Ericsson and Nokia that production would be delayed for no more than a week, when it became clear that production would actually be compromised for months, Ericsson was faced with a serious shortage. Nokia had already begun to obtain parts from alternative sources, but Ericssons position was much worse as production of current models and the launch of new ones was held up. Ericsson, which had been in the phone market for decades. This was mainly due to fire and its inability to produce cheaper phones like Nokia. To curtail the losses, it considered outsourcing production to Asian companies that could produce the handsets for lower costs, speculation began about a possible sale by Ericsson of its mobile phone division, but the companys president, Kurt Hellström, said it had no plans to do so. Hellström said, Mobile phones are really a core business for Ericsson and we wouldnt be as successful if we didnt have phones. Sony was a player in the worldwide mobile phone market with a share of less than 1 percent in 2000. By August 2001, the two companies had finalised the terms of the merger announced in April, Ericsson contributed a majority of the Ericsson Mobile Communications company, excluding a minor part spun off as Ericsson Mobile Platforms. Sony contributed its entire handset division, the company was to have an initial workforce of 3,500 employees. To this end, it released new models which had built-in digital camera. The joint venture continued to make losses in spite of booming sales. In 2007, the companys first 5-Megapixel camera phone, the Sony Ericsson K850i, was announced followed in 2008 by the Sony Ericsson C905, at Mobile World Congress 2009, Sony Ericsson unveiled the first 12-Megapixel phone, named Satio. In 2005, Sony Ericsson agreed to become the title sponsor for the WTA Tour in a deal worth $88 million US dollars over 6 years
6.
Masaru Ibuka
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Masaru Ibuka was a Japanese electronics industrialist and co-founder of Sony. In 1946, he left the company and navy, and founded a bombed out radio repair shop in Tokyo, in 1946 Ibuka and Akio Morita co-founded Sony Corporation, originally named Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corporation. Ibuka served as president of Sony from 1950 to 1971, Ibuka received Honorary Doctorates from the Sophia University, Tokyo in 1976, from the Waseda University, Tokyo in 1979, and from Brown University in 1994. The IEEE awarded him the IEEE Founders Medal in 1972 and named the IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award after him in 1987, Ibuka served as the Chairman of the National Board of Governors of the Boy Scouts of Nippon. In 1991 the World Organization of the Scout Movement awarded him the Bronze Wolf, in 1989 he also received the highest distinction of the Scout Association of Japan, the Golden Pheasant Award. Distinguished Services Award from the Institute of Electrical Communication Engineers of Japan,1981, humanism and Technology Award from the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies,1986. Eduard Rhein Ring of Honor, German Eduard Rhein Foundation,1989, designated Person of Cultural Merits by Ministry of Education,199. The Presidential Award and Medallion from the University of Illinois, the books foreword was written by Glenn Doman, founder of The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, an organization that teaches parents about child brain development. Ibuka and Doman agreed that the first years of life were vital for education, Ibuka left Sony in 1976, but maintained close ties as an advisor until his death in December 1997 from heart failure at the age of 89. He was posthumously decorated with the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun with Paulownia Flowers, Ibukas books IEEE bio of Ibuka Russian version of Ibukas Kindergarten is Too Late
7.
Philips
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Koninklijke Philips N. V. is a Dutch technology company headquartered in Amsterdam with primary divisions focused in the areas of electronics, healthcare and lighting. It was founded in Eindhoven in 1891, by Gerard Philips and it is one of the largest electronics companies in the world and employs around 105,000 people across more than 60 countries. Philips is organized into three divisions, Philips Consumer Lifestyle, Philips Healthcare and Philips Lighting. As of 2012, Philips was the largest manufacturer of lighting in the world measured by applicable revenues, Philips said it would seek damages for breach of contract in the US$200-million sale. In April 2016, the International Court of Arbitration ruled in favour of Philips, Philips has a primary listing on the Euronext Amsterdam stock exchange and is a component of the Euro Stoxx 50 stock market index. It has a listing on the New York Stock Exchange. The Philips Company was founded in 1891, by Gerard Philips and this first factory has been adapted and is used as a museum. In 1895, after a difficult first few years and near bankruptcy, though he had earned a degree in engineering, Anton started work as a sales representative, soon, however, he began to contribute many important business ideas. After Gerard and Anton Philips changed their business by founding the Philips corporation. In the 1920s, the company started to other products. In 1939, they introduced their electric razor, the Philishave, the Chapel is a radio with built-in loudspeaker, which was designed during the early 1930s. On 11 March 1927, Philips went on the air with shortwave radio station PCJJ which was joined in 1929 by sister station PHOHI, PHOHI broadcast in Dutch to the Dutch East Indies while PCJJ broadcast in English, Spanish and German to the rest of the world. The international program on Sundays commenced in 1928, with host Eddie Startz hosting the Happy Station show, broadcasts from the Netherlands were interrupted by the German invasion in May 1940. The Germans commandeered the transmitters in Huizen to use for pro-Nazi broadcasts, some originating from Germany, Philips Radio was absorbed shortly after liberation when its two shortwave stations were nationalised in 1947 and renamed Radio Netherlands Worldwide, the Dutch International Service. Some PCJ programs, such as Happy Station, continued on the new station, by the late 1940s, the Type 10 was ready to be handed over to Philips subsidiary Johan de Witt in Dordrecht to be produced and incorporated into a generator set as originally planned. The result, rated at 180/200 W electrical output from a bore, approximately 150 of these sets were eventually produced. However, they filed a number of patents and amassed a wealth of information. The first Philips shaver was introduced in the 1930s, and was simply called “The Philishave”, in the USA, it was called the “Norelco”, which remains a part of their product line today
8.
Phonograph record
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The groove usually starts near the periphery and ends near the center of the disc. The phonograph disc record was the medium used for music reproduction until late in the 20th century. It had co-existed with the cylinder from the late 1880s. Records retained the largest market share even when new formats such as compact cassette were mass-marketed, by the late 1980s, digital media, in the form of the compact disc, had gained a larger market share, and the vinyl record left the mainstream in 1991. The phonograph record has made a resurgence in the early 21st century –9.2 million records were sold in the U. S. in 2014. Likewise, in the UK sales have increased five-fold from 2009 to 2014, as of 2017,48 record pressing facilities remain worldwide,18 in the United States and 30 in other countries. The increased popularity of vinyl has led to the investment in new, only two producers of lacquers remains, Apollo Masters in California, USA, and MDC in Japan. Vinyl records may be scratched or warped if stored incorrectly but if they are not exposed to heat or broken. The large cover are valued by collectors and artists for the space given for visual expression, in the 2000s, these tracings were first scanned by audio engineers and digitally converted into audible sound. Phonautograms of singing and speech made by Scott in 1860 were played back as sound for the first time in 2008, along with a tuning fork tone and unintelligible snippets recorded as early as 1857, these are the earliest known recordings of sound. In 1877, Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, unlike the phonautograph, it was capable of both recording and reproducing sound. Despite the similarity of name, there is no evidence that Edisons phonograph was based on Scotts phonautograph. Edison first tried recording sound on a paper tape, with the idea of creating a telephone repeater analogous to the telegraph repeater he had been working on. The tinfoil was wrapped around a metal cylinder and a sound-vibrated stylus indented the tinfoil while the cylinder was rotated. The recording could be played back immediately, Edison also invented variations of the phonograph that used tape and disc formats. A decade later, Edison developed a greatly improved phonograph that used a wax cylinder instead of a foil sheet. This proved to be both a better-sounding and far more useful and durable device, the wax phonograph cylinder created the recorded sound market at the end of the 1880s and dominated it through the early years of the 20th century. Berliners earliest discs, first marketed in 1889, but only in Europe, were 12.5 cm in diameter, both the records and the machine were adequate only for use as a toy or curiosity, due to the limited sound quality
9.
Norio Ohga
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Norio Ohga, otherwise spelled Norio Oga, was the former president and chairman of Sony Corporation, credited with spurring the development of the compact disc as a commercially viable audio format. Ohga was born in Numazu, Shizuoka, when he was a child, he suffered tuberculosis that kept him in bed for a long time during which an acquaintance taught him physics and music. As a young man, Ohga aspired to be an opera singer. Because of his insight into music and technology, the hired him as a part-time consultant. He was made the president of Sony in 1982, and the CEO of Sony in 1989 and that same year, he purchased Columbia Pictures Entertainment from the Coca-Cola Company for $3.4 billion. A year earlier, Sony acquired the CBS Records Group from Columbia Broadcasting System, Ohga also played a key role in establishing Sony Computer Entertainment in 1993. He supported Ken Kutaragi to develop the PlayStation as a Sony-owned console, in 1994 he succeeded co-founder Akio Morita as Sony chairman. Indeed, Idei lasted until 2005 when he was succeeded by Howard Stringer, Idei became co-CEO with Ohga in 1998, and sole CEO in 1999. In 2000 he became semi-retired, staying Chairman of the Board while Idei became Executive Chairman, on November 7,2001, Ohga collapsed onstage due to a cerebral hemorrhage while conducting an orchestra at the closing concert of the 4th Beijing Music Festival in Beijing. He later recovered his ability to speak and move after a three-month coma, on his 73rd birthday in 2003, Ohga retired from the board and became Honorary Chairman. He served as chairman of the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra and he died of multiple organ failure at a Tokyo hospital on April 23,2011. His international recognition included the Japanese Medal of Honor with Blue Ribbon, Grand Cordon of the Order of the Sacred Treasure, press release on his retirement, with career timeline Sony chairman credited with developing CDs dies Karuizawa Ohga Hall
Media related to Walkman at Wikimedia Commons
