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A portable audio player is a personal mobile device that allows the user to listen to recorded audio while mobile. Sometimes a distinction is made between a portable player, battery-powered and with one or more small loudspeakers, and a personal player, listened to with earphones.
Portable battery-operated reel-to-reel tape recorders were introduced in the 1950s, [1] initially tending to be high-priced units for reporters, produced by Uher and Nagra. Lower-priced units became available later. In the mid-1960s Philips introduced the battery-operated compact cassette recorder, originally used for recording speech. At about the same time the 8-track player was introduced. It was very successful at the time, though bulky and inconvenient to use. There was a pause at the end of each track as the program changed. The compact cassette, although physically much smaller than the 8-track cartridge, became capable of good[ clarification needed ] sound quality as the technology developed, and longer cassette tapes became available. Cassette decks (not portable) were introduced for home use, and this encouraged the production of pre-recorded music cassettes.[ citation needed ]
The first portable audio player available to the general public, the Sony Walkman, was introduced in 1979 and sold very well. It was much smaller than an 8-track player or the earlier cassette recorders, and was listened to with stereophonic headphones, unlike previous equipment which used small loudspeakers. Unlike small loudspeakers, headphones were capable of very good sound quality. All previous compact cassette devices could record as well as play back; Walkmans and similar devices often had no recording facility, but took advantage of the pre-recorded cassettes that had become widely available.
Early personal CD players can play commercial CDs; later models can play recordable CD-R and CDRW media either copied from a pressed CD or containing MP3 and similar files.[ original research? ]
In 1998, digital audio players (DAPs) based on flash memory or hard disk storage became available (The Rio PMP300 from Diamond Multimedia is widely considered to be the first mass market DAP). Files are usually compressed using lossy compression; this reduces file size at the cost of some loss of quality. The trade-off between degree of compression and file size can be varied, although this is not an option for existing compressed files. The advantage of solid-state DAPs over hard disks and CDs is resistance to vibration, small size and weight, and low battery usage. Early solid-state DAPs had capacities of a few tens of kilobytes; as of 2009 [update] capacities of many gigabytes are available.[ citation needed ]
Walkman, stylised as WALKMAN (ウォークマン), was a brand of portable audio players manufactured and marketed by Japanese technology company Sony since 1979. The original Walkman was a portable cassette player and its popularity made "walkman" an unofficial term for personal stereos of any producer or brand. By 2010, when production stopped, Sony had built about 200 million cassette-based Walkmans.
Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding (ATRAC) is a family of proprietary audio compression algorithms developed by Sony. MiniDisc was the first commercial product to incorporate ATRAC in 1992. ATRAC allowed a relatively small disc like MiniDisc to have the same running time as CD while storing audio information with minimal loss in perceptible quality. Improvements to the codec in the form of ATRAC3, ATRAC3plus, and ATRAC Advanced Lossless followed in 1999, 2002, and 2006 respectively.
MiniDisc (MD) is an erasable magneto-optical disc-based data storage format offering a capacity of 60, 74, and later, 80 minutes of digitized audio.
The Compact Cassette, also commonly called a cassette tape, audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. Invented by Lou Ottens and his team at the Dutch company Philips in 1963, Compact Cassettes come in two forms, either containing content as a prerecorded cassette (Musicassette), or as a fully recordable "blank" cassette. Both forms have two sides and are reversible by the user. Although other tape cassette formats have also existed—for example the Microcassette—the generic term cassette tape is normally used to refer to the Compact Cassette because of its ubiquity.
Digital Audio Tape is a signal recording and playback medium developed by Sony and introduced in 1987. In appearance it is similar to a Compact Cassette, using 3.81 mm / 0.15" magnetic tape enclosed in a protective shell, but is roughly half the size at 73 mm × 54 mm × 10.5 mm. The recording is digital rather than analog. DAT can record at sampling rates equal to, as well as higher and lower than a CD at 16 bits quantization. If a comparable digital source is copied without returning to the analogue domain, then the DAT will produce an exact clone, unlike other digital media such as Digital Compact Cassette or non-Hi-MD MiniDisc, both of which use a lossy data-reduction system.
A cassette deck is a type of tape machine for playing and recording audio cassettes that does not have a built-in power amplifier or speakers, and serves primarily as a transport. It can be a part of an automotive entertainment system, a part of a portable mini system or a part of a home component system. In the latter case it is also called a component cassette deck or just a component deck.
A CD player is an electronic device that plays audio compact discs, which are a digital optical disc data storage format. CD players were first sold to consumers in 1982. CDs typically contain recordings of audio material such as music or audiobooks. CD players may be part of home stereo systems, car audio systems, personal computers, or portable CD players such as CD boomboxes. Most CD players produce an output signal via a headphone jack or RCA jacks. To use a CD player in a home stereo system, the user connects an RCA cable from the RCA jacks to a hi-fi and loudspeakers for listening to music. To listen to music using a CD player with a headphone output jack, the user plugs headphones or earphones into the headphone jack.
A boombox is a transistorized portable music player featuring one or two cassette tape recorder/players and AM/FM radio, generally with a carrying handle. Beginning in the mid 1980s, a CD player was often included. Sound is delivered through an amplifier and two or more integrated loudspeakers. A boombox is a device typically capable of receiving radio stations and playing recorded music. Many models are also capable of recording onto cassette tapes from radio and other sources. In the 1990s, some boomboxes were available with minidisc recorders and players. Designed for portability, boomboxes can be powered by batteries as well as by line current. The boombox was introduced to the American market during the late 1970s. The desire for louder and heavier bass led to bigger and heavier boxes; by the 1980s, some boomboxes had reached the size of a suitcase. Some larger boomboxes even contained vertically mounted record turntables. Most boomboxes were battery-operated, leading to extremely heavy, bulky boxes.
The Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) is a magnetic tape sound recording format introduced by Philips and Matsushita Electric in late 1992 and marketed as the successor to the standard analog Compact Cassette. It was also a direct competitor to Sony's MiniDisc (MD), but neither format toppled the then-ubiquitous analog cassette despite their technical superiority, and DCC was discontinued in October 1996.
dbx is a family of noise reduction systems developed by the company of the same name. The most common implementations are dbx Type I and dbx Type II for analog tape recording and, less commonly, vinyl LPs. A separate implementation, known as dbx-TV, is part of the MTS system used to provide stereo sound to North American and certain other TV systems. The company, dbx, Inc., was also involved with Dynamic Noise Reduction (DNR) systems.
The Stereobelt was a personal stereo player devised by Andreas Pavel, a former television executive and book editor. Pavel filed a patent of invention for his portable music player in Italy in 1977, and adopted the same protective steps in Germany, United Kingdom, United States, and Japan. He sought royalty fees and later commenced legal proceedings against Sony Corporation after the Walkman released commercially in 1979, believing the electronics manufacturer had infringed his intellectual property. Judges ruled against him, revoking the patent, stating his concept was "not significantly inventive".
The Microcassette is an audio storage medium, introduced by Olympus in 1969.
A portable media player (PMP) is a portable consumer electronics device capable of storing and playing digital media such as audio, images, and video files. The data is typically stored on a compact disc (CD), Digital Versatile Disc (DVD), Blu-ray Disc (BD), flash memory, microdrive, SD cards or hard drive; most earlier PMPs used physical media, but modern players mostly use flash memory. In contrast, analogue portable audio players play music from non-digital media that use analogue media, such as cassette tapes or vinyl records.
Discman was Sony's brand name for portable CD players. The first Discman, the Sony D-50 or D-5, was launched in 1984. The brand name changed to CD Walkman, initially for Japanese lineups launched between October 1997 and March 1998, and then entirely in 2000. Discman and CD Walkman players are no longer produced.
Gapless playback is the uninterrupted playback of consecutive audio tracks, such that relative time distances in the original audio source are preserved over track boundaries on playback. For this to be useful, other artifacts at track boundaries should not be severed either. Gapless playback is common with compact discs, gramophone records, or tapes, but is not always available with other formats that employ compressed digital audio. The absence of gapless playback is a source of annoyance to listeners of music where tracks are meant to segue into each other, such as some classical music, progressive rock, concept albums, electronic music, and live recordings with audience noise between tracks.
A personal stereo, or personal cassette player, 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 their shoulder. Some personal stereos came with a separate battery case.
The history of sound recording - which has progressed in waves, driven by the invention and commercial introduction of new technologies — can be roughly divided into four main periods:
Foster Denki KK is an electronics company that manufactures loudspeakers and audio equipment for other companies or sells them under the trade name Fostex. It is traded on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Personics was the company that invented the music recording retail system with trade name "Personics System" that was introduced in record stores starting in 1987. The system allowed customers to enter a music store, use headphones to preview and select individual songs on a console, then specify a custom list of songs to be recorded to a Compact Cassette tape. The songs available were also listed in magazine format available at the stores. The record stores had a machine from Personics that contained 120 custom Compact discs recorded in CD Digital Audio Redbook format with custom Dolby AC1 (DP85) tracks which were also pre-encoded with Dolby B Type Noise reduction prior to compression. These two drives each had jukebox disc changing systems and provided access to thousands of songs for fast in-shell cassette recording.