LP record

• 1. Introduction

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  The LP record made its public debut on the 21st of June 1948, when Columbia Records called a press conference at the Waldorf Astoria. The name is short for long playing, or long play. In its first years it was a Columbia trademark, and the company stacked the launch with a large catalog of recordings. The format was soon accepted as the new standard by the entire US record industry. For decades afterward, it was the shape in which popular music arrived at home. Why had earlier attempts at a long-playing record collapsed? Who solved the problem in the end? What did the first buyers actually find in the racks? And how did a black disc survive the arrival of tapes and digital rivals? The answers begin in the cramped world of the shellac record.

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• 2. The Shellac Problem

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  In 1948, nearly every record made for the home was pressed from shellac, a compound abrasive enough to make playback noisy. These discs used a much larger groove and spun at approximately 78 revolutions per minute. At that speed, a 12-inch record held less than five minutes per side. A Beethoven symphony or a Mozart concerto meant flipping through several four-minute sides. Columbia's new product swapped nearly everything. It was a fine-grooved disc of PVC, known as vinyl, and it was played with a smaller-tipped stylus in what was called the microgroove specification. Record company executives then tried to guess who would want what. Upscale classical fans, they reasoned, would jump at an uninterrupted symphony. Pop fans, used to hearing one song at a time, would find the shorter disc enough. So the 12-inch size was reserved for higher-priced classical recordings and Broadway shows, while popular music stayed on 10-inch records. By the mid-1950s the 10-inch LP, like its similarly sized 78-rpm cousin, had lost the format war and was discontinued.

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• 3. Failed Predecessors

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  As early as 1926, Edison Records experimented with Edison Disc Records that ran 24 minutes per side. The playback machines were still mostly wind-up phonographs, and the system proved unreliable. It ended as a commercial failure. Sound film created a different pressure. Talking pictures used records synchronized to movie projectors, and those soundtracks could not fit into the five minutes a 78 offered. Even after all studios had moved to optical soundtracks by mid-1931, soundtrack discs were still made as late as 1936. They were dubbed from the optical tracks and scaled down to 12 inches to cut costs, for theaters with disc-only projectors. In September 1931, RCA Victor launched the first commercially available vinyl long-playing record, sold as Program-Transcription records. The flexible 30-cm discs offered roughly ten to fifteen minutes per side and needed a special chrome-plated steel needle called Chromium Orange. The 10-inch discs, mostly for popular and light classical music, were normally pressed in shellac. The 12-inch discs, meant for serious classical music, used Victor's new vinyl-based compound, Victrolac, which gave a much quieter surface. The first 12-inch recording was Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, played by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. Reviewing it in The New York Times, Compton Pakensham wrote, "What we were not prepared for was the quality of reproduction... incomparably fuller." Praise did not save it. Affordable consumer playback equipment was missing, and the Great Depression made buyers reject a record that seemed frivolous. Most titles were deleted within a few years, though some stayed in the catalog until the end of the decade.

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• 4. The Columbia Team

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  Peter Goldmark, head research scientist at CBS Laboratories, led Columbia's push for a record that would hold at least 20 minutes per side. He chose the team, but he handed most of the hands-on experiments to William S. Bachman and Howard H. Scott. Goldmark had lured Bachman away from General Electric. Research began in 1939. It was suspended during World War II, which also halted RCA's own work on an improved long-playing record, and it resumed in 1945. The earlier long players had topped out at about 23 minutes per side for a 12-inch disc and around 15 for a 10-inch disc. Columbia's development of microgroove in 1948 pushed the format to its maximum playtime, and that length has lasted into modern times. The finished 12-inch side ran about 25 minutes, for a total runtime of approximately 50 minutes.

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• 5. The First Catalog

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  Columbia launched with 133 recordings. Eighty-five were 12-inch classical LPs numbered ML 4001 to 4085. Twenty-six were 10-inch classics numbered ML 2001 to 2026, eighteen were 10-inch popular numbers numbered CL 6001 to 6018, and four were 10-inch juvenile records numbered JL 8001 to 8004. The first twelve-inch LP, according to the 1949 Columbia catalog issued in September 1948, was Mendelssohn's Concerto in E Minor. Nathan Milstein played the violin with the New York Philharmonic, conducted by Bruno Walter, as ML 4001. Columbia may have planned Bach's album ML 4002 to lead, because the first 54 LPs ran alphabetically by composer from Bach to Tchaikovsky. Milstein was very popular in the 1940s, so his performance jumped the queue. The popular series began with a reissue of The Voice of Frank Sinatra, numbered CL 6001. The classical 10-inch series started with Beethoven's 8th symphony, numbered ML 2001. The juvenile series opened with Nursery Songs by Gene Kelly, numbered JL 8001. Two 2-LP sets also appeared, Puccini's La bohème as SL-1 and Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel as SL-2. Every 12-inch pressing used 220 grams of vinyl.

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• 6. Winning the Format War

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  Columbia's LP did not have the field to itself. RCA Victor backed a smaller 7-inch disc, the "45", oriented toward the single song. In 1952, 78s still accounted for slightly more than half of US unit sales. The 45 took just over 30% of units, while the LP held not quite 17% of units but just over 26% of dollar sales. Ten years later the picture had flipped. LPs held almost 25% of unit sales and 58% of dollar sales in the US. The 45 took most of the remainder, and 78s shrank to 2% of units and 1% of dollars. The longer playing time also changed what musicians made. From the late 1950s, performers used a side's length to build coherent themes, creating concept albums and ushering in what is called the album era. Critic Robert Christgau, writing in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies in 1981, said: "I've found over the years that the long-playing record, with its twenty-minute sides and four-to-six compositions/performances per side, suits my habits of concentration perfectly." The format gained its most important later addition in 1957, when stereophonic sound arrived.

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• 7. Imperfect Grooves

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  A quiet passage followed by a sudden loud sound on a microgroove LP could give away a secret. Listeners might hear a faint pre-echo of the loud sound 1.8 seconds ahead of time. The grooves sat so close together that the cutting stylus unavoidably passed some of the next groove's signal onto the previous one. Engineers kept improving the format anyway. Helium-cooled cutting heads, such as the Neumann SX68, could withstand strong high frequencies. Before them, cutting engineers had to turn down the high-frequency content, or the delicate coils could burn out. Other advances included elliptical styluses at the end of the 1960s and cartridges that tracked at lower force, beginning in the mid-1960s. Engineers also tried half-speed and one-third-speed cutting, antistatic compounds such as RCA Dynaflex, and tip shapes named Shibata, Van den Hul and MicroLine. Direct metal mastering followed, along with noise-reduction systems such as CX and dbx from 1973. One idea never caught on. Quadraphonic four-channel records appeared in the 1970s in discrete and matrix formats, but expensive playback equipment, incompatible standards and weak remixes held them back.

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• 8. Rivals and Revival

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  Reel-to-reel tape recorders challenged the LP in the 1950s, yet pre-recorded tapes cost more, which confined tape to a niche market. Cheaper, more convenient 8-track cartridges and cassettes became popular in automobiles from the mid-1960s. The real threat arrived in the 1970s, when better tape formulations and noise-reduction systems improved cassette audio. By 1983, cassettes were outselling LPs in the US. The compact disc came out in 1982, offering recordings that were theoretically almost noiseless and not audibly degraded by scuffs or repeated playing. High prices at first limited CDs to affluent early adopters and audiophiles. Prices fell, and CDs outsold LPs by 1988. In 1992 the CD overtook cassettes as the top-selling format. Along with other record formats, LPs came to be called simply "vinyl." A vinyl revival began in the late 1990s, with demand growing among audiophiles, DJs and fans of indie music. Even so, most music sales as of 2018 came from downloads and streaming. US vinyl sales reached 15.6 million in 2017 and 27 million in 2020. In 2022 they hit 41 million units, passing the compact disc for the first time since 1987.

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