The History of Digital Voice Recorders

The digital voice recorders you see on the shelves today weren't always so small and compact. Today's digital Dictaphones and other recorders got their start more than 130 years ago with the invention of the phonograph, and advances in technology have turned them into the convenient machines we use today.

The Phonograph Makes Recording Possible
While it later became popular for music recording, the phonograph didn't start that way; Thomas Edison intended it for business use. Invented in 1877, Edison's primary audience for the phonograph was businesspeople who might want to record speech to take dictation and record meetings. With the addition of wax cylinders that could be used multiple times in the 1880s, the phonograph really began to take off as a dictation device.

Recording Gets into a Groove
The phonograph reigned supreme as the recording format of choice until the mid 1940s, when three competitors emerged with groove-based dictation formats: SoundScriber, Gray Audograph and DictaBelt. These competitors used soft vinyl discs to record sound, using pressure to create grooves in the discs that held the recordings. Although these three competing technologies were similar, they were not compatible.

Tape Takes Over
Reel-to-reel tape heralded the introduction of magnetic tape recording. While magnetic tape recording originated in the 1930s, it didn't become commercially available until the late 1940s. Throughout the 1950s, businesses, homes and schools used reel-to-reel tape recorders for voice recording and dictation. The big problem with reel-to-reel tape recording was the difficulty of threading the tape, the relative flimsiness of the medium and the difficulty of transporting it.

Casettes Create Portability
The compact cassette, or cassette tape, took over from reel-to-reel shortly after its introduction in 1963. The low fidelity of the initial versions made cassette tapes the perfect choice for dictation technology, although the fidelity improved greatly as the format developed. Cassettes peaked in the 1980s, although they remained popular for dictation for years afterward.

Microcasettes Lead to Pocket Recorders
The minicassette was a format introduced by Philips a few years after compact cassettes, using a slightly different technology. Because the recording speed on a minicassette was so slow, it was primarily suitable for voice recording applications. Olympus introduced a competing format a few years later, called the microcassette. Microcassettes use a thinner tape and a slower speed than regular cassette tapes, but are approximately a quarter of the size, leading to miniaturization of voice recording devices.

Digtial Replaces Tape
Apart from their microphones, digital voice recorders have very little in common with their tape-based predecessors. Instead of magnetically recording information onto analog tape, a digital voice recorder turns sound into a series of ones and zeros that can be decoded and played back by a computer. Digital voice recorders and digital Dictaphones boast increasingly small sizes that could never be achieved even with microcassettes, and the ability to easily transfer digital files to a computer for editing and archiving.