Vinyl Records Art

Gramophone records were the primary medium used for commercial music reproduction for most of the 20th century, replacing the phonograph cylinder, with which they had co-existed, by the 1920s. By the late 1980s, digital media had gained a larger market share, and the vinyl record left the mainstream in 1991. However, they continue to be manufactured and sold in the 21st century. The vinyl record regained popularity by 2008, with nearly 2.9 million units shipped that year, the most in any year since 1998. They are used predominantly by young adults, as well as DJs and audiophiles for many types of music. As of 2010, vinyl records continue to be used for distribution of independent and alternative music artists. More mainstream pop releases tend to be mostly sold in compact disc or other digital formats, but have still been released in vinyl in certain instances.
A device utilizing a vibrating pen to graphically represent sound on discs of paper, without the idea of playing it back in any manner, was built by Edouard-Leon Scott of France in 1857. While the mechanism, known as a phonautograph, was intended solely to depict the visual characteristics of sound, it was recently realized that this depiction could be digitally analyzed and reconstructed as an audible recording. Just such an early phonoautogram, made in 1860 and now the earliest known audio recording, has been reproduced using computer technology.