Edison Records
Thomas A. Edison invented the phonograph, the first device for recording and playing back sound, in 1877. After patenting the invention and benefiting from the publicity and acclaim it received, Edison and his laboratory turned their attention to the commercial development of electric lighting, playing no further role in the development of the phonograph for nearly a decade. Edison's original phonograph recorded on sheets of tinfoil and was little more than a crude curiosity, although one that fascinated much of the public. These earliest phonographs were sold mainly to entrepreneurs who made a living out of traveling around the country giving "educational" lectures in hired halls or otherwise demonstrating the device to audiences for a fee. The tinfoil phonograph was not fit for any real practical use and public interest soon waned.
History of multitrack recording
The next major development in multitrack recording came in the mid-1950s, when the Ampex corporation devised the concept of 8-track recording, utilizing its "Sel-Sync" (Selective Synchronous) recording system, and sold the first such machine to musician Les Paul. However, for the next 35 years, multitrack audio recording technology was largely confined to specialist radio, TV and music recording studios, primarily because multitrack tape machines were both very large and very expensive - the first Ampex 8-track recorder, installed in Les Paul's home studio in 1957, cost a princely US$10,000 - roughly three times the US average yearly income in 1957, and equivalent to around $90,000 in 2016. However, this situation changed radically in 1979 with the introduction of the TASCAM Portastudio, which used the inexpensive compact audio cassette as the recording medium, making good-quality 4-track (and later 8-track) multitrack recording available to the average consumer for the first time. Ironically, by the time the Portastudio had become popular, electronics companies were already introducing digital audio recording systems, and by the 1990s, computer-based digital multitrack recording systems such as Pro Tools and Cubase were being adopted by the recording industry, and soon became standard. By the early 2000s, rapid advances in home computing and digital audio software were making digital multitrack audio recording systems available to the average consumer, and high-quality digital multitrack recording systems like GarageBand were being included as a standard feature on home computers.
Stereo sound recording on tape was perfected in 1943 by German audio engineers working for the AEG corporation. Around 250 stereo tape recordings were made during this period (of which only three have survived), but the technology remained a closely guarded secret within Germany until the end of World War II. After the war, American audio engineer John T. Mullin and the Ampex corporation pioneered the commercial development of tape recording in the USA, and the technology was rapidly taken up by radio and the music industry due to its superior sound fidelity and because tape - being a linear recording medium - could be easily edited, by physically cutting and splicing the tape, to remove unwanted elements and create a 'perfect' recording. 2-track tape recording was rapidly adopted for modern music in the 1950s because it enabled signals from two or more separate microphones to be recorded simultaneously, enabling stereophonic recordings to be made and edited conveniently, which in turn facilitated the rapid expansion of the consumer high-fidelity ("HiFi") market. Stereo (either true binaural two-microphone stereo or multimixed) quickly became the norm for commercial classical recordings and radio broadcasts, although many pop music and jazz recordings continued to be issued in monophonic sound until the late 1960s.