3 Sounds from magnets
3.1 Introduction
I've an opera here you shan't escape – on miles and miles of recording tape.
Flanders, M. and Swann, D. (1977) ‘The Song of Reproduction’ from The Songs of Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, London, Elm Tree Books and St George's Press, p. 99
Sounds, pictures, measurement data, financial statistics, personal details, etc. can all be recorded and stored on magnetic media, i.e. materials that are able to be magnetised to store information for future retrieval.
Activity 19
Construct a table of all the different types of magnetic media you think you may have used and what you kept on each type of media. Were you able to put any of the media to more than just one use, i.e. store different sorts of things on that media? Do not worry at this time if you are uncertain as to what I mean by magnetic media.
Answer
Comment
The media types I thought of are shown in Table 2.
Table 2: Various types and uses of magnetic media
| Magnetic media type | Use |
|---|---|
| Audio reel-to-reel tape | Music and speech |
| Audio cassette tape | Speech, music and computer data |
| VHS tape | Videos for television and digital audio |
| DV (digital video) tape | Home movies |
| Hard disk* | Computer data, music, speech, videos |
| Floppy disk | Computer data and music |
Did you notice from my list in the above activity that most magnetic media can have more than one use? I doubt that the designers of the compact cassette ever imagined it being used to store computer data (as was the case in the 1980s when cassettes were used with home computers). Magnetic media are incredibly versatile for recording and storing information due to their convenience of use, low cost, reusability and reliability, although not all these qualities are necessarily exploited. For example, audio and video recordings are often made only once and kept indefinitely, whereas data on a computer disk may be changed by the minute, as with the word-processor data file I am updating as I write (and rewrite!) this section of the unit.