Record Player, Gramophone

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Similar related terms gramophone and graphophone have similar root meanings. The coinage, particularly the use of the -graph root, may have been influenced by the then-existing words phonographic and phonography , which referred to a system of phonetic shorthand; in 1852 The New York Times carried an advertisement for "Professor Webster's phonographic class", and in 1859 the New York State Teachers' Association tabled a motion to "employ a phonographic recorder" to record its meetings.

The term phonograph is usually restricted to devices playing cylinder records. The term gramophone would generally be taken to refer to a wind-up machine, and from the 1960s onwards the more common term would be record player or turntable as part of a system that also played cassettes and included radio. Such a system would be called a hi-fi or stereo (most systems being stereophonic by the mid-1960s). Gramophone took its name from the Greek words "" (grami, line) and "" (phoni, voice). Like other, similar devices the marketers of which wanted to express the notion of "sound" in the devices' names, they also used the same part of the Greek word (e.g., telephone, microphone etc.).

The Grammy trophy itself is a small rendering of a gramophone, Modern amplifier equipment still labels the input that accepts the output from a modern magnetic pickup cartridge as the 'phono' input (abbreviated from 'phonograph').

They named their version the Graphophone. Emile Berliner patented his Gramophone in 1887. The Gramophone involved a system of recording using a lateral (back and forth) movement of the stylus as it traced a spiral onto a zinc disc coated with a compound of beeswax in a solution of benzine. The zinc disc was immersed in a bath of chromic acid; this etched the groove into the disc where the stylus had removed the coating, after which the recording could be played.

Recordings made using these other equalization schemes will typically sound odd if they are played through a RIAA-equalized preamplifier. High-performance (so-called "multicurve disc") preamps, which include multiple, selectable equalizations, are no longer commonly available. However, some vintage preamps, such as the LEAK varislope series, are still obtainable and can be refurbished. Newer preamplifiers like the Esoteric Sound Re-Equalizer or the K-A-B MK2 Vintage Signal Processor are also available. Powell, James R., Jr. and Randall G. Stehle. Playback Equalizer Settings for 78 rpm Recordings. Third Edition. 1993, 2002, 2007, Gramophone Adventures, Portage MI. ISBN 0963492136 These kinds of adjustable phono equalizers are used by consumers wishing to play vintage record collections (often the only available recordings of musicians of the time) with the equalization used to make them.

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