Record players
How sound is recorded and replayed from vinyl
Vinyl records are the audio storage media of yesteryear – though they are having a re-emergence in popularity. You can think of them as MP3 players that simply store sound using a different system: older hard-disk drives use magnetism to store this information, reading and writing using an arm that sweeps back and forth across spinning magnetic plates. Flash-memory music players like iPods, meanwhile, make use of transistor technology to store digital music, while compact discs have tiny pits pressed into the silver layer by a laser, which can be read by a CD player.