Forgotten Audio Formats: Floppy Disks

Original author: Phil Strongman
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Floppy disks have an amazingly diverse history for such a thin format, and in this article, everything from the Beatles, David Bowie and ABBA to Alice Cooper and the heavy metal style combined against their background. Their appearance is associated with National Geographic magazine, the McDonald’s million-dollar ad campaign, and the covers of numerous fashion magazines for girls. They were illegally pressed on x-rays in the USSR [the famous "music on the bones" - approx. transl.] and they even helped such a notorious liar as Richard Tricky Dicky Nixon become president of the United States in 1968.

Floppy disks from the 1960s to the beginning of the 1990s were sold by tens of millions - and then almost disappeared from the face of the earth for a decade and a half. But, as befits a product based on a spiral scratch, this was not the end.

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Floppy disk of Leonard Cohen. On the outer edge you can see a dark audio track.

“Musical cards” of a different kind — coarse grooves pressed into cards — have been sold since about the 1950s. In the second half of the 50s, even flexible vinyl discs appeared in Britain, although from a technical point of view their quality was disgusting. A few years later, an improved floppy disk was developed, patented, and introduced - the American company Eva-Tone Incorporated released it in 1962, first calling it “Eva-tone Soundsheet” [sound sheet]. This offspring had several advantages over his parents - a singing postcard and the original spiral-groove product, known as a vinyl record.

Eva-tone's soundsheet no doubt sounded better than cardboard postcards, and since floppy disks used much less vinyl than records, they were much cheaper to print, store, and transport. Often in the manufacture of used polyvinyl chloride instead of granular vinyl, which was even cheaper. In addition, the flexibility of these products meant that they could be sold on the covers or inside magazines, booklets and newspapers. They were quite hardy, unlike shell rims at 78 rpm, which could easily break if dropped to the floor, or 45 rpm vinyl records, which, although stronger than shellac, could still accidentally break.

One little problem


The situation was similar to a comprehensive win, but the Eva-tone floppy disks, like their British predecessors, still had a couple of minuses. For example, 12 "or 10" LPs were difficult to make, since floppy disks were very light: a typical single or EP disc usually weighed between 4.5 and 6.5 g — like a couple of sugar cubes. Paper or cardboard packaging weighed more, about 9 g. Compare this with 40 g of a typical vinyl single, or with 200 g of many shellac singles at 78 rpm - and you will understand how much material was saved.

Then they had a playback problem when the heavy losing head could just hold the floppy disk in place. Under normal conditions, there were two ways out of this situation - you could play a floppy disk by putting it on top of a vinyl one, or put a couple of coins in the area near the center of the disk. Later, some of the Soundsheet brand discs actually came out with painted circles indicating the places where the coins had to be put. Sometimes you had to perform both tricks at the same time to make the record play.

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In the USSR, this was also

But there were two more insoluble problems with the new ultra-thin recordings. Firstly, although after the first few plays for not-so-pretentious ears, the recording quality could argue with standard vinyl, floppy disks never had the same frequency range as full-weight disks of 45 rpm or magnetic tape in 7.5 "coils / C. Professionally use them, for example, on the radio, it was possible only in the absence of other options.Another annoying factor was the short life of the floppy disks - their shallow pressed tracks led to an increase in surface noise, scratches appeared vivo Recording faster and louder, so skip a track and jumping needle is quickly becoming a major problem drive, losing a few times.

Star moments in the history of floppy disks

For these reasons, the use of Soundsheet was quickly limited to three, albeit extensive, areas: promotional recordings of musical groups, children's recordings, and magazine adverts - basically, though not always, these magazines were music.

A typical example is The Beatles floppy disk, which they sent to their fan club in 1964. In the video below you can hear such funny things as the “sing with us” track and appeals to fans.



The magnificent four made it again in 1967, although the presentation this time was less ironic and more hasty, but this time there was at least a full song there.



A year later, Richard Nixon won the 1968 election thanks to a well-funded campaign that used Soundsheet among other materials. More than a million discs were sent by voters to key states, marked “Nixon is the one we need!” And recorded his speech.



But the discs were cheap and fun, and sales did not subside until the late 1960s. Promotional records from the early 1970s show how large the floppy disk industry has become. The disc in the video below is made in the form of a rectangular sheet, and this form was preserved almost to the very end. In the United States, the term “soundsheet” has always been more popular than “flexi disc”.

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Examples of greeting cards on discs. The material itself is a plastic film, which, using lamination, was applied to a printed postcard.

In Britain, vinyl companies, such as Lyntone, bought a license to manufacture improved floppy disks from Eva-tone and opted for the more descriptive term “floppy disc” because the word “disc” was believed to emphasize the connection with vinyl recordings , and the original name from the USA “sound sheet” could confuse music lovers - they might think that we are talking about printed notes [sheet music]. Surely, people involved in the industry were threatened by the old music-hall joke: “Do you like sheet music? 'No, I just like the good stuff ... ”[" - Do you like sheet music? - No, I prefer good. " The joke is based on the consonance of the words sheet and shit - approx. perev.]

David Bowie greatly benefited from new format discs when his breakthrough album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars, became one of the fastest-growing albums in the summer of 1972. RCA records, with which he collaborated at the time, was worried that she might not have enough vinyl due to gigantic demand - in those years, the fast-selling millionth circulation was something out of the ordinary - and as a result, the windy teenage pop fans weren’t they will want to wait a couple of weeks for a new batch and buy something else. Perhaps this fear was not unfounded. And then RCA Records used Dynaflex discs to print tens of thousands of copies of Ziggy Stardust songs, using a thin sheet of vinyl that outperformed floppy discs but weighed 25% less than a regular album.

RCA Records managed to release the required number of discs, Ziggy remained in the album charts, he soon practically settled in first places and David Bowie became a true star.



Cut spending and pounce on burgers


Some vinyl experts were outraged by this RCA approach. But after the 1973 oil crisis and the rise in the cost of vinyl, such discs for audio record companies became a good way to save on the cost of the album by cutting its weight and, as a result, sound quality. The thicker and heavier the album, the better the audio is reproduced - hence the fashion among fans of audio on discs from 160 to 200 grams.

Around that time, the leading British music newspaper New Musical Express issued an exclusive recording by Alice Cooper, a good imitation of Elvis Presley titled Slick Black Limousine. On the reverse side were excerpts from his upcoming album "Billion Dollar Babies". This edition was highly regarded among Cooper fans for many decades, until the record began to appear on pirated discs.

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Swedish pop sensation ABBA also did not refuse to give out exclusives free of charge: excerpts from their Australian tour of that year were placed on a golden one-sided ABBA / Live 77 floppy disk. It was distributed only in the form of gifts for children selling books, newspapers and magazines for the Jultidningsförlaget corporation from house to house on Christmas holidays. And at the other end of the pop culture spectrum in 1978 was the pioneering British electronic band The Human League, which was distributing a floppy disc called “Flexi Disc” with the 12th single “Dignity of Labor”, although it was later republished on the album “Reproduction.” At that time, this group was considered an arthouse, and in full accordance with their image on this record, one could hear how the group members were discussing, in fact, floppy disks, and whether they should record such a disc themselves.

Meanwhile, in the United States in the 80s, McDonalds used floppy disks — and in some states, cardboard records — to distribute a remake of the 1974 stupid but sweet hit Life Is A Rock (but The Radio Rolled Me) for its Menu Song ad campaign, which included an instant win of $ 1,000,000.



The campaign was incredibly successful and stretched to 1988 and 1989. Several different versions of this song were recorded and printed on 78 million (!) Floppy disks, which were then packaged in newspapers and leaflets. On each of the recordings there was the voice of some guest singer or just a person from the crowd who was trying to perform a song - after his mistake, the track ended. McDonald's acted in a cunning way, having printed the only disc on which the song ended correctly. The owner of this single record was to win a million dollars. After many months of waiting, during which cynics aloud doubted the reality of the existence of such a disc, Charlene Price from the city of Galaxy in West Virginia still found him, immediately fulfilling the dream of many people: she bought a store, in which she worked as a saleswoman. Whether she fired the former boss on the spot, history is silent ...

There was even a separate floppy magazine in London in the 1980s. It was called Flexi Pop, and was almost entirely devoted to all kinds of rumors and gossip, and the magazine was accompanied by a disc with a recording of the song, which at that time was on the top of the charts. Among these candidates, The Jam, Japan, and Depeche Mode met, and at the peak of their popularity, the magazine sold 90,000 copies. Recently, they even wrote a book about the magazine.

CD killed floppy star


It seemed that floppy disks would sell better and more and more often, but the end of the 80s was the beginning of their end. Then came the CD, and they gradually began to gain popularity as a means to listen to music, and people with limited finances switched to pirated audio tapes - despite the fact that many of these tapes were chrome or metal, and their quality was relatively high. Flexi Pop magazine closed, and disc press factories increasingly refused to accept low-cost orders.

Only in the USSR did floppy disks remain in mass circulation until the 1990s, and mostly popular and children's songs were recorded on them. And in the 70s and 80s, when Western rock music was banned in the USSR, pirates and fans illegally recorded audio on tape from x-rays [in fact, “music on the bones” existed from the late 40s to the early 80s, when cassette recorders began to appear - approx. transl.].

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Relatively new Electronic Sound magazine with a flexible record inside

With the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev, cultural and political censorship came to an end, and music on the bones lost its appeal. By 1992, floppy disks were on the verge of extinction. For almost 15 years, they remained more likely dead than alive. By the year 2000, even Eva-tone had finished their production. But in 2010 there was a slight renaissance: the independent Pirates Press factory occupied a niche of vintage products and began to produce floppy disks of all shapes, sizes and colors.

This idea might not be successful, but the extreme metal magazine, Decibel, has already begun experimenting with this form of recording, releasing exclusive tracks for new bands, and every release of it is actively diverging. Since then, many music publishers, such as Third Man, Side One Dummy and Domino, as well as Alternative Press and German PUNKROCK, regularly sell or distribute floppy disks. In 2015, the Italian factory PizzaDischi began accepting orders for the manufacture of such disks, while the cost of rare collection editions of old floppy disks began to exceed £ 200.

Floppy disks may now be as insignificant as their weight - but it seems that it is still afloat. Floppy disks remain a rare example of a forgotten audio format that has not completely disappeared and is not completely forgotten.

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