The Recording Museum
How humanity learned to freeze sound and data — from scratches in soot to atoms arranged by machine.
How It's Stored
Animated cross-sections of how different media physically encode information — wax cylinder grooves, vinyl tracks, magnetic-tape oxide flux reversals, optical pits, NAND charge cells. Select a medium to explore.
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15 Orders of Magnitude
From 100 bits per square inch to a quadrillion — fifteen orders of magnitude on a logarithmic scale. Click a bar for details.
The Collection
38 recording media artifacts spanning 170 years. Click any card to copy a summary.
No artifacts in this category.
A Brief History of Recording
Milestones in how we capture and store information — from phonautograph soot to 3D NAND.
Hands-on Instruments
Calculate any medium's capacity, watch what bit-depth reduction does to a waveform, and compare two media side-by-side.
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Original (16-bit)
Compressed (10-bit)