The phonautograph, invented in 1857, used a horn and diaphragm to capture sound and a stylus inscribed a line to indicate the sound on a rotating cylinder. In 1924 the Western Electric Company started to experiment with amplifiers and electromagnetic cutting heads, in other words, the cutting head would pick up sound from the amp and carve grooves accordingly, the format employed for this was vinyl.
In 1933 reel to reel tape machines started to be used in recording. The advantage of using tape over vinyl was that it permitted the recording to be edited by cutting and splicing it back together; however, one of the problem is tape hiss, which is always audible and gets worse the more times you record over the tape.
Tape recording was the industry standard until digital techniques appeared in the 80s. Phillips and Sony were the first to experiment with recording sound onto laser compact discs, and these were introduced into the market in the early 80s; however, recordable CDs would not be available until the mid 90s.