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jazzy_daveGreg Milner "Perfect Sound Forever" (Granta Books)
An informative, fascinating history featuring the inventors, scientists and musicians behind the development of recording technologies from Thomas Edison to MP3's. With Les Paul and Leadbelly, Nazi broadcasters and King Tubby’s Kingston studio, the Pixies, and Shellac, this is a story of the search for fidelity, authenticity, and the perfect sound.
However, this account is not a history of music recording; primarily it's a survey of the developments over the past fifty years in the recording of American pop music.
It's the omissions that irk me. Although he acknowledges recording's initial start in France, Milner really examines only American advances in equipment and recording techniques. Surely the British, the French, or the Germans (at least) contributed something to the challenges of transferring sound waves to a persistent medium. There's an interesting story in British Decca's development during World War II of anti-submarine hydrophone technology that subsequently became the basis for their revolutionary ffrr (or full frequency range recording) technique, an important impetus to high fidelity music recording in the 1950s; but you'll learn nothing of that from this book. Milner can also spend several pages on the Beatles' innovative recordings without ever mentioning George Martin; Ricky is the only Martin who makes it into the book's index. What's with that?
Edison's goal, according to Milner, was to make an objectively accurate record of an individual performance. The through-line of Perfecting Sound Forever follows the wandering path from that ideal to recent decades when a CD produces sounds that may never have had any prior physical existence at all. Organising the book around such a notion requires Milner to virtually ignore classical music after Stokowski's recording of Fantasia (on page 71 of 371) and almost all of acoustic jazz. Fidelity may have vanished in the 1990's from certain types of pop music, but it's grossly over-simplified, even in the era of MP3's, to imply that fidelity has ceased to be a goal of digital recording in general.
Despite the flaws that I have outlined I found some interesting content in most chapters.
An informative, fascinating history featuring the inventors, scientists and musicians behind the development of recording technologies from Thomas Edison to MP3's. With Les Paul and Leadbelly, Nazi broadcasters and King Tubby’s Kingston studio, the Pixies, and Shellac, this is a story of the search for fidelity, authenticity, and the perfect sound.
However, this account is not a history of music recording; primarily it's a survey of the developments over the past fifty years in the recording of American pop music.
It's the omissions that irk me. Although he acknowledges recording's initial start in France, Milner really examines only American advances in equipment and recording techniques. Surely the British, the French, or the Germans (at least) contributed something to the challenges of transferring sound waves to a persistent medium. There's an interesting story in British Decca's development during World War II of anti-submarine hydrophone technology that subsequently became the basis for their revolutionary ffrr (or full frequency range recording) technique, an important impetus to high fidelity music recording in the 1950s; but you'll learn nothing of that from this book. Milner can also spend several pages on the Beatles' innovative recordings without ever mentioning George Martin; Ricky is the only Martin who makes it into the book's index. What's with that?
Edison's goal, according to Milner, was to make an objectively accurate record of an individual performance. The through-line of Perfecting Sound Forever follows the wandering path from that ideal to recent decades when a CD produces sounds that may never have had any prior physical existence at all. Organising the book around such a notion requires Milner to virtually ignore classical music after Stokowski's recording of Fantasia (on page 71 of 371) and almost all of acoustic jazz. Fidelity may have vanished in the 1990's from certain types of pop music, but it's grossly over-simplified, even in the era of MP3's, to imply that fidelity has ceased to be a goal of digital recording in general.
Despite the flaws that I have outlined I found some interesting content in most chapters.
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