The end of Hi-Fi

I just finished a very interesting book, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music. Despite the subtitle, the author, Greg Milner, says right off the bat that the book "is not an exhaustive history of recording technology," but an attempt to find "important fault lines in the narrative" of recorded sound, to find moments when things changed and people thought, ah, this is what recorded music should sound like. He does his job very well, beginning with Edison and RCA's competing methods of acoustic vs. electrical recording, through recording on tape, multi-track recording, the digital format of the CD, right up to today's MP3s.

The focus remains on the idea of what it is we seek when we consume recorded music. The book made me look at the term "high fidelity" in a whole new light. To me, who grew up in the stereo phonograph era, hi-fi has always been just a catchphrase for "good, clear sound." But Milner explains that it came about in an attempt to reproduce as faithfully as possible live music, capturing something that was lacking in the recordings of the first half of the 20th century, "presence," the illusion that the listener was right in the room with the musicians as they were performing. As a former academic, my mind went right to the idea of authenticity, that, as far as music goes, the more "real" it is, the better it is. [Milner has a chapter on Alan Lomax and his primitive recordings of authentic American folk singers, here "authentic" seeming to mean amateurs who weren't paid to perform but who sat on their front porches and sang songs passed down through the ages, but he doesn't tie this as strongly as he could to the continuing debate on what makes a recording "real" or "good."]

The peak years of hi-fi were the 50's and early 60's, until The Beatles quit performing live and retreated to the studio to use layers of tape and artificial devices to produce music that couldn't be reproduced live--is "I Am the Walrus" the most historically profound recording ever? [Interestingly, I have waiting for me on the Kindle a book called How the Beatles Destroyed Rock & Roll, which I think will cover much of this ground in more detail, though perhaps more from an aesthetic viewpoint that a recording one.] From then on, musicians were more concerned with creating music in the studio than faithfully reproducing their live concert sound.

Milner thinks, along with many professional recording engineers, that digital sound was the beginning of the end, and the highly compressed sound of the MP3 is even worse. The book offers much evidence that, technically, he's right, but do consumers care? Obviously not very much. Should we care? I don't know. In this day and age when practically every top 40 song out there has been put together by computer, polished and corrected and made to sound like nothing that can be reproduced live in that same way, is authenticity at all crucial? The author examines a handful of recordings in detail (Def Leppard's Hysteria, Ricky Martin's "Livin' La Vida Loca," and Red Hot Chili Peppers' Californication), criticizing them all (implicitly at least) for taking us further and further from authentic recording of performance, but all of them were huge hits, even career-making turning-points for the artists involved.

Quite frankly, I listen to music these days mostly from my iPod through the car radio or on my computer in the dreaded MP3 format, and I'm happy with it (that me and my iPod at left). I use our home stereo system maybe 2 or 3 times a year--mostly to play Christmas music while I put up and take down the tree. I now have a turntable hooked up to our computer so I can rip vinyl to MP3 or just listen to my old records, and I have always believed (with a vocal minority of music consumers) that digital music lacks some hard-to-define element that vinyl has--warmth, richness, "presence"--but the sound of my records now comes through small computer speakers. I understand that authenticity is, in many cases, an artificial construct that we often let stand for more than it should, but that doesn't mean that I don't see Milner's point, and even agree with him to some extent. Regardless, the book is compelling and fascinating, and though there are holes in it--he sometimes seems to think that method of recording is the most important element in a recording, more important than the song or the artist or the genre--I highly recommend this to music fans who like to think about their music.