Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music

This is a must read for anyone who listens to music.

A fascinating look at how sound recording has changed over the years. (I posted a review from my Kindle version, but it never showed up).Two items missing when describing the warmth of LPs:1) Are the new 180 gram LPs mastered from digitized master files or the actual master tape?2) Years ago I re-bought one of my favorite LPs, as I was wearing out my original. But it sounded muddy and terrible. Later I found out that record companies would make a new version of an album's "master tape" from the previous version, which would then become the current version. I was shocked, as I knew that copying analog to analog would degrade the sound.From a sonic perspective, CDs are great in that they induced record companies to go back to original master tapes to get the best sound. Had CDs not come out, LPs would be in a sad state. Quality of sound became an important factor in music. Sadly, too much emphasis gets placed on how music sounds, rather than the music itself.Side note: I recently bought some HDTracks super-audio downloads online, but I can't hear any greater quality. My headphones only cost $50, but I should be able to detect something more.Side note 2: While I love digitized movies (which have made old movies look better than ever), you can see where digital degrades the image by looking at "2001: a space odyssey". In the original film version, the "eye" of HAL looked perfectly murky, but in digitized versions, it looks like there are bands of color in it. It's a minor issue, but perfectly illustrates what is lost when images are digitally compressed. The same is true of audio compression. But if you're only missing 1%, how much do you want to spend to get that 1% improvement?Side note 3: I loved how the book ended by going back to an Edison recording and finding out that they didn't sound as awful as the scratchy versions we usually hear.

This is a fantastic book that opens with the Edison Phonograph and the dynamic interaction with the recording artists/engineers/listeners and continues through radio, tape decks - of all kinds including DAT but the surprising history and origin of the magnetic tape, the industry shaking impact of the CD and again with ProTools and the curious audiophile predictions of the end of sound art at each phase. This goes into some enjoyable technical details but what is equally informative is the revealed dynamic between the everyday listener and the artist, program manager, recording and mastering engineer (the latter in particular) and the curious world of sound these people live in.Amazing work of journalistic research. My only regret for it is that it was published in 2010 which is too soon to go into the world of Vocaloids. I was hoping for a supreme treatment of the anti-presence phenomena of a Vocaloid concert or a Zappa redo concert. Carrie Fisher is still performing too I guess.

I read this book on the suggestion of Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer. An audiophile as well as a master photographer, Johnston keyed in on one of the outstanding aspects of Milner's book: the conflict between forces that wanted to record music as purely as they could and those who wanted to capture, somehow, the effect of the music. This struggle began with Edison's recording cylinder and continues through today.Milner describes the technical challenges that musicians and recording engineers have faced, but places them in the context of demands from the music industry (recording studios, record labels, radio stations, etc.), which gives the story an angle that makes it more meaningful to fans such as myself. After all, I don't understand what frequency modulation really is, but I am interested in how FM stations used electronic devices to manipulate the sounds of records and CDs.If I had any criticisms of Milner's work, I'd focus on two things. One, he focuses somewhat narrowly on popular music. While he seems to like a lot of the same bands that I do, I wonder how the book might have been different had he focused more on classical (which gets some good coverage, especially Telarc) or other styles such as jazz (which seems almost wholly absent). To be fair, maybe popular music stretched the technology further.My other criticism focuses on the scope of the work. The book focuses on a relatively narrow set of people. I would have liked to have learned more about some of the other personalities in involved. That said, I doubt the market for a 1000-page book on music recording is very large.All in all, a fascinating read and a must for music lovers who care about recording quality.

Fascinating book that goes into the history of sound recording including somewhat of a philosophical, psychological and sociological perspective along with the nuts and bolts of the hardware. It's also a bit of a character study and story of movers and shakers from Edison to Protools, Columbia, RCA, Phillips and Sony, the personalities behind the quest for recorded sound and a bit of their motivation.All the early marketing pseudo-science experiments that "proved" audio recording had reached a state of perfection such that audiences could not tell a recording from live - in 1918 !The speed wars to the loudness wars, analog vs digital, the quest for "high fidelity" and what that means ; capturing and reproducing the tone of an instrument, bringing the listener to a space in time with people playing in it, to the trend to create things that never existed in a real time or space till they were reproduced as created art, it's all in here .

Incredibly detailed history of recording and music production. Excellent research that goes far beyond the info that is commonly available on the internet. A+

It was in very good condition.

A well written historic lesson in audio.From Thomas Edison to The Loudness War.Recommend

Not an easy read at all. Quite confusing in it's layout. Not aesthetically appealing on the inside at all.