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Perfecting Sound Forever
Greg Milner
An Aural History of Recorded Music
Faber & Faber
June 2009
On Sale: June 9, 2009
416 pages
ISBN: 0571211658
EAN: 9780571211654
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In 1915, Thomas Edison proclaimed that he could record a
live performance and reproduce it perfectly, shocking
audiences who found themselves unable to tell whether what
they were hearing was an Edison Diamond Disc or a flesh-and-
blood musician. Today, the equation is reversed. Whereas
Edison proposed that a real performance could be rebuilt
with absolute perfection, Pro Tools and digital samplers
now allow musicians and engineers to create the illusion of
performances that never were. In between lies a century of
sonic exploration into the balance between the real and the
represented. Tracing the contours of this history, Greg Milner takes us
through the major breakthroughs and glorious failures in
the art and science of recording. An American soldier
monitoring Nazi radio transmissions stumbles onto the open
yet revolutionary secret of magnetic tape. Japanese and
Dutch researchers build a first-generation digital audio
format and watch as their “compact disc” is marketed by the
music industry as the second coming of Edison yet derided
as heretical by analog loyalists. The music world becomes
addicted to volume in the nineties and fights a self-
defeating “loudness war” to get its fix. From Les Paul to Phil Spector to King Tubby, from vinyl to
pirated CDs to iPods, Milner pulls apart musical history to
answer a crucial question: Should a recording document
reality as faithfully as possible, or should it improve
upon or somehow transcend the music it records? The answers
he uncovers will change the very way we think about music.
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