Opinion

When was the birth of hi-fi? Barry Willis argues it might have been 100 years ago when record labels embraced new electrical technologies and moved away from the ‘acoustic era’

It came and went with little fanfare, but February 25, 2025 was the 100th anniversary of the debut of microphones in recording studios. A century earlier was the day that Art Gillham, also known by the moniker ‘the whispering pianist’, became the first performer to sing into a newly installed recording system in Columbia Phonograph Company’s New York studio.

At least, that’s the tale as told by New York Times writer Ludovic Hunter-Tilney. In a breezy but very informative piece, he mentions the nearly 50-year period between Thomas Edison’s 1877 invention of the phonograph and the introduction of microphones in recording, a stretch of time known as ‘the acoustic era’ when singers and instrumentalists poured their efforts into horns that funnelled sound waves to a stylus carving undulations into a rotating wax cylinder.

Dawn of discs

Playback was a reverse process. Inherent noise favoured singers with loud voices, such as legendary Italian heartthrob Enrico Caruso. Edison cylinders, those fascinating historical artefacts, were replaced by flat discs – thick ones at first, to accommodate the ‘hill and dale’ technique of vertical inscription, then updated to thinner ones optimised for lateral inscription. The fundamentals of analogue disc encoding and playback have been refined over the decades but remain the same today.

Microphones and loudspeakers are two examples of electro-acoustic transducers. The first translates changes in air pressure to electrical signals, and the second does the opposite. Generally attributed to Danish-American engineer Peter Laurits Jensen, the microphone and its cousin, the moving-coil loudspeaker – also a Jensen invention, in 1915 – revolutionised not only recording and playback, but vastly expanded the styles of music that could be delivered. (Jensen, the founder of the Magnavox speaker brand, put on the world’s first public address demonstration, in San Francisco on Christmas Eve, 1915, and with partner Edwin S. Pridham invented a noise-cancelling microphone in 1917.)

All change

Prior to the microphone, singers who could ‘belt out’ a tune had an obvious advantage over those with soft voices. So did loud instruments such as trumpets and drums over quiet ones such as guitars. The microphone changed all that, but – no surprise – its potential wasn’t recognised by the recording industry despite the fact that it had been standard technology in radio broadcasting for several years previously.

Also not surprising was the fact that broadcasters and record companies viewed each other as enemies competing for the same market, rather than recognising a natural synergy. This sort of blind obstinacy has infected the entertainment industry forever. Film studios and television networks were at each other’s throats for many years in the 20th century, and need we mention the internecine format wars?

Hollywood film studios followed the phonograph industry’s adoption of the microphone but movie fans were dismayed that many silent-movie stars had terrible voices. There are some hilarious old comedies about that unexpected phenomenon.

Truly significant advancements for musicians and music lovers were the rapid adoption of microphones and how to use them, not only by recording engineers but by performers themselves. In his wonderful book The New Analog: Listening And Reconnecting In A Digital World, Damon Krukowski goes into detail on microphone techniques, in particular devoting considerable space to Frank Sinatra’s method of working close to or far away from the mic to get new effects. Second nature to contemporary singers who grew up with technology, in Sinatra’s time it was a conceptual breakthrough.

There’s no doubt the adoption of the microphone was, as recording engineer Todd Whitelock told Hunter-Tilney, ‘the moon shot of its time.’ And as colleague, Barry Fox, remarks this month [see Opinion] they’re now so ubiquitous that hearing unamplified voices can be a pleasant shock.