Democracy of Sound (15 page)

The war’s other major contribution came at the end, when Americans learned that German recording technology had progressed further than previously understood. The US military discovered the Magnetophon, a reel-to-reel tape recorder developed by German engineers in the 1930s, toward the end of the
war, and Americans were soon experimenting with the device back home. The technology rose to prominence by capturing the attention of Bing Crosby, who was eager to record his East Coast radio performances on magnetic tape and rebroadcast them later the same evening on the West Coast. Weary of performing twice every night, the singer left radio in 1944, after NBC refused to let him prerecord his show. In 1946, ABC got Crosby to return with the promise of recording on acetate discs, but the sound quality was too poor. When Crosby learned of the Magnetophon in 1947, he assembled a team of engineers to work on improving the technology; when their efforts fell short, he ponied up crucial funds to the Ampex Corporation, which allowed the company to expand its operation and produce a viable tape recorder by 1948. Crosby was the biggest star on the roster of record label Decca, which soon began using Ampex tape for its master recordings.
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Even before broadcasters adopted magnetic recording, the technology had made limited inroads with the listening public. The Brush Development Company had debuted its Soundmirror, a reel-to-reel recorder that used steel tape, at the World’s Fair in 1939. By the next year, professors at Hunter College in New York City were using the device to help students correct speech impediments.
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After the war, Brush marketed the Soundmirror to consumers as a way to capture “your favorite radio programs, records, children’s voices, two-way telephone conversations.” In 1947, the New York department store Schirmer’s guaranteed that its “radio-television service department can show you better than anyone else how to operate Soundmirror in your home … how to hook it up to your own radio or phonograph … and how to install such accessories as the Telechron clock which enables you to record your favorite program while you are away from home.”
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A year later, Magnetic Recorders Company, a retailer in Los Angeles, urged consumers to “keep forever great moments of radio [and] record your own parties, speeches, conferences,” using a Soundmirror with a built-in radio.
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Why did consumers begin showing interest in home recording in the 1940s? Recordable media were common in the early days of the music industry. The first phonograph was the wax cylinder, which could be recorded on, yet the cylinder rapidly lost ground to disc recording. (Two cylinders were sold for every one disc in 1909, but by 1914 the ratio had flipped to one cylinder for every nine discs.)
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Henceforth, only a select few listeners had access to technology that could inscribe sound, which remained largely confined to the studios and pressing plants of record companies. Why, then, were people not interested in home recording in the early twentieth century? David Morton, a historian of sound recording, thinks the answer is simple: “Americans disliked standing before the recording machine and hated the sounds of their own recorded voices even more.”
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Of course, other factors likely contributed to the dominance of
playback-only records as well. Emile Berliner’s flat disc was more durable, clearer, and perhaps more convenient to store. The disc was also a permanent record—once recorded on, whether in a home or studio, it could not be erased and reused, unlike the later forms of magnetic tape and wire. For an amateur using a disk engraver, making a permanent record of false starts and flubs could be unappealing.

Cultural and economic conditions were also more auspicious in the 1950s than in the 1890s or 1930s, when manufacturers had previously introduced amateur recording systems with little success. The availability of radio and television provided fodder for home recording, beyond dictation at the office or performance in the home, as the Soundmirror’s marketing suggests. In the 1890s and 1900s, people could document their own performances, and some even invited friends to bring their instruments over so each could make her own recording. At the time, the only other option would have been to lug the fragile equipment into a concert hall.
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Companies such as RCA struggled to market home disk-recording machines in the 1930s. The difficult operation of such machines appealed to a small group of music enthusiasts and collectors, such as the members of the Hot Record Society, but for most Americans years of personal experience ingrained an understanding of discs as containers of prerecorded sounds. In his study of the early development of sound recording, Jonathan Sterne argues that the shift from wax cylinders to discs resulted from changes in middle-class leisure and family life. In the Victorian era of the late nineteenth century, the cylinder provided a way for families to entertain guests, listening to home recordings in much the same way a family might share a photo album or home movie with friends. The phonograph industry focused on selling prerecorded sounds rather than home recording equipment in part, Sterne suggests, because consumers took greater interest in a broader consumer culture outside the home, which radio and recorded music on discs symbolized.
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The rise of magnetic tape as a consumer good in the 1950s suggests that the habits of family life alone cannot explain the success or failure of home recording. Certainly, the domestic, suburban turn of American life after World War II may have contributed to a renewed interest in the shared experience of recording that Sterne describes in the Victorian Era. However, certain technical features of magnetic recording made it more appealing than the wax cylinder, which reached its peak of popularity years before the advent of electric recording in the 1920s improved the fidelity and amplification of recorded sound. Magnetic tape’s greater potential for durability, flexibility, and quality stimulated the adoption of a “high fidelity” hobby by middle-class consumers in the postwar era, when prosperity enhanced the prospects for a new method of home recording to gain popularity.

Piracy and the Hi-Fi Mind

In the 1950s and 1960s, many guides to the technology of magnetic recording were published in the United States and Europe. Some explained the science for people who wanted to build their own equipment, while others focused on the uses to which tape recorders could be put.
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“Tape recording is fun!” promised one guidebook. The technology could be used for taping sound from radio and television, making original recordings, and backing up fragile disc records.
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The author also recommended making an “up-to-date reel of the latest hits” by collecting musical selections on tape for a party—one of the earliest examples of “mixing,” the practice of arranging songs in an original sequence, which would become popular with the cassette and, later, the compact disc.
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Tape users could also convert their recordings into disc form. Since tape recording was still a relatively new technology, one could not expect that others would have compatible equipment to play a tape recording. Exchanging a record with friends often required putting the sounds on the widely accepted format of a phonograph disc. “The outstanding advantages of a disc recording is that it is permanent and it can be played back on any phonograph,” the Rek-O-Kut company told consumers. “Because of this, most tape recordings ultimately end up on discs.”
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However, the Rek-O-Kut disc recorder carried a price tag of $459.95 in 1955—beyond the means of all but the most affluent hobbyist, although perhaps affordable for a small company or club. If buying a recorder was out of the question, record companies and professional studios offered “transcription services,” which would press discs from tape recordings. (Dante Bollettino had used the custom-pressing division of RCA to make his jazz bootlegs in the early 1950s.) “If you can dispose among your friends and relatives and associates, of from fifty to a hundred copies of a standard-type LP record that may be of as fine a quality as anything on the market, yet at a price not more, but considerably less than the usual retail price—then you’re ‘in business,’” choral director Edward Tatnall Canby observed. He recommended taping glee clubs, church concerts, and speeches at special gatherings—any activity that involved a large number of people, who could be counted on to buy enough records to make the pressing practical.
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For Canby, making records was a way of being involved with music for those who could not play an instrument professionally or even sing in the choir. Musicians, music teachers, and musicologists often mocked the collector for being a passive recipient of sound, he said: “We can be active, too, on the technical side and plenty of us are ‘doing,’ most actively, in the building of better and better high fidelity outfits.”
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Home recording lent an active, almost artisanal aspect to collecting. For middle-class men in the 1950s, the appeal of an expensive hobby that could reaffirm the masculine virtue of practical expertise was
significant. Tinkering with all manner of sound equipment to squeeze out the most precise and perfect Debussy could allow a man to feel both sophisticated and skillful. As Canby said, “The increment of pleased pride and heightened morale is incalculable.”
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High-fidelity hobbyists saw recordings as documents of reality, and it was the job of men and their machines to make that reflection as accurate as possible.
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Reviews in periodicals such as
High Fidelity
(founded 1950) and
Stereo Review
(1958) emphasized the clarity and balance of a recording and the quality of both the performance and the sound engineering in technical terms.
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To be beautiful was to be “lifelike,” and without distortion.
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The Dutch, an ad for Philips humbly suggested, made such good sound equipment because they were obsessed with order and detail, as shown by their “meticulous rows of tulips.” Their Norelco sound equipment could convey the “full tone wealth” of the music, with “all the glow, all the color the composer intended.”
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Even a snack food could be subject to this mentality of exactness. “Rye-Krisp is the only cracker with the high-fidelity crunch,” a television commercial boasted in 1955. “When you break a Rye-Krisp in two, you hear all the highs and lows that you do not hear with any other crackers. Rye-Krisp gives you the full fidelity of eating enjoyment.”
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Although
High Fidelity
magazine did devote some of its pages to jazz, the hobbyist literature focused overwhelmingly on classical European music. This genre seemed a natural fit for a discourse based on the refinement of presentation as much as that of performance. Moreover, its cultural cachet contributed to the self-image of consumers of both the music and the equipment, which were marketed to the “connoisseur” and “the man of discernment”—a man frequently presented in dressy clothes, his home always decorated with spare, modernist flair. A wine glass was often present.
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“No home pretending to any degree of artistic cultivation is complete today without those precious discs containing in such small space so much of the world’s priceless heritage of beauty,” one guide to high fidelity asserted, recalling earlier claims that the phonograph would democratize access to the finest sounds of high civilization.
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As Roy F. Allison reminded his readers, a great deal of technical knowledge separated the “layman” from the “high fidelity initiate.”
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As with the jazz collectors of the 1930s and 1940s, the hi-fi world was by and large a boys’ club. Writers on hi-fi discussed music in terms of “battles” and “tournaments” between different symphonies and even models of instruments, while further improvement in the fidelity of recording to real sound was described as a sort of triumph.
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Men also wrote frequently of their wives’ frustration with the noise, clutter, and unsightliness the hi-fi hobby generated, not to mention their husbands’ obsession with it. As Dana Andrews admitted, his neighbors were none too pleased by the crystal-clear sound of Bartok blaring in the middle of the night, and his wife did not appreciate that massive amounts
of sound equipment had taken over their home. “If I find her on a picket line along with the neighbors,” he wrote, “I’ll probably have to blame it on the irony of her bedroom being directly over the den, which houses an imposing battery of speakers.”
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Andrews was not unique in his penchant for such “imposing” consumer goods. Indeed, this domestic struggle reflected the differing aspirations of men and women to acquire and flaunt the trappings of abundance. “The family home would be the place where a man could display his success through the accumulation of consumer goods,” historian Elaine Tyler May has written. “Women, in turn, would reap the rewards for domesticity by surrounding themselves with commodities.”
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Like homesteaders who brought all their pots and pans and furniture out to be photographed in front of sod houses, suburbanites aspired to create a tableau of their material achievements in the home. Male readers of
High Fidelity
might like to show off their financial and technical prowess by owning an “imposing battery of speakers,” but this commodity might not suit the vision of the home held by their wives. Electronics companies geared their ads to men’s desire for respectability and masculine mastery, while the postwar boom and the ideology of consumerism provided the necessary conditions for gadgets like reel-to-reel tape recorders and disc cutters to flourish in the market, setting up new possibilities for copying sound.