Product Description

From our CD collections to iPods bursting with MP3s to the hallowed vinyl of DJs, recordings are the most common way we experience music. Yet their ubiquity has deafened us to how our understanding of music is shaped by the processes that create them. "Perfecting Sound Forever" tells the story of recorded music from Thomas Edison's claim, in 1915, that he could perfectly capture the sound of a live performance, to the digital tools used today which create the illusion of performances that never were. Along the way, Greg Milner introduces the innovators, musicians, and producers - from Les Paul to Phil Spector to Neil Young - who have affected the way we hear our favorite songs and describes the major achievements, breakthroughs and failures in sound technology. Exploring the balance that recordings strike between the real and the represented, Greg Milner asks the questions which have divided sound recorders for the past century: should a recording document reality as faithfully as possible, or should it improve upon or somehow transcend the music it records? What does the perfect record sound like? The answers he uncovers will change the way we think about music.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4919 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 464 pages

Review
'The story of recorded music has perhaps never been so captivatingly told as in this history' - Waterstone's Books Quarterly
--Review

'Lively, passionate and ever-questioning ... this is an accessible, well-informed and unique perspective' - Record Collector --Review

'Milner's appreciation of music is wide and deep ... and he provides illuminating answers to questions that are poorly understood' - Guardian --Review

'A breathless, surprisingly thrilling rollercoaster ride through the history of recorded music ... a-tour-de-force'
- Mail on Sunday --Review

'A work of great stylistic charm that never loses its pleasing balance between facts and human interest'-
Daily Telegraph --Review

'Fascinating ... a rich blend of commerce, ideology, technology and creativity' - Sunday Times
--Review

Review
'An epic study ... Greg Milner has been nothing if not meticulous' - The Times

Review
'A superbly researched book, an absorbing historical narrative' - Metro

Customer Reviews

Sound affects
This absorbing book, which maps the history of recorded music from Edison's wax cylinders to the MP3
generation, is clearly a work of heart.
Greg Milner is occasionally in danger of being engulfed by his own enthusiasm, and wandering into
dark territory inhabited by obsessives, as he charts the frustrations, triumphs and more frequently
disasters of those who aimed to nail the purity of sound. The story of the early pioneers is
exhilirating but ultimately heartbreaking as it dawns on them that their dream - to capture an
accurate phonographic record of a performance - is doomed by the limitations of their equipment.
High-flown principles of the musical revolution are gradually eroded as the format wars - wax
cylinder to early vinyl to electro-magnetic tape to CD - allied with the growing commercial market
begin to dictate the way forward.
Unlikely heroes emerge: Emory Cook, the audiophiles' audiophile who as far back as the mid-1950s
witheringly declared that true high fidelity simply could not be accomplished; reggae producer King
Tubby, who unwittingly stumbled across the power of reverb, invented the remix and almost
single-handedly paved the way for rap, hip-hop and techno; British loudspeaker designer Gilbert
Briggs, who gleefully demolished the fanciful notion that any recording could ever possess the power
and dynamic of a live performance.
Milner also charts the heroic struggles of young, talented producers to make the best of the limited
resources at their disposal - trying to mix on two-track machines, more incredibly trying to work
their magic so that the music sounded good even as it crackled out of tinny radio speakers.
But he also shows that the sudden explosion of high-tech equipment in the 1980s and 90s, which
should in theory have been music to the hard-pressed producers' ears, contained within it the seeds
of its own destruction, as the search for sound's Holy Grail - presence - became the first casualty
of what he calls "the loudness war".
It is here that Milner's genius flourishes. At last he nails the question that has vexed so many
since the invention of the compact disc - Neil Young and Bob Dylan most notably among them: why does
a format that has a far greater dynamic range than vinyl fail so often to sound as good?
In a nutshell: compression. Severely compressed recordings sound louder than those carefully
mastered, and in today's world of headphone listening fool the brain into thinking that loudness =
better, leading to such horrors as the Red Hot Chilli Peppers' hideously distorted "Californication"
album (Milner calls them: "the band that clipped themselves to death").
Less is more of course. And here is a further paradox that clearly bewilders Milner: how can a
file format that strips out most of the sound end up sounding better than the CD original? Rigorously
conducted scientific tests show that the AAC format, encoded at 128 kbps, beats almost everything
else hands down - to Milner's dismay, one suspects.
This is a splendid book, and one anyone with even a passing interest in musical history would be
well advised to pick up. Here's my one caveat, and the reason I docked it a star: Milner simply
can't hide his love for vinyl; but I grew up with vinyl, and suffered too often at its hands - the
warps, clicks, sticks and jumps - to have any fondness for it as a format, or indeed any
illusions about its usefulness.

Point proven, but no alternative given
Greg Milner is very passionate about music he likes and how he likes to listen to it. The (unfairly) simplistic premise of this book would be "Analog/LP = Good, Digital/CD = Bad". And he turned almost every stone around America to prove his point, from Edison's single minded-obsession with improving the recorded sound quality to explaining in detail how modern, internet based compression formats are destroying the sound we now listen on a daily basis.

It is rather obvious that he had his mind made up long before he started researching for this book. Warmth, wittiness and houmor of his writing about early days of cylinders and vinyls turns quickly into bitter sarcasm every time he mentions CDs, and Digital seems to be a dirty word for him. Artistic and technological advancements in Europe are largely overlooked, except when they are either nicked or exported over the Atlantic. I couldn't stop wandering, if by any chance CD wasn't invented by an European and a Japanese company, would it fair a bit better in his views?

Accounts of audio developments are detailed and to the point, but some might find them too technological. Milner wastes no efforts to prove his point - that since the 80s over-produced and over-compressed rock and pop music doesn't sound 'natural' any more, exclusively due to digital recording technology and digital sound processing. But when he gets to explain why do we suffer from a digital fatigue, he is still exclusively focused on rock and pop. Classical music is barely mentioned, and even then, Leopold Stokowsky is painted as a charlatan and Herbert von Karajan wrongly(!) labeled as 'Hitler's favorite conductor'. And that's it. Naturally created sound doesn't seem to exist in Milner's recorded world, but it was far easier proving that already artificially created sound of rock and pop music sounds equally artificial when recorded and reproduced. And the fact that Philips and Sony already fixed all shortcomings that 'dirty' CD made such an inadequate sound carrier is also barely mentioned - there are only two passing references about Super Audio CD in the whole book, but nothing about its capabilities to sound like a good old LP.

Everything concerned, this is an interesting read. If you have more than a passing interest in sound technology, this is a must. The unique selling point of Milner's writing should be his ability to build up a very convincing theoretical analysis out of historical narrative. And, at the end of the day, you can agree or disagree with some of his points, but the fact remains that the commercial need for a quick musical buck lowered the sound quality of the (rock and pop) music we listen today to an equivalent of a cold pizza - digestible only if you're desperate.

A definitive history of recorded music
As other reviewers have pointed out, it is surprising that no-one has written a book exactly like this before.

Greg Milner sets out to tell the story of recorded music and whets the appetite as early as the Intro chapter with the story of the phonautograph which was built by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville in 1857. It used a stylus attached to a vibrating diaphragm to etch patterns on a rotating glass cylinder covered in carbon. This preceded Edison's phonograph, and it's amazing to discover that in 2008 scientists actually found a way to play some of Scott's phonautographs! This is just one small example of knowledge that I gained from "Perfecting Sound Forever".

I also gained a much greater understanding of what I'm actually listening to in modern music and that alone was worth reading the book for. The book is very technical at times and, again as mentioned by other reviewers, some of this did go over my head. But it is also very readable and I'm glad that I stuck with it through some of the more challenging passages.

Tracing recorded sound all the way through to modern digital techniques, the book is filled with a lot of input from people in the music business and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to learn more about the development of recorded music - it certainly gave me a tremendous insight into how it all happened.