Observe the timeline in the graphic below. Along its axis, from 1925 to roughly the present, are arrayed the five critical changeover years in audio history. Each of those particular dates carries with it a warning to the discerning listener, and that warning is:
Beware recordings made right around this time. No matter who is playing or who recorded the album, the audio is likely to suck.
Let’s take a look at each date in turn:
1925 marked the advent of electric recording. Microphones and tubed amplifiers entered the recording studio courtesy of radio and the concomitant surge towards the talkies. Studio engineers couldn’t be expected to shuck off a lifetime of experience in arranging musicians around large acoustic horns and magically acquire expertise in arranging microphones—many of which, in those early days, were temperamental divas, finicky as all get-out and prone to egregious sonic behavior. The shakedown persisted until about 1927, so early electric recordings from 1925-27 can suffer from a raft of problems, including massively boomy bass, shrillness, or just plain weirdness. But once the feathers settled everybody was set for the long haul. For the next quarter century the electrically-recorded 78 RPM disc reigned supreme, and the best of those records still have a lot to offer the modern listener. Schnabel, Toscanini, Koussevitzky, Elman, a lot of Heifetz, ditto Rubinstein and Horowitz—all on 78s. A significant portion of our audio heritage resides on those fragile, ungainly, clicky, and whooshy discs—and a lot of it can bounce back to glowing life with the merest soupçon of assistance.
1950 divides 78 RPM discs from the arrival of both magnetic tape and the long-playing record. With that comes the concept of High Fidelity, or "hi-fi." Hi-Fi was the buzzword of the age, just as "digital" would become to a later age. Many recordings made right around 1950 are dreadful—harsh and pestered with a horrid low-treble blare, often jarringly boomy with over-emphasized bass. The problem was twofold. First, as in 1925 the engineers just didn’t know what to do with the newly expanded dynamic and frequency range. Second, most folks still had their same old record players so the engineers goosed the extremes of the frequency range, hoping to extract faux-hi-fi from distinctly middling-fi record players. Some particularly egregious examples from this period: Heifetz’s solo Bach suites and partitas and Pierre Monteux’s 1950 remakes of the Franck D Minor Symphony and Berlioz Symphonie fantastique with the San Francisco Symphony. (Monteux’s originals—1941 for the Franck and 1945 for the Berlioz—offer more humane audio.) Modern remastering can help, but you know the old adage about silk purses.
(In case you’re wondering why the remakes: the original Monteux/SFS albums were big hits and the original matrices became too worn to stamp new copies. The same thing happened with a 1945 Brahms 2nd Symphony, and once again the original is sonically sweeter than its 1951 remake.)
The engineers only needed a year or so to get it right. By 1952 audio entered a mini Golden Age of monophonic sound. For those of you who are monophobic: try the EMI "Tosca" from 1955 with Maria Callas and Giuseppe di Stefano in the "Great Recordings of the Century" CD remastering; the richness and depth of the sound will blow your socks off. Or dig the original Broadway cast album of My Fair Lady, just about the last and probably the greatest hurrah of the monophonic era. Compare Pierre Monteux’s 1952 San Francisco Beethoven 4th Symphony to the Franck D Minor Symphony of just two years previously. The sonic difference is mind-blowing.
1957 is the year in which stereo started acquiring commercial traction. Stereo LPs weren’t practical until about 1958, but open-reel magnetic tapes had led the way a few years earlier. Stereo was a gimmick at first. Instruments were full left or full right, and maybe the soloist was alone in a single mono-mixed center channel. The end result was laughably bad, artificial and hokey. To hear early stereo in maximum tastelessness, may I suggest Columbia’s movie soundtrack recording of "L’il Abner" with Peter Palmer and Stubby Kaye. Even the chorus gets shoved over to the side, sometimes left, sometimes right. By 1959 the kinks were worked out and the gee-whiz days were over. Stereo mixes were much more natural. Still, if you get a chance to compare LPs that were dual-mastered in both mono and stereo during the changeover period, you will find that the monophonic version typically trumps the stereo mix. Vide Gilels-Reiner-Chicago in the Brahms 2nd Concerto, Brailowsky-Jordá-San Francisco in the Rachmaninoff 2nd Concerto, Munch-Boston Mendelssohn Italian and Reformation Symphonies, all on RCA. Mono rules for all three. Pop music adopted stereo a bit later than classical, so the process was recapitulated in the early 1960s. Many afficionados prefer the Beatles earlier monophonic mixes to the stereo releases, for example.
1981 is the year for the arrival of the compact disc. Early CDs tended to be harsh, dry, and unmusical. Part of that was inexperience yet again, as engineers learned how to equalize and mix for a medium with an expanded dynamic and frequency range. But drawbacks such as jitter and improper filtering weren’t well understood at first, so digital audio’s growing pains took longer than did those of electric recording or LPs. But by 1985 most of the problems were solved at the recording end, although home playback systems lagged behind. Most digital recordings from the early 1980s will blossom with a modern remastering, but a lot of the early CDs are icky. The poster boy is Herbert von Karajan’s CD of Richard Strauss’ Eine Alpensinfonie, made right at the dawn of the CD age. I have an original copy, and it’s downright ratty. Those early problems gave digital audio a black eye amongst audiophiles, and while all that flinty hardness is long gone, some audiophiles have remained staunch in their unwavering support for analog technology.
2005 is a compromise year. I chose it as a landmark at which digital downloads became ubiquitous and iPods began supplanting stereo systems of old. Digital downloads were initially hamstrung by slow telephone-based Internet connections and required heavy compression to make downloading feasible. But that compression comes at a dreadful price: the sound quality is lifeless, cardboard, without depth. With hi-speed broadband becoming more and more common, it’s now possible to download an entire album at full CD quality without taking all day about it. And downloads also offer the possibility of hi-res digital audio, available currently only on SACD discs with their obnoxious copy-protection. So modern-day downloads can be sonically every bit as good as a CD if not better. However, most downloaded audio remains sonically inferior, sad to say.
But if historical patterns repeat, digital downloads will lose their sonic deficiencies across the board before too long. And then something else will come along. And the cycle will begin again.