Last night I was scrolling through the cable-TV onscreen guide and came across Turner Classic Movies showing a goodly selection of short flicks by Georges Meliès, all dating from around 1902 through 1906. In case you aren't familiar with Meliès: he's the father of modern special effects, having transferred his background in onstage magic to the nascent film medium. By fixing a motionless camera to the front of the stage, he was able to make people and objects seem to appear and disappear by stopping and starting his camera. Stagecraft and in-camera trickery took care of the rest. Meliès is most famous for his "Voyage to the Moon", a kooky and loose adaptation of Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" that remains good silly fun even today.
As I watched the Meliès shorts—many of them digitally restored to like-new condition—I noticed that the actors displayed the hyperkinetic quality typical of early movies. Given my lack of a suspension of disbelief, I'm quick to notice stuff such as "his hat is about to fall off" or "those two actors just ran into each other." Thus as Meliès made tables and chairs and people pop in and out of view, I was increasingly distracted by a cast that appeared to be afflicted with a particularly nasty case of St. Vitus Dance.
Even twitchy crack-heads don't jitter around that much. Obviously somebody was telling them to do it. Well and why not? It was called a moving picture for a reason. Just the fact that people could move onscreen was abundant reason for them to stay active. And stay active they did: frenetically, maniacally, and hysterically flapping their arms and rolling their heads and running and walking and circling and jumping and jiving and jittering and jiggling. I got tired just watching them.
New media, or new wrinkles in old media, often elicit such extremes during their salad days. Consider the situation with sound and recording. Arguably the single most important development in the history of audio occurred between 1925 and 1926, when the original direct acoustic technique was enhanced by electricity: microphones picked up sounds that were formerly too faint to register on the wax, while amplification could be applied to discs upon playback. Electric recording is old hat now, but in 1926 those record producers were itching to show off the quantum leap that had just occurred in sound reproduction. That wasn't as easy it sounds, since most people were still playing their records on standard acoustic players—think Great-Granny's wind-up Victrola. Those gramophones were purely mechanical; the needle's vibration caused a matching shimmy in a diaphragm, which got a column of air into motion and into a horn of some sort.
As a result, those early electric recordings were flashy as all get-out. They boomed the bass like no tomorrow. In some cases, the producers continued the older practice of doubling string bass parts with tubas, not because they needed to (frequency response had increased to encompass most of the audible bass range) but because it produced more bling on a wind-up Victrola. Heard on modern equipment, some of those recordings come off as ridiculous, Colonel Blimp-ish and tubby. But they weren't meant to be played on pish-posh audiophile gear, so one mustn't mock them (well, not too much) for all that oom-pah-pah bass.
The transition from shellac 78 RPM discs to vinyl LPs was another time for fancies and furbelows. For consumers it was a more wrenching change than had been the coming of electric recording, because going LP meant buying a new record player. So customers were expecting big thrills for their audio dollar, and the studios were determined to provide same.
Early demonstration-class LPs can still raise goosebumps. Among the most spectacular would be Rafael Kubelik and the Chicago Symphony tearing their way through the Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, on Mercury. The thing delivered such a socko punch that critic Howard Taubman gushed that it was like being in the "living presence" of the orchestra—hence giving birth to a legendary trademark, the "Mercury Living Presence" series. Even today the Kubelik Pictures leaps athletically out of one's speakers and into the room. Heard over headphones it's rather overwhelming, in fact, all that zap and zing and zowie emanating right from the middle of one's head without any ameliorating room acoustics. Mussorgsky would seem to have been the man of the hour in the LPs palmy days. In another early mono stunner Leopold Stokowski took the San Francisco Symphony, SF Opera Chorus, and bass-baritone Nicola Rossi-Lemeny through selections from Boris Godunov. RCA Red Seal LM-1764 was for many the ideal demonstration disc for the massive new hi-fi in the living room, all glowing tubes and wood and fabric. Given the notably recessed treble common to most of those early hi-fi rigs, RCA Red Seals from the early 1950s run distinctly treble-ish when heard on modern gear. But on a 1953 RCA or Magnavox or Philco or Norelco or Capehart, the "Coronation Scene" on LM-1764 would have been a roller-coaster ride par excellence. If you have that recording—it's available in an excellent digital remastering from Cala records—you can approximate the original impact by applying some strategic equalization. Turn down the higher treble regions a bit, and give the mid bass enough of a kick to cause a woolly thwomp for timpani and string basses, and there you are. If you want to go for broke, run it through a digital filter that adds some bass rumble, for that old-timey wheel-drive turntable sound.
Or you can go all audiophile-contempo and find yourself a real LM-1764 for playing on your brand-new and super-pricey turntable. But you're going to have to look very, very carefully, because almost all extant copies of LM-1764 got chewed to ribbons by intemperate Eisenhower-era audiophiles. And, no, you may not borrow my near-mint condition copy.
Then came stereo and the studios had another potential gold mine on their hands. It had become possible to record in stereo quite early in the LP era; in 1953, for example, a broadcast of the popular Standard Hour, featuring Alfred Wallenstein conducting the San Francisco Symphony, was recorded simultaneously on stereo tape by Ampex engineers. By a miracle the tape has survived in playable condition. The stereo is fully convincing and full-bodied; the whole thing is a bit harsh but it's a spectacular improvement nonetheless. But even if tape was ready for stereo, grooves were not. A commercially viable stereo LP was not available until 1958, so any number of recordings made from about 1954 through 1958 were first released in mono, and only later in stereo format.
Two schools of thought were in vogue for recording in stereo. One school aimed to exploit the daylights out of the possibilities of two channels, and to that end tended to push blocks of players either to the far left or the far right, with only soloists in the middle. Such records were undoubtedly a lot of fun when new, but they haven't worn worth a tinker's damn. The soundtrack recording for the musical "L'il Abner" is a case in point; even the chorus is tucked over to the side somewhere. It's a weird experience, everything all compartmentalized and split up like that. The other school aimed for a naturalistic soundstage and presentation, copying as far as possible the positioning of the performers in their original space. That means a lot less overt separation than you might normally think; next time you're at a concert, note how subtle the left-to-right spread actually is. It goes without saying that natural soundstaging has prevailed for the most part, at least in the classical field, but in those early days you heard a lot of extremes.
The coming of digital technology offered its share of teething pains. One feature of early CDs was a tendency to exploit the new medium's enhanced dynamic range with extremes that were beyond the capabilities of most home stereo systems. The quiet parts were so quiet that they tended to drop below the system's noise floor, and then one had to lunge for the volume knob when the loud parts came and threatened to put a crack in one's foundation. Early CDs ran heavy on orchestral spectaculars and the like; it was a while before it all settled down.
The fact that we haven't undergone a similar shift as CDs give way to downloads demonstrates clearly to me that this time around the difference is more of degree rather than kind. After all, an uncompressed or lossless digital download will play back bit-for-bit the same as a CD. When you get right down to it, the gradual move away from portable physical media to digital storage is more about convenience and less than about than audio per se. So we're not at the beginning of anything right now. But something unexpected and new might come along and, with it, a whole new world of bling.