The audio recording: a minimal history (part four)

Digital period (1975 – to the present)The fourth period is the one in which we still find ourselves today and is characterized by the introduction of digital technologies that have brought about the most rapid and far-reaching changes in the history of audio recording. In a span of less than two decades, all previous recording technologies have been rendered obsolete by digital sound coding.The theoretical foundations of converting an audio signal into a sequence of numbers had been known for decades,¹ but it was not until the 1970s that the advancement of basic technologies made it possible to apply it to obtain quality recordings. The process of storing and playing a digital sound consists of several steps: once a sound has been converted into an electrical signal with a microphone, measurements of the level of the electrical signal can be made at very short intervals (sampling rate). Each measurement is represented by a number, which is stored using any technology (computer memory, magnetic media, optical media, etc.). This first step is called analog-to-digital (A/D) conversion. In order to reproduce sound, it is necessary to carry out the complementary operation, called digital-to-analog (D/A) conversion, which involves retrieving numbers from memory with the same sampling rate at which they were derived, and using them to reconstruct an electrical signal, which in turn can be transformed into sound by a loudspeaker. Digital recorders introduced in the 1970s used videotapes from VCRs as their media because at that time computers were underpowered, memories expensive and of low capacity, and data transmission lines too slow to think about distributing content in digital format (streaming): recording and partial signal processing were thus the only commercial applications available. In the late 1970s, it became clear that, through laser reading technology, it would be possible to create and put into production a distribution system for audio recordings in digital format. In 1979 Philips and Sony began to study the system that would become the Compact Disc (CD). The record companies, on their side, sensed that the new format would vastly improve the quality standard of high fidelity, especially in the area of cultured music that would initially be favored by the more affluent consumer groups. They then decided to invest economic resources by intensifying the making of digital recordings first in the area of cultured music, since the digital editing techniques available at the time were still rather crude and unsuited to pop music procedures, later extending to other genres.

The CD was launched in the Japanese market in 1982 and in the rest of the world in 1983 posing the recording industry with a myriad of problems, chief among them being the acceptance of the new format by the general public who were required not only to invest money to equip themselves with a suitable player, but also to spend more than they used to do to buy an LP record. There was also the question of whether, in the transition phase, the public would accept the coexistence of the two formats CD and LP, characterized by such different performances (at least on paper). In addition, because factories for making CDs required enormous investment, there was a fear that there would be a monopolistic concentration of manufacturing associated with poor availability. Then there was the question related to how and when to transfer the repertoire in the catalogs to CD, which involved making the public accept the idea of publishing digital media containing analog recordings. And again: how to use the longer duration available (over 70 minutes), since all the albums made for the LP format lasted no more than 45 minutes? It was also necessary to understand how the song lineup would be affected in a pop music album once it was put on a medium that did not have the same features as the 33rpm which has two sides and which lacks direct access to each individual track. The artwork was also the subject of analysis: how would the small size of the medium and its packaging be received, after at least two decades of pop albums adored by audiences even for their thirty-centimeter-side covers? We must not forget that the glories of Progressive Rock had just ended, and that was the period when artwork experienced its heyday.² The music industry was unprepared to deal with such questions that, in some cases, it was not even able to understand. The focus was all on the supposed, overwhelming technical superiority of the new medium that would guarantee perfect recordings, discs with unlimited shelf life, as well as the zeroing of differences between players during playback due to digital encoding. Today, forty years later, we can say that things did not go as planned. The sound of early digital recordings was far from excellent. CD players initially neglected the analog section to focus exclusively on the digital section, with the result that most old analog recordings on tape or LP sounded vastly superior in terms of tonal coherence and harmonic correctness. Studio equipment and recording techniques also had to be adapted to the new standard, and the workflow to be employed during recording sessions had to be completely rethought, thing for which it was necessary to wait for the advent of sufficiently powerful and affordable workstations capable of making an impressive number of tracks (several dozen) available to sound engineers, using one or more for each instrument played. It took at least fifteen years to come to understand the secrets of digital and be able to make sonically sound recordings and players that would not deaden them.In spite of all the problems, the Compact Disc quickly replaced both the 12-inch album and the 7-inch single as the standard consumer format, while still making a qualitative improvement due to its wide dynamic range (~96dB), excellent signal-to-noise ratio, and substantial storage capacity.

The case of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony

Where does the value of seventy-four minutes maximum CD length come from? The answer to the question has to do with Ludwig van Beethoven, and the story associated with the number 74 has become something of a curious legend in audio so it is worth reporting. Both Sony and Philips were aware that Herbert Von Karajan would be a crucial testimonial for the success of the new format they were working on. Even before the official debut, the legendary conductor had already magnified the gifts of the new technology in several interviews, agreeing to attend the press conference presenting the CD prototype that was to be held in Vienna (Fig. 10). Von Karajan had set a condition, however: that the new technology could allow listeners to hear Beethoven’s entire Ninth Symphony without interruption. The longest recording Sony could find was one from 1951 by Wilhelm Furtwängler, which was precisely 74 minutes long. There is another version of this story, however, which says that it was the president of Sony who insisted that the Ninth Symphony should go in its entirety on one CD. Whichever one is true, Beethoven’s last symphony underlies at least a couple of the technical features of the Compact Disc format (the other concerns the choice of sampling rate set at 44.1 kHz). Then there is a much less artistic and more commercial version of the same story that was revealed by an engineer on the Philips work team, Kees A. Schouhamer Immink, explained that his company was lobbying for the CD to be similar in size to the cassette tape, while Sony was pushing for a 12-cm disc, i.e., slightly larger, because they knew that Philips already had a factory that could produce 11.5-cm discs, and if they chose the 12-cm version as the industry standard, they would eliminate Philips’ competitive advantage in production. Eventually the maximum duration was set at 74 minutes and 33 seconds, allowing consumers to hear the entire Ninth Symphony without interruption. In fact, at least in the early years of production, the real limit for CDs was 72 minutes, not 74 minutes, as this was the maximum length of the U-Matic videotapes used to make the audio masters. Getting to put Furtwängler’s recording on a single CD would have to wait until 1997, when technological developments made it possible to overcome this final hurdle.

Epilogue: the evolution of digital audio

Compact disc almost totally dominated the consumer audio market until the early 2000s. Paradoxically, almost as it reached its maturity and thus in conjunction with the resolution of the technical issues that plagued its early years, developments in computer technology made it obsolete as virtually redundant. Responsible for this further transition was the digital audio file. Regardless of its format (.WAV, .FLAC, ALAC, .mp3 and many others), the audio file has enabled an epochal shift: untying the content (the music) from the container (the physical medium). In this new paradigm, the container is no longer there and the audio file becomes dematerialized. It is worth reflecting on the sonic/qualitative consequences of such a shift, beyond the commercial considerations to which we will return later. Over the past two decades, the cost of computer memories has fallen dramatically while the technical performance of digital devices has risen to heights never before experienced. These two factors made it possible to produce audio files of very high quality, albeit of enormous size. Put another way, it was finally possible to deploy the full power of digital audio once the barrier of the Compact Disc format whose technical specifications (44.1 kHz/16 Bit) had been determined by the technology available in 1979 was removed.

From a commercial or, if we prefer, distribution perspective, audio files have had devastating spin-offs: when combined with digital signal compression algorithms that greatly reduce their size, they can be easily transferred over computer networks generic (as attachments to e-mails) or based on specific protocols. This is what happened in the early 1980s: with the complicity of the simultaneous spread of the Internet, coupled with the rapid developments inhome computing, the phenomenon of illegal distribution of digital files (audio and multimedia) was witnessed. This phenomenon has been facilitated by peer-to-peer sharing technologies such as Napster and BitTorrent. Only Apple Computer’s introduction of the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003, along with the popular iPod portable media player, put a stop to the practice of illegal file-swapping and the resulting economic losses that had cast doubt on the very existence of the recording industry for some years. That shift, however, had at least a couple of important artistic consequences: membership in Apple’s Music Store required record companies to accept the idea of single-track sales. This started the phenomenon of artists releasing a single and then disappearing from the music scene. There was also less need for the large-scale recording project, given the fact that it was now common practice to release only one track at a time. On the end-user side, the practice of constructing music selections based solely on the criterion of relationship to the consumption occasion began to spread: thus was born the phenomenon of Playlists for running/studying/driving/meditating/working/etc. Finally, the habit of listening to these playlists on personal devices (first the iPod, later the smartphone, which will engulf it over the years) transformed the listening experience from a collective to a personal phenomenon.

Beyond the issues of copyright infringement, the development of digital audio has brought significant benefits to consumers and record labels. In addition to facilitating transfer and archiving, this technology has fueled the availability of so-called back catalogue titles stored in record label archives by making it possible to convert old recordings and distribute them digitally at a fraction of the cost of physically reissuing albums on LP or CD. Digital audio has also enabled significant improvements in the restoration and remastering of acoustic and otherwise pre-digital electric recordings.