In 1915, Thomas Edison proclaimed that he could record a live performance and reproduce it perfectly, shocking audiences who found themselves unable to tell whether what they were hearing was an Edison Diamond Disc or a flesh-and-blood musician. Today, the equation is reversed. Whereas Edison proposed that a real performance could be rebuilt with absolute perfection, Pro Tools and digital samplers now allow musicians and engineers to create the illusion of performances that never were. In between lies a century of sonic exploration into the balance between the real and the represented.

Tracing the contours of this history, Greg Milner takes us through the major breakthroughs and glorious failures in the art and science of recording. An American soldier monitoring Nazi radio transmissions stumbles onto the open yet revolutionary secret of magnetic tape. Japanese and Dutch researchers build a first-generation digital audio format and watch as their compact disc is marketed by the music industry as the second coming of Edison yet derided as heretical by analog loyalists. The music world becomes addicted to volume in the nineties and fights a self-defeating loudness war to get its fix.

From Les Paul to Phil Spector to King Tubby, from vinyl to pirated CDs to iPods, Milner pulls apart musical history to answer a crucial question: Should a recording document reality as faithfully as possible, or should it improve upon or somehow transcend the music it records? Perfecting Sound Forever is an exhaustively researched, extraordinarily inquisitive book that dissects the central question within all music criticism: When we say that something sounds good, what are we really saying? And perhaps more important, what are we really hearing? (Chuck Klosterman, author of Downtown Owl )

And in the beginning, there was no recorded sound. For millennia, music lovers had to play songs for each other in order to hear their favorite music. Because of this, perhaps — as Greg Milner points out in his exhaustive, technically precise and fascinating survey Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music — the primary objective of the earliest sound recording was verisimilitude. Hence, the term 'high fidelity, ' created for the listener who might fret about impurities that could arise as a consequence of reproducing music.

Perfecting Sound Forever frames the divide between authentic reproduction and the willful manipulation of sound as the 100-year dialectic that has spurred every new technological advancement in recording. Certainly, it has stoked an ongoing debate among fans and industry professionals, like a fractal tape loop . . . Perfecting Sound Forever is best when it takes readers on the labyrinthine journey through the tiny warrens and corporate-sponsored laboratories of the inventors, musicians and hustlers who helped advance sound recording. We learn, for example, that microphone technology was perfected at Bell Telephone Labs in the early 1920s, as part of an extensive experiment to improve the reception of telephone transmissions. Soon after, Bell Labs became the most important incubator of recording technology in the world, aided in no small part by the barnstorming efforts of a classical maestro named Leopold Stokowski. Milner describes, in compelling detail, how Stokowski became the world's great proselytizer of microphone recording, producing the first commercial electrically recorded performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1925, then enthusiastically cooperating with Bell Labs when it separated the orchestra's high and low frequencies in two separate channels — the first example of Stereophonic sound . . . If the first half of Perfecting Sound Forever tracks a fitful trajectory toward the apex of analog recording glory, the second half — at least by Milner's lights — maps its decline and fall into the garish hyper-realism of digital recording.

"Recording gadgets evolve with dizzying speed, but debates over their effects on music never change, according to this fascinating study of technology and aesthetics. Journalist Milner (coauthor, Metallica: This Monster Lives) surveys developments in recording, from Thomas Edison's complaints about those new-fangled Victrolas to the contemporary controversy between CD and vinyl. With every advance of hardware, he notes, comes accompanying shifts in the sound of music: the sense of physical space implied by stereo sound; the advent of rock 'n' roll reverb; the 'big obnoxious ambient drum sound that defined the '80s' under the Phil Collins dictatorship; the 'unsettling robotic tone' imparted to vocals by today's Auto-Tune pitch-correction software; the arms race toward ear-grabbing, distortion-heavy loudness that leaves us 'surrounded by music that does nothing but shout.' Perennial arguments about the fidelity of new technologies, he contends, miss the point: now that every record is digitally spliced together out of multiple tracks and far-flung samples, there is no authentic musical performance for the sound engineer — contemporary music's true auteur — to 'record.' Milner combines a lucid exposition of acoustics and technology with a critic's keen discernment of the pop-music soundscape. The result is a real ear-opener that will captivate fans and techies alike. (June 16)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Exhaustive, technically precise and fascinating." Marc Weingarten, Los Angeles Times

"A personal yet informative interpretation of recorded music that will appeal to students and professionals in the music industry as well as general music-loving readers." Bradford Lee Eden, Library Journal

"[P]rovides insightful commentary and possesses a solid grasp of pacing and a light touch with the technical aspects....Milner especially excels at revealing the human side of each story." Kirkus

From CDs at Virgin Records, to the hallowed vinyl of DJs and audiophiles, to the MP3s cramming college servers, recordings are by far the most common way we experience music. Yet their ubiquity has deafened us to the way the processes that create them shape our understanding of what music is.

Perfecting Sound Forever tells the history of recorded music, from Edison's quest to perfectly capture the sound of a live performance to the state of affairs one hundred years later where the armada of producers who turn Jennifer Lopez into a recording artist want us to believe in a performance that never actually happened. Along the way, the music journalist Greg Milner takes us through the major recording achievements, breakthroughs, and failures, focusing on the innovators, musicians, and producers who changed the way we hear our favorite songs from Les Paul to Phil Spector to Neil Young and King Tubby (the inventor of the dub remix). He charts the key points in a debate that spans the past century: Should a recording document reality as faithfully as possible, or should it improve upon or somehow transcend the music it records? The answers he uncovers will change the very way we think about music.

In 1915, Thomas Edison proclaimed that he could record a live performance and reproduce it perfectly, shocking audiences who found themselves unable to tell whether what they were hearing was an Edison Diamond Disc or a flesh-and-blood musician. Today, the equation is reversed. Whereas Edison proposed that a real performance could be rebuilt with absolute perfection, Pro Tools and digital samplers now allow musicians and engineers to create the illusion of performances that never were. In between lies a century of sonic exploration into the balance between the real and the represented.

Tracing the contours of this history, Greg Milner takes us through the major breakthroughs and glorious failures in the art and science of recording. An American soldier monitoring Nazi radio transmissions stumbles onto the open yet revolutionary secret of magnetic tape. Japanese and Dutch researchers build a first-generation digital audio format and watch as their compact disc is marketed by the music industry as the second coming of Edison yet derided as heretical by analog loyalists. The music world becomes addicted to volume in the nineties and fights a self-defeating loudness war to get its fix.

From Les Paul to Phil Spector to King Tubby, from vinyl to pirated CDs to iPods, Milner pulls apart musical history to answer a crucial question: Should a recording document reality as faithfully as possible, or should it improve upon or somehow transcend the music it records? The answers he uncovers will change the very way we think about music.

Greg Milner has written about music, media, technology, and politics for Spin, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Slate, Salon, and Wired. He is the co-author, with the filmmaker Joe Berlinger, of Metallica: This Monster Lives and has also worked as a political speechwriter. He lives in Brooklyn. A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

In 1915, Thomas Edison proclaimed that he could record a live performance and reproduce it perfectly, shocking audiences who found themselves unable to tell whether what they were hearing was an Edison Diamond Disc or a flesh-and-blood musician. Today, the equation is reversed. Whereas Edison proposed that a real performance could be rebuilt with absolute perfection, Pro Tools and digital samplers now allow musicians and engineers to create the illusion of performances that never were. In between lies a century of sonic exploration into the balance between the real and the represented.

Tracing the contours of this history, Greg Milner takes us through the major breakthroughs and glorious failures in the art and science of recording. An American soldier monitoring Nazi radio transmissions stumbles onto the open yet revolutionary secret of magnetic tape. Japanese and Dutch researchers build a first-generation digital audio format and watch as their compact disc is marketed by the music industry as the second coming of Edison yet derided as heretical by analog loyalists. The music world becomes addicted to volume in the nineties and fights a self-defeating loudness war to get its fix.

From Les Paul to Phil Spector to King Tubby, from vinyl to pirated CDs to iPods, Milner pulls apart musical history to answer a crucial question: Should a recording document reality as faithfully as possible, or should it improve upon or somehow transcend the music it records? Perfecting Sound Forever is an exhaustively researched, extraordinarily inquisitive book that dissects the central question within all music criticism: When we say that something sounds good, what are we really saying? And perhaps more important, what are we really hearing?--Chuck Klosterman, author of Downtown Owl

And in the beginning, there was no recorded sound. For millennia, music lovers had to play songs for each other in order to hear their favorite music. Because of this, perhaps--as Greg Milner points out in his exhaustive, technically precise and fascinating survey Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music--the primary objective of the earliest sound recording was verisimilitude. Hence, the term 'high fidelity, ' created for the listener who might fret about impurities that could arise as a consequence of reproducing music. Perfecting Sound Forever frames the divide between authentic reproduction and the willful manipulation of sound as the 100-year dialectic that has spurred every new technological advancement in recording. Certainly, it has stoked an ongoing debate among fans and industry professionals, like a fractal tape loop . . . Perfecting Sound Forever is best when it takes readers on the labyrinthine journey through the tiny warrens and corporate-sponsored laboratories of the inventors, musicians and hustlers who helped advance sound recording. We learn, for example, that microphone technology was perfected at Bell Telephone Labs in the early 1920s, as part of an extensive experiment to improve the reception of telephone transmissions. Soon after, Bell Labs became the most important incubator of recording technology in the world, aided in no small part by the barnstorming efforts of a classical maestro named Leopold Stokowski. Milner describes, in compelling detail, how Stokowski became the world's great proselytizer of microphone recording, producing the first commercial electrically recorded performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1925, then enthusiastically cooperating with Bell Labs when it separated the orchestra's high and low frequencies in two separate channels--the first example of Stereophonic sound . . . If the first half of Perfecting Sound Forever tracks a fitful trajectory toward the apex of analog recording glory, the second half--at least by Milner's lights--maps its decline and fall into the garish hyper-realism of digital recording. Cannily using Def Leppard's 'Hysteria' as a swan song for the analog era, Milner describes a recording process, overseen by producer Mutt Lange, that was marked by 'the desire to fix everything, down to the individual note . . . spending years building a sonic edifice and deciding which bricks to remove, and tailoring the record's sound toward saleability rather than a traditional capture the performance idea of fidelity.'--Marc Weingarten, Los Angeles Times

Partway through his new book on music's journey from the wax cylinder to the MP3, Greg Milner describes the emergence during the mid-'50s high-fidelity craze of a dubious psychiatric disorder called audiophilia, defined by one doctor as a 'tendency to become preoccupied with and dependent upon . . . recorded sound.' I'm no medical expert, but judging by the evidence presented in Perfecting Sound Forever, it seems safe to say that Milner has a raging case of the stuff: He delves so deeply into the hows and whys of recorded sound that you may never listen to Lady Gaga the same way again. Milner's story begins as far back as you can imagine: 'The first thing the universe did was cut a record, ' he writes, likening the Big Bang to a sort of cosmic remix. Then he winds his way forward with CSI-like detail, unpacking Thomas Edison's foundational wave-capture work; folk-music obsessive Alan Lomax's in-the-field innovations; the rise of the multitrack recording studio; and the digital revolution that set the stage for Pro Tools and Auto-Tune. Milner is a gifted storyteller . . . Milner never loses his

Greg Milner has written on music, film, and technology for Spin, Salon, The Village Voice, and Wired, among other publications. He is the co-author with Joe Berlinger of Metallica: This Monster Lives.