Sounds of Our Times

In the spring of 1952, as a generation of young men boosted by the GI Bill began buying new homes, and new big-finned cars to park outside them, the last great era of American capitalism was getting under way. The American business of recording and selling sounds was also changing. In 1952, teen fans of pop music, like “ethnic” fans of country western and rhythm and blues, were still wearing out 78-rpm singles, or lightweight 45s, on their barroom’s jukeboxes or bedroom consoles. But a new vinyl format—the 33⅓ Long-Play record—had begun appearing in stores, and a new consumer audio-equipment market was on the rise, aimed at getting those prospering veterans to spend their disposable dollars on home “hi-fis.” These developments didn’t just transform the soundscape of the United States; the rise of the LP shaped the culture and politics of hundreds of nations just then transforming themselves from colonies of old Europe into new member states of the U.N. In March of that year, the New York Times published a column (under the headline HIGH FIDELITY—DOES IT EXIST?) that laid out a new philosophy of sound for a hi-fi world.

The column’s author, though hardly a household name today, was as instrumental as his better-known contemporaries were in shaping the LP age. Emory Cook began his Times column lamenting the fact that the phrase high-fidelity, which was at the time plastered onto audio equipment and records of wide-ranging quality, had become “a banal expression.” In the early ’50s, advertisers were selling everything from “high-fidelity” lipstick to “high-fidelity” Dacron shirts. Cook counseled his readers that anyone could become an expert at recognizing “the fearful discrepancy between reproduced music and music.” To do so, he suggested, they need only go to a concert:

Listen there for the velvety-smooth complexion of the overtones of the string section; hear the abrupt rubbery sound of the rosin on the soloist’s bow; commit to memory the make-up of the piano note, especially the “attack,” or beginning of each note. Feel the physical sensation of bass in pitch, not boom. Listen, if you can, less for enjoyment this time, and more for memory—and for days afterward you will be an expert judge of high fidelity.

Cook bewailed the fact that “modern studios have evolved to the point where they are unnatural places in which to originate sounds.” He contended that recording music in an acoustically “flat” studio—a sound-absorbent space free from the world’s overtones and echoes—was a practice to which all music lovers should object. “We listen to [music] for its emotional...