Opinion

Hunt around online, says Steve Harris, and you can hear the earliest electrical recordings and read the scientific paper that laid the foundations for the next century of hi-fi sound

In HFN Sep ’25, my colleague Barry Willis recounted the 100-year anniversary of the electronic recording era, highlighting the February 25, 1925 recording of ‘You May Be Lonesome’ by Art Gillham, for the Columbia Phonograph Company [see A century of sound]. But I’m now here to tell you that, perhaps, November 2, 1925, marks the centenary.

It was on this day that the American Victor company announced the start of a new era with a massive publicity campaign for its Orthophonic Victrola phonograph, which had a nine-foot-long horn folded inside the cabinet to reproduce the lower bass notes that were now possible. Victor and Columbia had signed up to use the Western Electric system in 1924 and started releasing electrical recordings in the spring of 1925 respectively. But they had agreed to keep the new technique secret for a few months, to give time for old stock to sell through and to build up a new catalogue.

Making memories

Western Electric’s was the first successful system but wasn’t the first attempt. The first publicly issued electrical recording was the Memorial Record made at the funeral ceremony for the burial of the Unknown Soldier in Westminster Abbey on November 11, 1920.

This was done ‘By Guest & Merriman Electrical Process’ under the auspices of the Columbia Graphophone Company, the UK subsidiary of the US Columbia company. The inventors were two army officers, Major The Hon. Lionel G. W. Guest and Captain Horace O. Merriman, who operated from the world’s first mobile recording truck outside the Abbey. It’s fascinating to hear this recording now (you can find it on YouTube), but the sound quality is very poor, as it was made with four carbon telephone microphones placed around the nave of the cathedral.

Columbia didn’t continue with the Guest & Merriman system. Others made experimental recordings in the US, but all were eclipsed by the success of the Western Electric system, which was solidly based on advances made by the Western Electric Engineering department, which was soon to become Bell Telephone Laboratories.

Western Electric had long been the key supplier of equipment for AT&T’s Bell System telephone network. In 1912, it purchased Lee de Forest’s ‘Audion’ patent and developed better triode tubes. In 1916, E. C. Wente invented a form of condenser microphone. Finally, J. P. Maxfield and H. C. Harrison developed an effective electro-magnetic disc recorder.

These developments had been pursued to serve the progress of the telephone system. A high-quality sound recorder was originally wanted to capture telephone line noise accurately for analysis. And the amplification, filtering and impedance matching techniques needed for long-distance telephony all fed into the new recording system, which gave a flat frequency response from 115Hz to 4kHz – a world away from the constricted and jagged response of acoustic recordings made by shouting down a horn.

In 1926, Maxfield and Harrison delivered their illuminating paper, High Quality Recording And Reproducing Of Music And Speech, with the subtitle ‘Based On Telephone Research’, to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. To read this now (it’s easily found online) is to appreciate the scientific approach and unparalleled research that had gone into the Western Electric system, and the way it transformed the reproduction of music.

In the paper’s introduction, Maxfield and Harrison discussed the need for careful choice of reverberation time in the recording room, to give ‘the effect of a room with proper acoustics.’ When this is accomplished, they went on, ‘the person listening to the reproduced music has the consciousness of the music being played in a continuation of the same room in which he is listening and also has a sense of spatial depth’.

And 100 years on, this is still what we want to hear.