| By :
Mark Etinger
There are different ways to record music that affect the sound that comes from your home audio systems. There is a long history of recorded sound that begins in the nineteenth century, but modern music as we know it began with magnetic tape. This allowed for longer, high-fidelity recordings and pre-produced music to sound better than it ever had before. Stereophonic sound, or stereo, uses two or more audio channels through two or more loudspeakers that create the illusion of hearing sound from different angles and perspectives. This is the preferred way to listen to music in most home audio equipment. This is in contrast to monophonic sound, which is formed through one channel and centered in one audio field. In the late '50s and early '60s, Phil Spector developed a special kind of recording called the "Wall of Sound." This technique assembled many different musicians with instruments atypically used for ensemble playing - such as electric guitars - and orchestrated sometimes two or three musicians to play the same piece to create a fuller sound. In addition, he used horns, percussion instruments and woodwinds to generate a naturally reverberant sound. This style worked especially well on AM radio and the jukeboxes popular during the era. Spector himself said that it allowed the producer greater control over the sound than stereo, which gave the listener control as to how to hear and appreciate the music. Until the mid-'60s most pop hits were recorded in mono. Stereo versions were remixed and remastered by separating the master tape's two tracks, which spread sound by pumping low-frequency sounds into one channel and high-frequency sounds into another. Another important distinction in recording technology is between high-fidelity and low-fidelity. Several technological advances led to the departure from the background noise and distortion that is problematic in lo-fi. Long Play (LP) 33 1/3 RPM vinyl records allowed for longer, often classical works, (listeners of which were especially important to the industry) to fit onto one record; FM radio allowed for less signal interference and fading; and better amplifiers meant higher power output and less distortion. Hi-fi records are supposed to reproduce sound as accurately as possible. Yet lo-fi still has popularity - many artists prefer the uncut, unpolished sound it delivers, and recently, especially in indie music, lo-fi has seen a major resurgence. There have been many technological developments in music recording over the past fifty years. It will be interesting to see how the sound of music continues to change as it sounds on our home audio.
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