100 Years Ago: the Giant Step of Electrical Recording

That big old horn you see at left is what musicians had to contend with in the early days of recording. Until 1925, you made a record by cozying up to the horn, which took the sounds you produced and drove a needle that scratched them (or a rude facsimile of them) onto disc. No microphones, no electronics.

The result was often dim, and worked best with a few voices or instruments. When you got the band together - as you can see in the image above from the Victor studio - the results could be cacophonous.

The horn was relatively insensitive, so orchestras resorted to using such instruments as the Stroh violin - you can see one at front, with its own horn poking out of the soundboard and pointed at the big recording horn.

Electrical recording was a leap forward - probably the biggest qualitative change ever in the recording industry. While acoustic recordings generally had a frequency response of about 300-3000 Hz, electrical recording then covered from about 50-6000 Hz, enough to dramatically improve fidelity.

To demonstrate this difference, I've prepared the same piece of music in acoustic and electrical recordings made just six years apart. For both of these, the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski plays an excerpt from Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade - "The Young Prince and Young Princess."

The acoustic recording, which is heavily cut and reorchestrated, comes from 1921. The sessions were arduous. Stokowski and band had devoted four dates to the piece in 1920 and 1921 without achieving an acceptable take. (This apparently was the norm rather than the exception for them.) Finally a good take (number 10) was set down on March 25, 1921.

Labels of the acoustic and electrical Scheherazade recordings

The critic Rob Cowan writes in Gramophone (I nicked this idea from him): "Listening to Stokowski’s acoustic recordings of music from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, specifically ‘The Young Prince and Young Princess’ (recorded 1921), is instructive. The acoustic version ... sounds as if it’s being played by a chamber ensemble with bongos, whereas by the time the complete work was recorded in 1927, captured on wax, Stokowski’s characteristic Philadelphian opulence could be reproduced with impressive realism."

Stokowski twiddles the dials at an Academy of Music recording session

That second recording session took place in Philadelphia's Academy of Music on October 10, 1927, where the orchestra was able to record an acceptable take in two passes. The aural result is a good example of the Stokowski magic, why he was sometimes called the "old sorcerer," although he was not so old when these discs were made (38 and 45).

There's more about the transition to electrical recording in Rob Cowan's article. Also, historian Allan Sutton writes in detail about the beginnings of electrical recording here.

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