Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music [Hardcover]

'The story of recorded music has perhaps never been so captivatingly told as in this history' - Waterstone's Books Quarterly
--Review

'Lively, passionate and ever-questioning ... this is an accessible, well-informed and unique perspective' - Record Collector --Review

'Milner's appreciation of music is wide and deep ... and he provides illuminating answers to questions that are poorly understood' - Guardian --Review

'A breathless, surprisingly thrilling rollercoaster ride through the history of recorded music ... a-tour-de-force'
- Mail on Sunday --Review

'A work of great stylistic charm that never loses its pleasing balance between facts and human interest'-
Daily Telegraph --Review

'Fascinating ... a rich blend of commerce, ideology, technology and creativity' - Sunday Times
--Review

'Greg Milner tells the story of recorded music with novelistic verve, ferocious attention to detail, and a soulful ambivalence about our quest for sonic perfection. He shows how great recordings coe about not through advances in technology, but through a love of the art, and that same love is the motor of his prose.' Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise

'A superbly researched book, an absorbing historical narrative' - Metro

'Milner has done such a terrific job, he is laudably lucid on the technicalities of how music works' - New Humanist

'An engrossing history of recording technology' - Literary Review

`An amiably garrulous and discursive guide to the development of recorded sound' -Classic FM magazine

From our CD collections to iPods bursting with MP3s to the hallowed vinyl of DJs, recordings are the most common way we experience music. Yet their ubiquity has deafened us to how our understanding of music is shaped by the processes that create them. "Perfecting Sound Forever" tells the story of recorded music from Thomas Edison's claim, in 1915, that he could perfectly capture the sound of a live performance, to the digital tools used today which create the illusion of performances that never were. Along the way, Greg Milner introduces the innovators, musicians, and producers - from Les Paul to Phil Spector to Neil Young - who have affected the way we hear our favorite songs and describes the major achievements, breakthroughs and failures in sound technology. Exploring the balance that recordings strike between the real and the represented, Greg Milner asks the questions which have divided sound recorders for the past century: should a recording document reality as faithfully as possible, or should it improve upon or somehow transcend the music it records? What does the perfect record sound like? The answers he uncovers will change the way we think about music.

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.