Where is your cut-off point?

Interesting poll. 1900, 1917 and 1925 all in the running.

I don't have a cut-off point so 1853 it is.

Ok pomenitul, enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibVP_08-158

Ok, I lied, it's 1900.

I mean, just compare this (1889)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZXL3I7GPCY

to this (1903)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-p8YeIQkxs

I'm a Caretaker fan, mind you.

I'll listen to ragtime or early folk recordings, but it definitely helps keep me interested if the recording is clear.

DRC, dude. You’ve got this cut off point thing the wrong way round 😉

So yeah, those early Kreisler recordings are about as far back as I'll go unless I'm in a hauntological noise mood or whatever.

I listen to pre-electric recordings occasionally, but the earliest recordings I play with some regularity are from 1925.

I just finished Susan Schmidt Horning's Chasing Sound and learned more than I expected about the evolution of recording technologies and studio practices. It was sort of shocking to realize that Edison's acoustic recording methods didn't depend much on 19th century theory or materials and could have been implemented centuries earlier. To develop electrical recording, Western Electric engineers basically redid everything from scratch, armed with WWI-era radio electronics.

you can really hear steady progress in recording technology all the way from 1890 to 1927 or so, there are a few leaps forward of course, and sometimes I'll find an amazing recording has had parts re-recorded and added later, plenty of Caruso recordings for instance. Then after 1927 it's a series of lurches forward every decade or so.

Chasing Sound is really good, loved the descriptions of acoustic recording studios

This seems half to be a question about the fidelity of recordings of a particular vintage and half to be about musical styles. I've heard Brucknerians say they only want to hear his symphonies in stereo. Earlier in the CD era digital vs. analog recording seemed to be a big deal in the classical market. But most of the compositions are 100+ years old.

If we're assuming an alignment of music and recording technology, I'd say I probably pull out something from the early electric recording era at least once a year, Duke Ellington or McKinney's Cotton Pickers or something like that. Some fifteen years ago I had some comps like Legendary Voices of Vaudeville in fairly regular rotation but not so much in recent years.

I've thought it would be interesting to trace the history of uses of vintage recordings in sound films—at what point does the sound of a recording register as "old" the way, say, that sentimental tune that plays at the end of The Shining does? Kiss Me Deadly is an earlier example—Ralph Meeker, having destroyed a collector's Caruso shellac, calls it a "nice record"—perhaps, at heart, he harbors a preference for electric recordings.

I think the technical answer for me would be the 50s, but feeling a desire to listen to music from the 50s (let alone earlier) is rare enough for me that I think I should probably choose the 60s.

I think the only pre-60s records or CDs I actually own are a couple of Sun Ra's early albums.

I don't know the why of it but it seems like recording got more advanced in the early 1930s. Something like Ella Fitzgerald's "A-Tisket, A-Tasket" (1938) doesn't sound sonically compromised to me, so anything from that point on is potentially fine with me.

Susan Schmidt Horning
She is cite in this really interesting paper I haven't really had a chance to read yet that RJ Smith posted a link to on social media.

http://luifabriek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Bram-Nigten-Recorded-Reflections-Sonic-Space-in-US-Popular-Recordings-During-the-Mono-Era-1877-1957-and-its-Occurrence-in-Three-Recordings-of-Studio-Pioneer-Bill-Putnam-MA-Thesis.pdf

yes, that's what put me onto her book ... that thesis is pretty good

back to 20s but generally only when i listen to ellington (same as with 40s). in practice i probably listen to more 50s music (jazz), but even then i often feel like records from before late in the decade or the 60s proper are not 'full' enough to really engage me.

And if movie musicals count, the music in films like Gold Diggers of 1933 or Top Hat (1934) sounds pretty good, reasonably modern.

Voted ‘30s, but you people discussing earlier recordings are fascinating me, please keep it up! I’m really concerned about anyone who thinks pre-70s recordings are “sonically underwhelming,” because I’ve been moved to tears by so many early blues and jazz recordings, not only the performances but the sheer sound of them.

Voted ‘30s, but you people discussing earlier recordings are fascinating me, please keep it up! I’m really concerned about anyone who thinks pre-70s recordings are “sonically underwhelming,” because I’ve been moved to tears by so many early blues and jazz recordings, not only the performances but the sheer sound of them.

Voted ‘30s, but you people discussing earlier recordings are fascinating me, please keep it up! I’m really concerned about anyone who thinks pre-70s recordings are “sonically underwhelming,” because I’ve been moved to tears by so many early blues and jazz recordings, not only the performances but the sheer sound of them.

Voted ‘30s, but you people discussing earlier recordings are fascinating me, please keep it up! I’m really concerned about anyone who thinks pre-70s recordings are “sonically underwhelming,” because I’ve been moved to tears by so many early blues and jazz recordings, not only the performances but the sheer sound of them.

Voted ‘30s, but you people discussing earlier recordings are fascinating me, please keep it up! I’m really concerned about anyone who thinks pre-70s recordings are “sonically underwhelming,” because I’ve been moved to tears by so many early blues and jazz recordings, not only the performances but the sheer sound of them.

Voted ‘30s, but you people discussing earlier recordings are fascinating me, please keep it up! I’m really concerned about anyone who thinks pre-70s recordings are “sonically underwhelming,” because I’ve been moved to tears by so many early blues and jazz recordings, not only the performances but the sheer sound of them.

Voted ‘30s, but you people discussing earlier recordings are fascinating me, please keep it up! I’m really concerned about anyone who thinks pre-70s recordings are “sonically underwhelming,” because I’ve been moved to tears by so many early blues and jazz recordings, not only the performances but the sheer sound of them.

Voted ‘30s, but you people discussing earlier recordings are fascinating me, please keep it up! I’m really concerned about anyone who thinks pre-70s recordings are “sonically underwhelming,” because I’ve been moved to tears by so many early blues and jazz recordings, not only the performances but the sheer sound of them.

Sorry, technical difficulties.

Fitting.

voted 1925. also fyi showed your new and improved century of sound blog to my students and they thought it was increible :)

it's 20s for me, Louis's Hot Five and Hot Seven sessions and American Anthology of Folk Music are things there's an ok chance of me actually listening to in a given year. I mean on the other hand I have listened to 1900s shit like Caruso singing vesti la giubba or whatever but not necessarily likely to do so in a given year tbh.

Voted 1950s because the oldest things I listen to regularly are some of the late fifties jazz heavy hitters (kind of blue, time out, modern jazz quartet). But as someone unthread said, those are pretty late in the decade, and aesthetically distinct from the bop stuff that came before - so for me this is more a question of getting on board with genre and not with recording quality.

The vast majority of what I listen to is either from roughly 1955-80, or brand new. But I am certainly willing to listen to stuff from the 1930s (Robert Johnson, Count Basie) and 1940s (Duke Ellington - I don't have much interest in his early stuff, but the Blanton-Webster band was a monster). Earlier than that, there's nothing much that calls out to me.

The oldest record I've listened to dozens of times or more is probably 'The Real Calypso' which spans a period concurrent with the Electrical Era.

The multitrack stuff is probably my comfort zone. Like, the major leap from pet sounds to sgt. pepper is that when you listen to pet sounds you're still essentially hearing a large ensemble playing together in a room, rather than a collage of individual parts that can't really be recreated by an ensemble of any size. and that's an important distinction because pet sounds is pretty much synonymous with multilayered arrangements, rich textures and complex densities but i think on some level we're aware that it's a live ensemble, which makes pepper a much more 'modern' sounding record. we just intuitively sense that what we're hearing is not the beatles, or the beatles augmented by some larger ensemble, playing together in real time. pet sounds doesn't really explot the capabilities of multitracking.

It's a "post-multitrack" era, in a way. It's not just the idea of an ensemble that feels old fashioned now, but maybe also the idea of a "performance".

In a way, these are all superficial differences and presumably there's a point on the timeline where the intention of recording shifts from this kind of documentation, making a moment repeatable - to constructing the master performance of a composition, an intention that I think all these approaches share. For me and maybe others my age, that's probably going to be the all-important difference that makes a record sound "modern" enough.

1930

Might be some recordings earlier than that but couldn't think what they might be offhand and they were on an expressive vibe back then

"This seems half to be a question about the fidelity of recordings of a particular vintage and half to be about musical styles"

Yeah, I was thinking that too. These things are almost being conflated and I'm not sure whether this is helpful.
or unhelpful.

Like, are there styles of music that sound "too old" regardless of the recording technology used to capture them?
I grew up listening to a lot of 60's music, not just rock bands like the Rolling Stones but also Bee Gees-style pop like 'The Silent Sun' by Genesis and Status Quo's 2nd album at a time when it was "cool" to listen to Green Day and Nirvana.

But these days I can't stand to listen to a lot of 60's and 70's rock that may have sounded a little dated to me in the 90's but now feels terribly remote for reasons that are largely superficial. Now I can only experience fuzz guitar solos as the musical equivalent of B.O. There was also a moment in my 90's childhood, following on grunge and r&b perhaps, when pre-beatles rnr began to sound "too old".

I've noticed a lot of >25 year olds are totally disinterested in 60's rock and pop. There's a lot of interest in various 80's styles of course. I've wondered if maybe this stuff has a shelf life of 35 years or so, after whch time it becomes too remote for younger generations to connect with- but theories like this are obviously much too reductive to hold any water.

I've been thinking about this a lot actually. My 5 y/o niece responded very enthusiastically to 'The Boys of Summer', so we played her some Beatles which she did not care for. This could be for any number of reasons that have nothing at all to do with my biases and preconceptions as I've described here, but how much of an age range is there among posters here and isn't that a really important factor? I'm under the impression that being in my mid-30's, i'm on the younger side for this board.

*< 25

1917 for me

Those phonoautograms are amazing!

So that's my vote. The real answer is, however, that recording was obviously a mistake from the outset.

On the other end, I won't listen to any music that was recorded after ILM first started combining votes for remixes and original tracks in year-end polls.

to be really, really boring and saying 1960s because of the Beatles and the Stones and Velvet and...

1920s grindcore here

"This seems half to be a question about the fidelity of recordings of a particular vintage and half to be about musical styles"

I mean. this may be justified to some extent. is it possible for one musician to make a jazz record by overdubbing all the different parts? Or do you need other players for it to be "jazz"?

The earliest stuff I have are the first jazz recordings, but I also have a Scott Joplin album of piano rolls that were "recorded" before then.

FWIW, this is what I'm referring to and it's highly recommended:

https://img.discogs.com/5OR-xUkoz8014FawNlbd1TbRpIU=/fit-in/600x606/filters:strip_icc():format(jpeg):mode_rgb():quality(90)/discogs-images/R-1925744-1252864061.jpeg.jpg

And Scott Joplin's piano rolls have been put out in so many ways, you need to be careful. As some have mentioned, it can be like listening to a MIDI depending on which release you get. More info here: https://midimusic.github.io/joplin/rolls/index.html

But a good one that I listen to is this album, with the rolls played back on a vintage 1910 Steinway 65/88 note player:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71K3fToIIbL._SL1500_.jpg

is it possible for one musician to make a jazz record by overdubbing all the different parts? Or do you need other players for it to be "jazz"?

There are plenty of solo jazz records and some with overdubs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hsr6ZVzq-dQ

"This seems half to be a question about the fidelity of recordings of a particular vintage and half to be about musical styles"

Yeah, this is confusing me. I don't have a cut-off point for styles, but I'm unlikely to encounter much stuff from early recordings, so I guess I have an artificial cut-off point due to availability? On the other hand, I am the type of nerd who will immediately go listen to very early recordings if I see a link to them, and I guess that probably happens around once a year? So er, maybe Edison era for me?

I interpreted it as 100% about the recordings themselves. If we're talking about musical styles, there is no cut-off (except for anything after the first ILM poll where remixes were counted along with originals).

Not a willful cut-off, however.

30s, 80s, very little in between and almost nothing since

i r weird

I know lots of people think Blanton-Webster is Peak Ellington, but for me that comes in the late 20s / very early 30s - East St. Louis Toodle-oo, Black And Tan Fantasy, Take It Easy, The Mooche, Rockin' In Rhythm, Mood Indigo - that's some world-shattering stuff.

This is huge for me, and a big reason why I've never really had a "cut-off point" in that sense.

"in principal" lol

Those sides, on a comp of Early Ellington, and Afro-Eurasian Eclipse have been my most listened-to Duke for a while. Marvel at that span!

I probably love the 50's Ellington stuff on Columbia the best, which I know is not the norm. Such Sweet Thunder is one of my favorite records.

Sound quality is leaps and bounds better, which probably doesn't matter to most.

30s, 80s, very little in between and almost nothing since
i r weird

voted based on hot fives/sevens as well

I probably love the 50's Ellington stuff on Columbia the best, which I know is not the norm. Such Sweet Thunder is one of my favorite records.

Such Sweet Thunder and Blues In Orbit are both near the top of my Ellington list, too.

For curiosity and cultural significance I'll go back as far as the beginning of the 20th century, but for enjoyment and immersion, it's challenging to listen to recordings done prior to the 20's. Hard to beat the dynamic range improvements and stereo recordings that came about in the 50's and beyond.

It seems like for those-who-were-there, later Ellington was seen as inferior, but that's hardly a consensus view since the 90s.

Hank Williams, and a plenty of other small combo C&W artists recording in the late 40s sound fantastic on record. I can not imagine a lot of those tracks sounding any clearer.

Yeah, I think the dividing line for recording fidelity is mid-40s. Before that, most (not all) sounds a little rough. After that, with post-war technology, dollars, and market, you start getting very nice recordings.

"would listen to" pretty much anything, but "likely to listen to" the cut-off is probably 1925. I listen to a lot of New Orleans radio, and they play stuff definitely back into the '20s, so I'm likely to absorb some even without trying.

early Ellington recordings are the earliest recordings of anything I have. Haven’t listened to his later stuff, always have this plan to proceed chronologically.. but fuckin a, those awesome late 20s songs always hit me.. it’s like, who could ask for anything more? I’ll get there eventually.

I had the Armstrong hot fives + sevens box in high school... the lack of Armstrong in my life is deeply fucked up

“old” music I get the most enjoyment out of these days is probably 30s Indian film music

how do i vote if i'm mainly into music from museums that approximate how ancient cultures' music may have sounded based on their collection of artifacts?

in that case you are still listening to recordings from, at earliest, the 80s.

i guess. it's new wave af, and i respect that

I did actually look into this before starting, but went "nah." This is the earliest example of this stuff I can find, it's quite relaxing.

https://youtu.be/QpxN2VXPMLc

1920s is probably my honest answer.

Went with 30s. I like ragtime music a lot, but typically I listen to more modern recordings of it so realistically '25-30s is my cutoff. 30's Cab Calloway stuff is probably some of the earliest recordings I listen to regularly.

For me fidelity is acceptable differentially relative to the type of music. There are wax cylinders that achieve musicality when they're bare-bones, and others of more complex music with more participants that are unlistenable to me. Plenty of 78s of solo blues that are beautiful and evocative if far from pristine. Jazz, for me, loses a lot in mono, and makes a huge leap forward with stereo recordings. Ambitious, layered music like 'Pet Sounds' I can't listen to in mono, even if the mono mix was the production focus.

I'm no audiophile. I just want to hear music with enough room to breathe that it sounds alive. Carter Family or "Devil Got My Woman" can do that in remarkably low fidelity. The Blue Nile, conversely, would lose the magic in rough mono.

Ultimately, most things from the 20s on were captured sufficiently, if not ideally, to be worth hearing if the music is good. Before that, it's almost always "interesting" at best.

Been listening to Arthur Schnabel's recordings of Beethoven's piano sonatas today, all from the 1930s, but they sound to me like they could have been recorded yesterday. If it was a simple one-track recording of a single instrument, and they were willing to spend the money to get the best possible quality, and the recording has been looked after and restored properly, there's really not that much difference between the 30s and today. Some huge IFs there, of course.

An example is that some of them old Rachmaninoff recordings that I occasionally hear on r3 strongly possess some quality about them that transcends the audio limitations of old sound recording tech. This is an audio aesthetic I'm quite fond of throughout the 20th century. I'm not very good at articulating this thing, but it is definitely my shit!

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Most of the time for me it's about 1955, prior to that you can hear a dropoff in sound quality. Even, say, the 1952 recording of Bruno Walter conducting Das Lied Von der Erde sounds much noisier than the 1960 recording of the same conductor, orchestra, and piece. However, I voted for 1930, if only for Canary Records. A lot of folk music, early blues, solo instruments, etc that came out on 78s have this kind of immediate presence, even if the sound "fidelity" isn't strong; it's like you can see the player's face, and their sweat, rather than hearing the wood or the brass of the instrument.

I've never listened to anything earlier than 1928 for aesthetic reasons.

Yeah I'd say 1955ish too. I will listen to a few select recordings before that, like "West End Blues" or some big band, bebop, some blues etc, but the way the question was phrased made me pick '50s.

I feel like the real cut-off for lots of people might be LPs. if you mainly consume music in that form then there's not much more than compilations for you pre-50s, and compilations aren't really the same deal.

Most of these compilations have a completionist approach, or else they just seem sort of thrown-together, there are some excellent ones (for example Canary Records) but they tend to be of more obscure music. Music before the 50s was mostly made to be consumed as a 3-minute single, it isn't easy to make 20 of those into an LP that flows well.

*cough* Smithsonian Anthology Of American Folk Music, those Hot Fives & Sevens LPs, Quintessential Billie Holiday Vol. 1, so so many more

I mean, yes, I like those, feel like lots of people wouldn't listen to them though.

Hot Fives and Sevens is just brilliant, but it is (almost) a complete recording sessions compilation, and even I will want a change after 10 or so tracks of that.

I love well done complications of old pre-LP stuff, like the Ellington Okeh comps or that great Art Tatum Capitol comp. They sometimes require more effort to discover (so many weird budgety suspect CDs out there) but yeah I just really like those well made comps that mop up all the sides an artist did for a particular label or whatever.

1920s because carter family, louis armstrong/fletcher henderson and a handful of other treasures that i never ever ever want to forget.

The Ken Burns Duke Ellington CD is surprisingly good, obviously he has so much to work with, but it flows well too.

This poll got me to find this neat article about the phonautograph...
https://www.wired.com/2010/04/0409scott-phonoautogram/

This is the definitive site to find out about the phonoautograms, amazing amount of research they've done

http://firstsounds.org/

Or this is my mix of them

https://centuriesofsound.com/2019/04/17/1853-1860/

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

drafted a few different responses but nothing looked right.

so just wanted to say that i voted 1917 in order to include stuff like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SbZjhzTMqY

impressive voter turn-out!

it is yes! and I want to know who the other five freaks who regularly listen to phonoautograms are, and whether they really read the question.

I was just really excited by your Youtube of it and hoped to pull it out once a year.

Mary Lou Williams - Zodiac Suite (1945)

some inspired music is this and it is so out of time, probably the oldest "album" I've got on my player. But I have a few django reinhardt collections that predate it.

Hi, I missed this poll because my life circumstances don't allow me as much uninterrupted internet time as they used to and because of the world burning etc.

Put me down for 1900-1917 being the earliest period. I think the oldest record I have & enjoy at least a few times per year is a balalaika & voice record recorded in St. Petersburg, 1904.
I enjoy early acoustic jazz like the earliest King Oliver records, Bennie Moten's Okeh's etc. I also enjoy the very early acoustic-era country records by John Carson, Fiddlin' Sam Long, John Hammond etc. BUT where I really start is mid-twenties. I collect 78s (primarily old-time music but also some blues, gospel, ethnic music, hawaiian guitar, irish music, jazz, cajun etc) and the majority of my collection is from approx 1926-1930; the proportion of 78s I have from the thirties onward is fairly low, probably less than 10%, but with the recording dates of many of the ethnic records unknown to me it could be wrong.

I pretty much enjoy music up to today but with only a relatively small percentage being post 1978 or so.

Thanks for letting me blog

also this bit is sort of incorrect -
"Music before the 50s was mostly made to be consumed as a 3-minute single"

Music was recorded in 3 minute chunks because that was the limitation of the medium; in reality, before recording, a lot of music (especially music for dancing!) was performed in much longer chunks. It's not unusual to read about Western Swing bands vamping on a tune for 10-20 minutes, while the recorded version is paltry in comparison. Similarly jazz bands would be playing for much longer stretches. I guess another way to put it tis that the commodification of music resulted in the 3-minute song length, not the other way around.

also also, I don't know if it was talked about in this thread re: fidelity -- but, 78s can and so sound fucking amazing, even the early acoustic ones. The problem is that a lot of LP reissues of the material (especially the earliest ones) went nuts on noise-education and over-equalization so the sound you're getting on the LP isn't comparable to the sound you'd get from a clean example of the 78. Remastering technology has come a long way since then thankfully and there are lots and lots of modern CD reissues of 78rpm-era material that sound great. But also plenty that are still cheaply or quickly done! So, you gotta pick & choose. Yazoo CDs sound good, as do CD remasters on labels like County, Old Hat, Rounder, Dust To Digital etc. The other issue is people playing 78s on the wrong type of equipment. Most of the 78s I collect are from the era before the RIAA curve so any non-specialized piece of equipment is taking you away from the original sound by default, even with the proper stylus.

I did not know some of that! (pre-RIAA curve, etc)

thanks man

Just came across this treasure trove of Susan Schmidt Horning interviews for her book. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org/ark:/16417/xt7pzg6g4k5n