The Tale Of The Tape

I’ve never been much of an audiophile; if I love a song or a voice I don’t much care whether I hear it in quadrophonic surround sound or on some scarred old slab of vinyl. When it comes to music I'm no surface and all feeling, which is why few things bore me more than people who are obsessed with the spec of their hi-fi equipment.

And yet I thoroughly enjoyed Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music, which I review in this week’s New Statesman. Perhaps it’s because Milner comes at his subject from such an enthusiastically musical standpoint – which might be why the book also serves, probably unwittingly, as an alternative history of popular music - as he entertainingly reveals how every piece of recorded music is a fabrication, a wonderful little lie, whether preserved on wax, Shellac, tape, vinyl, CD or Mp3. It’s well worth a read. It will change the way you think about music and how it does what it does.