Sounding Off
A history of music-reproduction technology skips a groove
Douglas Wolk
Tuesday, February 24th 2004
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As a book, though, it's not quite coherent, and held together by soddenly peppy prose ("Now weird scenes occur inside the record company diamond mine, and the light at the tunnel's end is distant and getting dimmer by the minute"). Coleman barely addresses the way changes in playback (as opposed to recording) technology have altered the way music is made or heard, and he tends to get sidetracked into stories about the music business that don't have much to do with his topic, like a passage on Alan Freed, Dick Clark, and the payola scandal of the '50s. His analysis is questionable, too: According to Playback, the recording format used for early phonographs is "the software, in modern parlance" (no, not exactly), and the iPod is "the ultimate app" (it's not an application—and that same paragraph claims that it has a "5-gigbyte [sic] hard drive." Well, it did two years ago). Coleman often seems to be working up to an argument about the relationship between the format and content of recorded sound, but he keeps conflating them; he concludes only that the high-tech revolution has somehow made canned music less canned.
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