High fidelity was all the rage in the 1950s. The LP was a surprise hit–no one had expected that it would catch on as well as it did. It was much more expensive than the 45-rpm disc (or the older 10-inch disc, which survived until about 1955), and it was not intended for singles, which had been the main product of the music industry since its beginnings. LP sales were helped by the hi-fi movement, which emphasized listening to classical music (usually on LP), but also by the success of Broadway show tune and movie soundtrack albums. There was also some manipulation by the record companies, who discovered that when a song became a “hit” on the radio, if they simply refused to issue that song on a 45-rpm disc, the public would be forced to buy a whole album if they wanted to get that song. And while 45-rpm singles typically cost a dollar or less, albums were four dollars or more.

Interestingly, technologies that were invented in order to attain “high fidelity” sound quality became the focus of music where “truth” to the original performance was irrelevant. Before the introduction of the tape recorder in the studio, musicians had to perform “live” in the studio to make a recording. High fidelity equipment was aimed at reproducing the exact sound of this studio performance in the home. With the introduction of the tape recorder, suddenly it was practical to edit sound after the fact. If a soloist missed a note, a recording engineer could literally cut out that part of the tape and replace it with a better note. It was also possible with tape recorders to make recordings that could not possibly be captured “live.” The musical team of Les Paul and Mary Ford often made recordings where they made recordings on top of existing recordings, resulting for example in a recording where Mary Ford apparently accompanied herself. When multitrack tape recorders were introduced, it was possible to do much more along these lines. Now it became more common for the various instruments, vocals, and solos to be recorded separately at different times, then “mixed” together later. Again, the trend was moving away from an artist or a group performing a whole piece that was recorded exactly as it actually sounded. Popular music (rather than classical) drove this forward. While classical musicians were constrained by tradition, popular music was free to experiment. In the studio, special effects and gimmicks were used freely. This was also true in the new rock and roll music, where studio effects like echo and reverb became the norm. When rock entered its “psychedelic” phase in the late 1960s, musicians pulled out all the stops and began using every technological trick available to them to create exotic new sounds. Two channel “stereophonic” recordings were developed as early as the 1930s as a way to create the illusion of reality–they were a “high fidelity” innovation. But by the 1960s the stereo effect was also being manipulated simply for the sake of producing a pleasing result, regardless of whether it was “true” to the original sound. On heavily “produced” records like the Beatles Sgt. Pepper album, the music was only remotely related to anything that could be performed live by the Beatles themselves.