British Decca had a far-reaching role to play after World War II when its ffrr—full frequency range recording—became internationally known. The frequency range of discs had been dramatically extended, and Ernest Ansermet’s recording of Stravinsky’s Petrushka in the new process was to awaken the unsuspecting ears of many record collectors in 1946 to the future high fidelity, or “hi-fi,” possibilities of the phonograph.

Two other developments in the late 1940s combined with the extended frequency range to produce a radical change in the development of recordings: magnetic recording and the first commercially successful long-playing (LP) record. In 1948 Columbia Records demonstrated 12-inch unbreakable vinyl discs that could play about 25 minutes of music per side. The standard shellac disc had revolved at 78 rpm, and a 12-inch disc had to be changed, automatically or manually, every five minutes, thus breaking up the continuity of longer works; the 12-inch LP, revolving at 331/3 rpm, could hold the average symphony, sonata, or quartet on a single side. And the vinyl discs had quieter surfaces than the shellac. Victor soon countered with its own microgroove records: seven-inch vinyl discs at 45 rpm. Each contained approximately as much music as a 12-inch 78-rpm disc, but the package was smaller. By 1950 a pattern had been set: 12-inch LPs for classical works and popular albums, 45s for individual popular songs. Extended-play 45s also were developed and successfully marketed. The LP opened up an entirely new market—not only newcomers but older record collectors who could see the advantage of the new technology and were willing to repurchase their collections as LPs. The 78-rpm shellac disc followed the cylinder into oblivion.

Tape had a major impact on recording starting in the late 1940s: anyone with a good recorder and microphone could become a record producer. Small companies sprang up in areas of music ignored by the giants: the esoteric and the avant-garde, the music of the periods before and after the highly popular Romantic classics of the 19th century. Chamber music, as well as Baroque works of the 18th century and earlier, which required paying fewer musicians than an entire symphony orchestra, flooded record stores and resulted in an unprecedented Baroque revival among music lovers. Antonio Vivaldi concerts were sold out, and Johann Sebastian Bach became a best seller. Orchestral recordings of less familiar works—produced in a Europe that had been ravaged by World War II, where musicians’ fees were minimal—crested the flood. New companies recorded for the first time many symphonies, quartets, masses, little-known operas, and many other once esoteric works, some of which were now available in competing versions. The more popular standard works, the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky, became duplicated by the dozens. By the mid-1950s it seemed that most of the worthwhile musical output of Western civilization—and much from Asia and Africa—had been made available to the average home.

For a few owners of some deluxe tape recorders, a new listening experience was available by 1956: stereophonic tape recordings. Within two years stereo discs made their commercial appearance; every major U.S. company had begun issuing stereo discs by the end of 1958.

A new flood of records hit the market: notably popular were those that displayed the spectacular effects possible with stereo. It was again Decca/London that convinced the serious music lover of the musical benefits of stereo—this time, with the release in 1959 of Richard Wagner’s Das Rheingold, conducted by Georg Solti, a pioneer work in the “creative” school of classical record production. Within a decade two complete recordings of Wagner’s Ring cycle, comprising four complete operas on 19 discs, were available. Again, as with the advent of the LP, a technical advance spurred the record industry into recording an even greater repertoire than was available previously. By the late 1960s most American record companies had discontinued their monaural recordings, except for “historical reissues.”

The 1950s saw a rearrangement of record company alliances, as Europe began its strong invasion of America. By the 1970s not only did Europe own a sizable chunk of the American record industry, but it had taken over the recording, for the first time, of many of the most prestigious U.S. orchestras.

Another far-reaching phenomenon of the 1950s was Elvis Presley, a popular U.S. singer who inspired a new, militantly youth-oriented style of music: rock and roll. It generated a multitude of solo singers and groups as well as a teenage and subteen culture of rabid record buyers. The success of the Beatles helped stimulate record sales in the 1960s to an all-time high. The sales of classical records, however, represented a declining portion of the total. It seemed that most people who wanted the standard classics had already bought them and that few new standard works of any length were being written. Rather than new classical recordings, re-releases were issued in new packages (e.g., “Debussy’s Greatest Hits”) and in the new medium of tape. During the mid-1960s two small and conveniently packaged tape formats began a steady rise to popularity: the continuous-loop one-reel cartridge and the two-reel cassette. Each obviated the need for threading tape in order to play it. The cartridge first achieved consumer acceptance as an automobile accessory and was designed primarily as a playback-only format; the cassette configuration was first introduced in an inexpensive portable recorder-player.

Cassettes had the advantage over continuous-loop cartridges in being rewindable and thus easier to control for selective “spotting” and for amateur recording. For non-selective music or music in which it is not necessary to start at the beginning—background music, for instance—the continuous-loop cartridge had the advantage of not having to be rewound at all. By the end of 1982 sales of recorded music on cassettes had overtaken those of LP discs in the United States.

Meanwhile, a new recording technique that boasted, among other things, a wider dynamic range had begun to revolutionize the market for quality recordings: the music was taped “digitally,” via pulse-code modulation. Pioneered by the Denon label in Japan, it was most enthusiastically adopted by Cleveland-based Telarc Records in the late 1970s. Another small company, Sheffield Lab, had already been producing impressive-sounding results by recording directly onto disc, foregoing the tape stage entirely. These and other “audiophile” companies began to corner the quality market while charging two to three times the price of standard discs for their products. By 1983 this had led more than 40 companies, including the major labels, to adopt audiophile, primarily digital, techniques for at least their new classical releases. The first true digital discs, called compact discs (CDs), played back with a laser as the “stylus,” became available in Japan in 1982 and in Europe and the United States in 1983.

Video continued to be used to record musical performances via several incompatible disc and tape formats. The first years of the medium demonstrated that the grafting of images onto music would become viable only with the emergence of genius comparable to that of the great composers themselves.