Having interviewed hundreds of people for his exhaustive history of recorded sound, Greg Milner has been nothing if not meticulous. However, from his New York base, one news item eluded the Spin and Village Voice writer. It concerns a peculiar little revolution now taking place in Hayes, West London. Twenty years ago, not a shred of trend analysis could have told you that the old EMI pressing plant would still be spitting out black vinyl records well into the 21st century. Only eight years ago the place seemed beyond reprieve. EMI had sold it to property developers. However, the new owners were entranced with the idea that this was where Beatles albums were freighted out in their thousands.

Today, at the newly named Portalspace, the vinyl business is booming with sales rising year on year. As downloading hits the sales of CDs, suddenly it’s not too fanciful to imagine — as the Nirvana and Pixies producer Steve Albini states in this book — that black plastic may yet end up being the analogue tortoise to the digital hare. “The vinyl record will certainly outlast CDs. I don’t think we’ll see the end of vinyl LP manufacture in my lifetime,” he says.

Versions of the CD v vinyl debate, it emerges, have always been with us. In 1888, 11 years after Thomas Edison invented the Phonograph, Emile Berliner invented his rival Gramophone. Edison thought his sounded better; Berliner promised convenience. Edison’s idealism exasperated his staff. When testing the quality of his record releases, he sought to bypass his (near-deaf) ears by biting into the wooden cabinet that housed his invention — all the better to mainline the vibrations.

Victor, however, trounced Edison by mass-producing Berliner’s machine and then also making the records for it. Victor then persuaded the great Enrico Caruso to promote the machine for them. Milner calls it the “first synergistic relationship between hardware and its software”.

If a single question underpins Milner’s historical excavations, it’s probably this. Does music have a “soul” and, if so, how does an artefact best go about preserving it? “Presence” is a recurring theme in Milner’s investigations. He is sceptical about the superiority we feel when reading about the public tone tests staged by Edison and Berliner. In these, musicians “performed” only to stop halfway through as audiences gazed aghast with wonder as the music played on. How could they be so naive, we might ask, as to mistake a scratchy old cylinder for the real thing?

Milner, however, makes a comparison with the all-pervasive use of the voice correction software Auto-Tune in recent years. The “human” voice extruded through Auto-Tune sounds far less like a human voice than that of Caruso on those early Victor recordings. And yet, save for the odd Victoria Beckham solo hit, we almost never stop to question its veracity.

But while audiophiles have always pursued their “demented quest” for fidelity, some producers have gone in search of the thrillingly unreal noises pioneered by Joe Meek and Phil Spector. Overseen by George Martin, the Beatles obsessed over the possibilities of “bouncing” the contents of what they had recorded on four tracks of magnetic tape on to a single track — thus freeing up room for more bells and whistles. While My Guitar Gently Weeps took 29 takes to record and barely fitted on to eight tracks of tape. However, the engineer, Geoff Emerick, said it never surpassed George Harrison’s original acoustic take.

As the years roll by, Milner’s book becomes a parable about musicians and listeners unable to see the wood for the trees. He describes the multimillion-pound overdubbing and airbrushing of Def Leppard’s second album, Hysteria. In striving to appeal to all humans, it ceased to sound human at all. Albini talks about young bands lured by a producer into recording their parts separately, then wondering why the ensuing recording sounds so flat. They are “doing a simulacrum of what they did every day”.

Milner casts doubt on the imperishability of digital music. A mastering engineer tell hims that bearings in hard drives dry out — and the information becomes irretrievable. By contrast, Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska was recorded on a cassette using a ghetto blaster that had previously fallen into a river. The cassette then survived a fortnight in his back pocket.

Milner’s most damning section is on the mania for musical compression. Once pop songs had quiet bits and loud bits. If you want your single to be played on the radio, full dynamic range is no longer an option. A sonic picture of a recent hit — say Franz Ferdinand’s The Fallen — shows a thick band of sound seemingly designed to be heard over the rumble of traffic. A sound picture of Neil Young’s 1975 song Tonight’s the Night depicts a series of peaks and valleys.

This tactic may ensure that a song gets radio play; we may even buy it. But once we have the album, loudness also accounts for why perfectly good music may start to feel oppressive; three tracks and we turn it off.

Perhaps the cumulative sense that music is ganging up on us, crowding us out with its ubiquity is contributing to its commercial devaluation. For many music fans who feel this way, analogue isn’t just a qualitative choice; it’s a symbolic one.

Perfecting Sound Forever: The Story of Recorded Music by Greg Milner (Granta, £20; Buy this book; 464pp)

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