Pop music was surprisingly slow to match the classicalists’ creativity; many of the commercial successes of the ’60s were mastered in mono, which became an object of nostalgic fascination after the record companies later reengineered them—in “simulated stereo”—to goose sales. (Had it been released by the Beach Boys back then, Smile would have been a single-channel record, and, in fact, Brian Wilson himself is deaf in one ear.) It wasn’t really until the late ’60s, when Pink Floyd championed experiments in quadraphonic sound—four speakers—that pop music became a more reliable scene of fresh approaches in both recording and production.
Nowadays, even the most rudimentary pop song is a product of engineering you couldn’t begin to grasp without a few master’s degrees. But the technologization of music producing, distribution, and consumption is full of paradoxes. For the first 100 years, from that Paris Opera telephone experiment to the release of the compact disc in the early 1980s, recording was an uneven but inexorable march toward higher quality—as both a selling point and an artistic aim. Then came file sharing, in the late ’90s, and the iPod and its descendant, the iPhone, all of which compromised the quality of the music in favor of smaller files that could flourish on a low-bandwidth internet—convenience and scale at the expense of quality. Bluetooth, another powerful warrior in the forces of convenience, made similar trade-offs in order to spare us a cord. Alexa and Siri gave us new reasons to put a multifunctional speaker in our kitchens and bathrooms and garages. And the ubiquity of streaming services brought the whole chain together, one suboptimal link after another, landing us in a pre-Stokowski era of audio quality grafted onto a barely fathomable utopia of access: all music, everywhere, in mediocre form.
People still listen to music in their car or on headphones, of course, and many others have multichannel audio setups of one kind or another. Solitary speakers tend to be additive, showing up in places you wouldn’t think to rig for the best sound: in the dining room, on the deck, at the beach. They’re digital successors to the boombox and the radio, more about the presence of sound than its shape.