In 1925 records stopped being made through a horn. The microphone and the amplifier took its place, and the sound of recorded music changed for good.
The new system
During the first half of the 1920s, engineers at Western Electric, and independent inventors such as Orlando Marsh, developed a way to capture sound with a microphone, amplify it with vacuum tubes (valves, in British English) and use the amplified signal to drive the cutting head. Victor and Columbia licensed Western Electric's system and made their first electrical discs in the spring of 1925.
The first electrically recorded Victor Red Seal record was the pianist Alfred Cortot playing Chopin's Impromptus and Schubert's "Litanei", in Victor's studios in Camden, New Jersey. By 1926 shops advertised records made "by the latest Victor process of electrical recording".
What it changed
| Acoustic (horn) | Electrical (microphone) | |
|---|---|---|
| How sound reaches the cutter | Air pressure through a horn to a diaphragm | A microphone signal, amplified by valves |
| Sensitivity and range | Poor, with an uneven frequency response | Wider, and the signal can be made louder |
| Where the performer stands | Right at the horn | Where the microphone is |
Acoustic records had their recognisable tone because of the horn's limits. Once the signal could be amplified, quiet sounds became recordable and the performer no longer had to be loud and close to a horn. The engineer's choice of microphone and its position became part of the sound: that is where the modern craft of recording begins.
Why it matters to a producer
Every vocal chain today, from the microphone to the preamp to the converter, is a descendant of this one: capture, amplify, record. See Microphones in the Library for what that chain looks like now.
Sources
Every date, name, tempo and origin on this page comes from these pages, read on 2026-10-24.