You're listening to 20,000 Hertz.

What makes a song great?

Of course, the writing, the performance, and the arrangement are all important.

But there's another huge factor that's really easy to miss, the technology behind the music.

In some ways, technology is like an invisible instrument.

That's 20,000 Hertz producer, Andrew Anderson.

We don't always notice the role it plays, but without it, songs just don't sound the same.

There are so many examples of new inventions that transformed the sound of music,

from magnetic tape, to electric guitars, to drum machines, and beyond.

Developments like these can change the course of music history,

and sometimes they can even change the world.

Let's get into it.

Music recording began back in the late 1800s,

and due to the limits of technology, these recordings sounded pretty rough.

As an example, here's a track from 1888 called The Lost Chord.

But over the next hundred years, recorded music became a closer and closer replication of live sound, thanks to inventions like reel-to-reel tape, multi-track recorders, and high-fidelity microphones like this one.

As time went on, musicians expected their instruments to sound as pristine as possible when captured on record.

Here's a tune by the Benny Goodman's sextet from the early 40s.

By modern standards, it sounds pretty vintage, but you can hear that recording quality had already come a long way since the 1880s.

But then, in the 1910, that recording quality had already come a long way since the 1880s.

But then in the 1950s, something strange started to happen.

All of a sudden, you had these sounds that were just dirty and messed up.

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