Discussing the history of recordings was fascinating to me.  Seeing how far it’s come from needles on glass and bands crowded into a single room to the ease of modern recording is honestly mind-boggling.  These days, anyone with any sort of electronic device can easily record sound, with or without video.  Recording studios don’t need to bother with a specific setup – recording quality is better overall, and changes can always be made in post-production.  It’s so commonplace that it’s hard to imagine a time when this wasn’t possible, but it wasn’t so long ago that people were only just figuring out how digital recordings worked.  I’ll admit that I don’t quite understand the specifics of how they work now.  There’s a lot of technicalities involved with technology in general that escape me, though I usually know how it works.  Maybe that’s why the early attempts at recording are so interesting to me.  I don’t even know the details about how something that I use often works, but these people, so far removed from modern society, understood enough to create and improve the groundwork for it.  There’s probably some kind of statement to be made there about modern society, but I’m unsure exactly what it is – in the meantime, the various ideas of all those people trying to make the first recordings are still endlessly fascinating to me.