Berliner “Horn” Gramaphone

Acoustic Recording Studio

By the 1920s, it was manufacturing not only pianos but phonographs, and, to go with the phonographs it began producing records. The Gennett Records Division of Starr Piano recorded artists of early jazz, blues, and country. Because these were new music forms in the 1920s the large record companies did not record them at all, so the records produced during this time constitute the earliest recorded examples of these forms. Artists such as Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Hoagy Carmichael, and Bix Beiderbecke performed in the studio in the Whitewater gorge

Davenport Blues was the first composition by Bix Beiderbecke to have been recorded. The historic event took place in the Gennett Recording Studios of the Starr Piano Company, in Richmond, Indiana, on January 26, 1925.

Gennett logo on the side of building in Richmond, IN

King Oliver Band with Louis Armstrong

True to form, many critics hated the electrical process, claiming it brought out individual instruments, thus destroying acoustic recording's smooth ensemble sound; other detractors believed that this new technology sounded harsh and unnatural.

Although unveiled in 1925, electrical recording resulted from several successive technologies, ranging from Western Electric engineer Edward C. Wente's development of the condenser mic in 1916 to the availability of improved carbon mics — such as Western Electric's venerable model 1B. But the breakthrough came with Henry C. Harrison and Joseph P. Maxfield of Bell Labs, who created a matched-impedance recorder that had a bandwidth of 50 to 6k Hz — greatly improved from acoustic system's limited 250 to 2.5k Hz range.