The preservation of the inherently evanescent. That is the old dream behind sound recording, photography, etc, and it's the dream that put the idea of carrying moonbeams home in a jar on a level with swinging on a star in a 1944 Bing Crosby recording. But of course it must be the SAME MOONBEAM, or you're not really carrying "it" in a jar. You're using a jar to simulate a moonbeam, a different feat, right? For decades after the invention of the phonograph, fidelity was the central goal of audio recording. The same moonbeam. Edison had sung “Mary had a little lamb,” and listen! You could hear him doing so! The general attitude was that the more faithful the sound you heard was to the sound he had originally made, the more successful the recording. But beginning at the time of the Second World War, and with increasing technical sophistication in the 1950s and 1960s, the goal was not merely fidelity, but something that may seem contrary -- successful...