What is it that causes that ‘old-timey’ quality to voices in old recordings?

Question

I’m not talking about the mid-atlantic accent which has been asked about on this sub. I mean how the actual recordings of voices have a distinct sound quality where you can tell they’re…. old timey. Not the graininess, not background-noisiness, but the actual timbre/character of the voices has some sort of… idk, almost slightly electronicky sound to it. And modern artists use it as an artificial effect. But modern recording technology recreates voices much more true-to-life. What is this?

If this makes no sense feel free to roast me and remove my post >_>

edit: someone suggested to link an example. This was on my mind when watching this clip of the Jordannaires singing at the Grand Ol Opry in the 50s: [https://youtu.be/qkJU8BS-jDU?t=337](https://youtu.be/qkJU8BS-jDU?t=337) I listen to a fair amount of barbershop, and lots of the old recordings have this vocal quality to it, but modern recordings are much more accurate to the person’s real-life voice.

In: Technology

Answer 1

So to understand why a lot of old recordings sound the way they do, you need to understand the mediums which were used to record these sounds. These artefacts of the technology were not generally desirable, but were due to the characteristics and limitations of these technologies. Specifically, this is often the sound of tube amplification as well as magnetic tape. Tubes were used in microphone preamps and other recording gear, and added a distinct warmth to the sound, but also made the higher frequencies (t and s sounds especially) very sharp.

Many shows of this time period were recorded onto magnetic tape, which also imparted its own characteristics. Shows were often recorded at 7.5 inches per second to save tape, as opposed to the music recording-quality 15 or 30 IPS. This caused the sound to become a bit darker and slightly more saturated (that is the crunch or crispness you might hear in older recordings).

There are many other reasons for the specific sound of the time, such as dialogue and music being mixed to sound good on the tv speakers etc that the media was being played through, which often lacked good bass or high end.

Ironically, while at the time artefacts like these were avoided as much as possible, we have come to like their sound and actively try to replicate it in our music and such to give it a vintage feel.