"I started in a research lab for TV cameras, then I worked at a tape duplication facility. That was the first introduction for me to recorded music and hi-fi"
About this Quote
Parsons frames his origin story like an engineer accidentally wandering into art, and that’s exactly the point. The sentence moves in clean, workmanlike steps: lab, factory, then revelation. No myth of the garage-band genius, no romantic lightning bolt. Instead, it’s the backstage infrastructure of sound - the places where music is handled as signal, material, product. That plainness carries its own swagger: before he became “Alan Parsons,” he became fluent in the systems that make modern listening possible.
The subtext is a quiet argument about authorship. By crediting a research lab for TV cameras and a tape duplication facility, he’s telling you that the real creative formation happened where fidelity, noise, and reproduction are fought over. “Recorded music and hi-fi” isn’t just a consumer hobby here; it’s an initiation into a new kind of musicianship where mic placement, tape saturation, and the limits of the medium shape what counts as a performance. It also telegraphs why his later work feels so controlled and cinematic: he learned to think in terms of capture and playback, not just notes.
Context matters: Parsons comes out of a mid-century British tech pipeline, when studios were becoming laboratories and “high fidelity” was a cultural obsession, sold as both luxury and truth. His path suggests that rock’s future wasn’t only on stages - it was in rooms full of machines, where the people who knew the machines could quietly redefine the sound of an era.
The subtext is a quiet argument about authorship. By crediting a research lab for TV cameras and a tape duplication facility, he’s telling you that the real creative formation happened where fidelity, noise, and reproduction are fought over. “Recorded music and hi-fi” isn’t just a consumer hobby here; it’s an initiation into a new kind of musicianship where mic placement, tape saturation, and the limits of the medium shape what counts as a performance. It also telegraphs why his later work feels so controlled and cinematic: he learned to think in terms of capture and playback, not just notes.
Context matters: Parsons comes out of a mid-century British tech pipeline, when studios were becoming laboratories and “high fidelity” was a cultural obsession, sold as both luxury and truth. His path suggests that rock’s future wasn’t only on stages - it was in rooms full of machines, where the people who knew the machines could quietly redefine the sound of an era.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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