At the beginning of the Listen article [“Reflections on Recording” by Joseph Szigeti, published in Listen magazine] I mentioned the private recordings I made in 1907 or 1908- before I started my professional phonograph career- for an old-style machine playing cylindrical records with a sapphire needle. Even then I vaguely sensed the importance it can have for a player to record himself and listen to the results with a critical ear. Needless to say, the results from such experimental recordings, on pioneer equipment, were of little value in catching fine points of playing technique. But these early efforts marked for me the start in utilizing one advantage that today’s virtuosi have over those of the past in being able to follow their development step by step, comparing their past performances with present ones. / Often I got four or five processed test records of the same part of a concerto or sonata, and listening to the minute discrepancies in these, weighing the flaws against the passages that were more than usually satisfying to me in a certain cases made up for the less-than-average quality in others, offered a schooling in critical and objective listening that only the most imaginative players of the pre-phonograph era could ever envision as an actual possibility. << less