I can't stop listening to that track in particular.

...it's for the 25th anniversary of his death.

I'm a bit of a Larkin nut: wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the relationship between his poetry and jazz, and I'm forever trying to shoehorn his stuff into the taught curriculum. ;-)

I keep wanting to tell people that there's almost 100 years of contemporaneously* recorded music now available. Almost half of that time was before rock and roll (in the very widest sense of the word) was around.

Recorded music spans a HUGE range of styles - there's so much more to it than 'post-Elvis popular music' and, as I said in http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/have-i-had-my-fill-pop-music last year, I'm no longer interested in the latest new thing when it turns out to be 4 more white boys with electric guitars when there's much more interesting stuff to be found in the years before I was born.

(*is that a real word?)

Providing you call it 'Play Some Old'.

or Marco Pirroni based Goody Two Shoes on that?
That is really good.

of driving past Centennial Park towards Bondi in Sydney , sunroof open , sun shining in kids in back and West End Blues soaring out. A Porsche convertible pulled up next to me and said "what the fuck is that - it's incredible".

Louis Armstrong - only around 100 years old I responded and drove off.

so you can copy, trade, download those with no compunction whatsoever.

What I love about pre-1950s recordings is artists didn't make 'albums' in the modern sense, they just did sessions which my or may not have ever been released - sometimes not even under the own name; so there's no definitive discography for (say) Armstrong or Bechet. There's still the thrill of digging out individual tracks from modern compilations and collections.

With any modern artist, the Grateful Dead for example, I can look up their definitive discography and know that, if I collect those 109 albums, I will have every officially released recording. I suspect no-one knows for certain what Louis Armstrong sides were released over the course of his life - he certainly wouldn't have known.

On a related note, I made a passing reference to Mezz Mezzrow's autobiog 'Really The Blues' earlier. If anyone wants the warts-and-all story of what it was like being a second-division jobbing musician (and dope dealer) in the 1920s and 30s, I'd really recommend it. It was published in '46 and immediately became a 'lifestyle guide' for the young proto-rock 'n' rollers who gobbled up copies brought back from the US by merchant seamen. Much of the stereotypical jazz and drug slang that we now take for granted entered the UK via Mezzrow's book. It's a "rollicking rollercoaster of a read"

Louis Armstrong was a genius, in the sense of someone who seemed to have an innate superhuman talent (plus seemed to be a pretty cool cat - perhaps the coolest). Those hot fives and sevens - every time I listen I cannot get over the awesome sense of timing and sheer joy he expresses. And his compadres - Mr Johnny Dodds, Kid Ory, etc - are no slouches, either.
He also seemed to be someone without pretension. I recall reading that in an interview he said that one of his personal favourites was the Guy Lombardo band, who were seen as a very middle-of-the-road proposition and certainly not the kind of thing that you would admit to liking if you wanted to create the impression of being an edgy,daring listener. He was cool without trying, which is the very acme of cool in my book.

But seriously, I know that all that tinny sound and crackle can be a bit of an obstacle. Lots of old blues music sounds a lot better to me on headphones than through big speakers. I know that the quality of sound varies a lot between different releases of the same material, but I am not enough of a audiophile to know which recordings are regarded as the best

Remember, recording to tape only became widespread in the 1950s, prior to that most tracks were recorded direct to master disk.

In the 20s and 30s, there were still occasions when horn microphones were used - by modern standards this wasn't even a microphone, merely a large horn into which the musicians played which impinged directly on the cutting needle; essentially a wind-up gramophone in reverse!

Mic technology made huge advances during the second world war to the point that post-recordings sound 'modern' to today's ears whereas pre-war mic and recording technology often had that 'tinny' quality you mention. There were high quality studios using magnetic wire recorders around during and after the second world war which were capable of very good quality recordings (for the time) but they were large, expensive and dangerous due to the high speed of the wire.

The legendary Neumann U-series mics appeared in the late 40s and their descendants are still in use today. During the 1950s, Ribbon mics were developed to a high standard of quality - the RCA Type 77 (you'd recognise one if you saw it) were capable of very good recordings.

So, the simple answer is, no - pre-war recordings always sound like that. Remember, before the war, jazz was the outsiders music of it's day and was often recorded in less than state of the art studios.

These old recordings were made in the days before tape recorders. Recordings were cut directly onto acetate discs, which were then transferred into stampers for pressing records. Consequentially all CD issues are made by dubbing directly from these 78s, so it all depends on the condition of the records.

Up to around 1925 all recordings were made acoustically by singing/shouting into a horn, and therefore sound pretty poor. Electrical recording then appeared and improved things, but it took some time to standardise on the correct equalisation curve to use for playback.

Another point is that speeds were also not standardised at 78 rpm. Some recordings were made slightly faster, others slower.

The material used to make the original records also plays a part. The blues label Paramount were made from really poor quality shellac, so the few that survive today generally sound awful. Some of EMI's pressings used organic material as part of their composition; as this has since decayed these records have really bad surface noise.

It therefore all really bows down to how the re-issues have been transferred. Some labels put some effort into doing this, correction the tone balance and speed, filtering out scratches, and so on, and can produce wonderful sounding recordings. Others just simply transfer recordings quickly, and use digital reverb to filter out the noise. As these recordings are out of copyright, the quality does vary remarkably.

As far as I'm aware his stereo effects were added electronically.

There are a few Duke Ellington recordings that have been issued in stereo by sourcing from two simultaneous recordings (using two sets of microphones), but the practice wasn't that widespread. Most incidences of cutting multiple masters at once used shared microphones.