Arthur Haddy

These required new, sophisticated sonic developments that Haddy and his colleagues later put to peacetime use in Decca's innovative postwar recording techniques.

[1] In 1929, he became engaged to the daughter of Harry Fay, a popular singer who recorded with the Crystalate Company, makers of the Rex and Panachord labels.

[3] Together with a music director, Jay Wilbur, Haddy was in sole charge of the technical side of the company's work until the young Kenneth Wilkinson joined him in 1931.

[3] During the 1930s Haddy gradually developed improved cutting heads and dynamic pickups, with the aim of widening the usable frequency range of his records.

After experimenting with other techniques, Haddy opted for the moving-coil principle which Paul Voigt of Edison Bell and Alan Blumlein of EMI had separately advocated back in the 1920s.

They were tasked with making recording equipment to detect the sonic differences in the water movement around German and British submarine propellers.

[5] Under Haddy's technical leadership, Decca was the first British company to issue long playing records (1950) and was in the vanguard of stereophony in the middle of the decade.

The accepted need now to preserve some degree of background ambient noise if a recording is to sound natural and lifelike is due in part to his concern.