At the urging of family friend, Saturday Review of Literature Editor Norman Cousins, Hall abandoned his graduate studies to write an annotated discography of recorded sound.
In 1948, Hall joined forces with fellow Yale graduate John Hammond on a quest to post-war Europe on behalf of Mercury Records, then a Chicago-based produced of "pop" material.
Wishing to enter the growing classical music market, Mercury executives realized that radio stations and governments in formerly Nazi-occupied countries held a gold mine in superb performances by Europe's top musicians.
Hammond had hired Hall, "a well-known authority on classical recording, to handle the considerable job of cataloging Czech and German material.
"[7] Hall and Hammond left Prague one step ahead of Soviet forces as they crushed Czechoslovakia's democratic government.
Fine's mobile sound studio toured the midwest, recording performances by the Detroit, Louisville, and Minneapolis symphonies and musical groups at the Eastman School at the University of Rochester.
In 1967, Hall was the founding curator of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound, one of the units of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center.
Hall and his associates also released an important collection of historic sound recordings, The Mapleson Cylinders, which captured the singing of Metropolitan Opera stars of the early twentieth century.
Late in life, Hall was at work on a biography of the twentieth century American composer, Roy Harris.