The recording of The Ring was conceived and produced by Decca's senior producer, John Culshaw, who engaged the Vienna Philharmonic, the conductor Georg Solti and leading Wagner singers including Birgit Nilsson, Wolfgang Windgassen, Hans Hotter and Gottlob Frick and, in roles they did not play onstage, well-known singers such as Kirsten Flagstad, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Joan Sutherland.

Culshaw and his engineering colleagues set out to capture on disc performances that would recreate in listeners' minds the drama that Wagner intended, compensating for the lack of visual images with imaginative production, making use of stereophonic techniques that became possible shortly before the start of the recording of the cycle.

In polls for BBC Music and Gramophone magazines the Decca Ring has been voted the greatest recording ever made, and it has won numerous honours, including Grand Prix du Disque and Grammy awards.

Before the introduction of the long playing disc (LP) in the late 1940s a complete recorded Ring was, as the Decca producer John Culshaw put it, "unthinkable".

There were two such recordings – Die Meistersinger ("The Mastersingers") (Decca, 1950–51),[6] and Tristan und Isolde (EMI, 1952)[7][n 2] – but in general it was thought that the only financially viable course was to tape live performances.

There and elsewhere in the score the volume and clarity of sound were unprecedented on disc;[21] the hi-fi aspects of the recording added to its appeal to the LP-buying public, as Culshaw recognised.

It entered the Billboard charts of best-selling LPs, "surrounded by Elvis Presley and Pat Boone, and without another classical recording in sight".

The best-known singer of Siegfried at the time was Wolfgang Windgassen, but in Culshaw's view the performer's voice was showing "distinct signs of wear and tear" after more than ten years of singing Wagner's exceptionally demanding tenor roles.

[34] In High Fidelity Conrad L. Osborne called the set "Solti's finest recorded accomplishment to date", and added, "On to Götterdämmerung, please".

[37] Another, more controversial, attempt to represent Wagner's intentions was near the end of Act I, where the tenor Siegfried impersonates the baritone Gunther: the engineers subjected Windgassen's recorded voice to technological intervention to make it temporarily sound more like that of Fischer-Dieskau.

Flagstad had died in 1962 and for Fricka, which she had played in Das Rheingold, Culshaw hoped to cast another former Brünnhilde, Astrid Varnay, but she declined and Christa Ludwig sang the part.

)[44][n 9] In 1968 Decca issued the cycle as an integral set on 19 LPs, together with a three-disc addendum consisting of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll and Kinderkatechismus ("Children's Catechism") both conducted by Solti, and an illustrated musical analysis of The Ring by the musicologist Deryck Cooke.

[51] In polls for Gramophone (1999) and BBC Music Magazine (2012) the Decca Ring was voted "the greatest recording of all time",[52] and the phrase has been echoed by writers in the US and Australia.

[53][54] In 2008 The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music said of the set, "Whether in performances or in vividness of sound, it remains the most electrifying account of the tetralogy on disc, with Götterdämmerung "a peak of achievement for [Solti], commanding and magnificent".

[55] The complete cycle and its component parts have won numerous honours, including Grand Prix du Disque Mondiale and Grammy awards.