CBS 30th Street Studio — The Sound of Silence overdub

The CBS 30th Street Studio at 207 East 30th Street — known as 'The Church' for its exceptional acoustics, housed in a converted Armenian church — was Columbia Records' primary recording facility from 1948 until it closed in 1982. Simon and Garfunkel recorded there throughout their career, and it was at 30th Street that producer Tom Wilson in 1965 overdubbed electric guitar, bass, and drums onto their earlier acoustic recording of 'The Sound of Silence' — without telling them, without their approval, while they were out of the country. The resulting release reached number one and changed both their careers and the trajectory of folk-rock.

The 30th Street Studio was by general agreement among engineers and musicians the finest-sounding large recording room in America during its operational years. Its dimensions — the converted church nave, the height of the ceiling, the particular way sound moved in the space — produced a natural reverberation that could not be replicated artificially and that defined the sound of dozens of the most important recordings in American music history. Miles Davis's Kind of Blue was recorded there. Billie Holiday, Glenn Gould, Johnny Cash, and Leonard Bernstein all worked in the room. Simon and Garfunkel's Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme was recorded there in 1966.

The building at 207 East 30th Street was demolished in the early 1980s following Columbia's decision to close the studio, and the site was subsequently redeveloped. The loss of the room — which could not be rebuilt once it was gone, because its acoustics were a product of its specific construction — was widely mourned in the recording industry. The Church exists now only in recordings: in the particular quality of echo and space that listeners hear in the records made there between 1948 and 1982.