And I am not talking musical here, I am talking engineering.
Bing Crosby told people how to sing into a microphone. Before that people bellowed, they were opera singers trying to be heard, and a mic transformed it into noise. The great crooner Crosby realized he could sing very quietly and the mic would pick up his voice. This allowed Crosby to reinvent the balald. And it allowed for some of his greatest mements and popular music's greatest moments.
Listening to "White Christmas", what you then notice is how quietly devastating the sentiments are: the hope is near muted in its gloriousness, a benediction emapthic for the Christian (or at least Western Christian) world, unimaginable 30 years earlier.
The case for Crosby is kinda self-evident. The case for Armstrong less so. In the early 1920s, Armstrong recorded himself with the Hot Five and the Hot Seven. What they discovered is that the sound was muddied and not vaguely useful in capturing their live sound. So they went to a huge empty warehouse with the recorder somewhere in the swamps of Chicago and they took metal baskets and stood them on their bottoms apart from each, messing about with the distance between the instruments because this was one track only. When they got the right distance, they recorded themselves and listen to "West End Avenue" to figure out the result.
This was the birth of recorded music and everything we learnt about recording music stemmed from it. And while obviously much has changed, whatever has been gained from these two innovations.
So when you rave about Red Hook, remember this story!