Kenneth Wilkinson

Kenneth Ernest Wilkinson (28 July 1912 – 13 January 2004) was an audio engineer for Decca Records, known for engineering classical recordings with superb sound quality.

After working for small recording companies, Wilkinson was taken onto the staff of Decca, where he engineered many recordings, working with producers such as John Culshaw and conductors including Sir Georg Solti, Hans Knappertsbusch and Benjamin Britten. He trained a whole generation of celebrated Decca engineers.

Wilkinson so closely identified with the Decca sound that he retired when the company was absorbed into the PolyGram group in 1980.

Wilkinson was born in London. He attended the Trinity Grammar School, Wood Green in north London on a scholarship. He left school at the age of sixteen in 1928, and worked for the publishing house, Cassell's. When one of the firm's accountants left to join the World Echo Record Company, Wilkinson went with him, and was present at the company's first electrical recording at the old Clerkenwell Sessions House off Farringdon Street in London. In that job, which involved him in the early electrical recording process, he met Jay Wilbur (James Edward Wilbur), a dance bandleader who interested him in the technical side of recording. The company folded, and Wilkinson took a job in charge of the recorded music at an ice rink in Brighton.

Wilbur had joined Crystalate, another record company, and invited Wilkinson to join him at its studios in Hampstead. Wilkinson's job as a junior there included shaving waxes, removing the surface of used recording waxes to make them blank for re-recording. At Crystalate he met the recording engineer Arthur Haddy (1906–1989). When Decca acquired Crystalate in 1937, Wilkinson and Haddy (who would become the technical director at Decca) now worked for the new company.

An attempt to volunteer for the Royal Air Force during World War II was refused because Decca was involved in top secret government research. Wilkinson would work on submarine navigation, recording Luftwaffe night fighter signals, and on navigation aspects of the dam buster operations of Barnes Wallace. With Haddy, he also worked on Decca's recording equipment, disc cutters, and recording techniques including "ffrr" (full frequency range recording). He was also involved in recording two of Decca's most popular artists: Vera Lynn and Mantovani.

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