In our time, Lo-Fi has become a deliberate colour on the production palette of musicians wanting to sound immediate, raw and direct. It's a way for modern and musically naïve bands to channel or 'dial in' some of the DIY ethic of the punk era, with all its overtones of energy and anti-corporate integrity. A way to badge their garage purity and angry art, however cynically or unconsciously they choose or have it chosen for them.

Nowadays it doesn't matter if you sound shit, because crappy sound gives an aura of groovy authenticity. Whatever poisonous form your desire for authenticity takes, or how tone-deaf your audience may be.

And there are artists for whom it's not even a qualitative distinction: they just prefer to work in Lo-Fi.

It reminds me of something Eno said about changes in technology: once a technology has been supplanted, then its formal limitations take on the retro chic of realism and immediacy, and people start seeking it out as a medium. His examples included analogue technologies like valve amplifiers and grainy super-8 film. And I guess some of the modern techno-vivalism is due to the rapid and powerful changes in digital technology like the compact disc and Pro Tools. The jump to these technologies was so quick that their initial teething problems (bad mastering mostly) made a lot of conversions to the analogue cause. The technical options and choices presented by the modern studio make the simplicities of the 4-track and cassette era look wonderfully simple and pure again somehow. Hence their return.

But there are great, honestly Lo-Fi records out there: some made Lo by choice, others by design and most by some sort of economic necessity. Let's do a quick jog-through of how this came about.

Back in the days of 78 RPM gramophone records, recordings were made live to master disc, everyone playing in the room and projecting as loud or near as possible to the large bell of the recording diaphragm. Scratches and compressed sound be damned — they recorded amazing (if short & tinny) performances this way. They've also become collector's items. Then the recording process started to improve because better microphones were developed. Radio had a lot to do with this. Still playing to one mic, a band would learn to space themselves around it, move in closer for the solos etc. Then came magnetic tape recording, and again the microphones and amplifiers got better. Then (almost concurrently I think) came long-play microgroove records which could soon enough play in stereo. The mixing boards became much better, clearer and tricky so that unique sounds and effects could be created in the studio. Stuff like natural reverb could be recreated or emphasized using springs, echo chambers etc. Heartbreak Hotel. And at this point the idea of fidelity really took off. And right here, you probably started hearing from 'purists' who liked their jazz bright and scratchy and only played on authentic 78s. The mouldy fig was born, pontificating about purity. He resurfaced in the 70s as the audiophile bonding with Steely Dan on his Marantz stereo and a light cocktail.

Note how these changes are closely related to format. From the brittle shellac 78s to the vinyl Single and LP to the Cassette Tape and then the Compact Disc, with some interesting experiments in quadraphonic and 8-track along the way. And now with a new, occasionally-downward step via digital MP3 and lossy formats. At each improvement there were exhortations to throw away the previous format and get with the newest and clearest in hi-fi crispness (as well as some related trend in amplifiers or speaker positioning or noise-cancelling headphones; technology is about onselling after all).

But sprinkled through this history there have been genuine limitations of necessity, recordings dependent on whatever means were at hand. Think of rare and early recordings of opera from the rafters, think of the gloriously Lo-Fi realism of Live 1969 by the Velvets, the tape recorder on the table with the drinks and small-audience smirks. If no one sat there with the crappy tape recorder, or the microcassette (or now the mobile phone), then we wouldn't have these works of great archival value. The idea of The Bootleg or Audience Recording would not have been the same.

That Velvets recording is true to all the received Lo-Fi hallmarks: the small but smart early-adopter audience, the captured vibe of great songs, the can-do simplicity and anti-corporate roughness. Packaged in a Warhol slip and marketed to the big audience, of course; and now sounding mildly ironic in crisp CD fidelity for everyone who wants to feel distinctly early-adopterish again. Can't wait for the remastered version.

Nowadays bands regularly incorporate rough-and-ready Lo-Fi elements in their slick corporate productions. A little roughness to warm up all those clean fields of digital. Or by incorporating the subtle distortion and warmth of valve amplifiers. Lo-Fi presents a deliberate way out of the perennial analogue vs. digital argument by making it a deliberate option or indeed a full creed to live by.

I keep thinking of that guy from Underworld sitting by the kerb, speaking the colours of passing cars into a microcassette, which was then overdubbed to make the slick final studio mix sound arty and impressionistic and street. This small use of the tape recorder can also become the entire means of production.

Or take a band like the Cowboy Junkies recording their classic Trinity Sessions in a church with only one (very expensive) microphone. Or all the alt.country hipsters with their corduroy values and amps. Or the deliberate dirt of Jon Spencer or Lenny Kravitz distorting his drums like Bonham. Somewhere in the early 90s, dirty became a production value again. Grunge.

This could all be viewed as a covert history of distortion, which is really just rich limitation. Overloading the analogue whatever.

But then there are great new records around which revel in real Lo-Fi. Jolie Holland's first album Catalpa is a wonder of soul and of one-mic in-the-bedroom magic. Early Bonnie Prince Billy is loaded with Lo-Fi sufficiency . Tom Waits is naturally and consistently Lo-Fi, but then his art is commensurate with it: rough, hairy and uniquely soulful. That big guttural voice might sound even more disturbing in full digital clarity — but why would you want that?

And yet Eno's attempt to recreate Velvet Underground magic with No New York in 1978 sounds kind of forced and deliberate, merely dirty or canned in a dial-it-up sense, uninspired.

It's starting to sound like there's a quality of intent at work here: the genuinely limited or uncaringly Lo-Fi vs the canny and planned dirty-Dirts. Sometimes artists adopt the mantle of the Luddite because it's convenient to sound edgy, original and pure. And for other artists the limitations are all they need because their art will carry in any medium, or because a sense of natural limits is key to their style.

And on the other (technological) hand, any supplanted medium will soon inspire advocates and retro-adherents. Take the resurgence of the Cassette — because it's not immediately downloadable and often hand-made, it's gained in cache and cultural kudos. People are making mix-tapes again. By this formula, in ten years the iPod will have gained full retro chic. Shudder.

I could ramble at greater length about some of my favourite Lo-Fi albums (and 1969 is a truly inspiring record for me, and Paul Kelly wrote a very nice piece about the C-90 mixtape over at The Monthly, and I really wanted to sneak in a blurb about the great Headphone Masterpiece), but I'll hand to floor over to contributor suggestions.