Kenneth Wilkinson

Wilkinson discussed the use of the Decca tree in an interview with Michael H. Gray in 1987.

Wilkinson's method of selecting recording venues was recounted in an article on concert hall orchestral sound written by the conductor Denis Vaughan in 1981:

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

Wilkinson retired from Decca when the company was taken over by the PolyGram group in 1980. He made no free-lance recordings. His work was released on Lyrita and Reader's Digest records (as mentioned above) and RCA Records with recordings licensed through Decca. His recordings were characterised by the producer Tam Henderson in an appreciation: "The most remarkable sonic aspect of a Wilkinson orchestral recording is its rich balance, which gives full measure to the bottom octaves, and a palpable sense of the superior acoustics of the venues he favored, among them the Assembly Hall at Waltham Forest Town Hall, Walthamstow in London and The Kingsway Hall of revered memory".

On retiring, Wilkinson received a special gold disc produced by Decca with extracts of his recordings. He received three Grammys for engineering: 1973, 1975, and 1978. He also received an audio award from Hi-Fi magazine in 1981 and the Walter Legge Award in 2003 "…for extraordinary contribution to the field of recording classical music".

Among Wilkinson's favourite recordings was Britten's War Requiem. This was recorded in January 1963 at one of Wilkinson's favourite venues, Kingsway Hall, with Culshaw as the producer. Among other recordings engineered by Wilkinson were Wagner's Parsifal recorded live at Bayreuth in 1951, of which the critic Andrew Porter wrote, "...the most moving and profound of spiritual experiences ... Decca have recorded, superbly, a superb performance", and Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique with Sir Georg Solti conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in May 1972 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Krannert Center.

Decca was an early adopter of the LP album, which put it ahead of its direct competitor EMI. The company was also an early exponent of stereophonic recording. Wilkinson would make the move to stereo recordings for Decca in April 1958, but until then he remained the engineer with the monaural recording team (for a time there were parallel recording teams) because mono was considered the more important release. In the early 1950s, together with Roy Wallace (1927–2007) and Haddy, he developed the Decca tree spaced microphone array used for stereo orchestral recordings. Decca began to use this for recordings in May 1954 at Victoria Hall in Geneva, a venue Wilkinson did not record in. He preferred recording in London and Paris although he also recorded in Amsterdam, Bayreuth, Chicago, Copenhagen, Rome, and Vienna.

Wilkinson's early recordings as an engineer were for monaural 78 rpm releases. With Charles Munch bringing the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra to record in London for the first time, Wilkinson had to find a new recording location as Kingsway Hall was already booked. He found an outstanding acoustic in Walthamstow Town Hall, which was booked for the sessions for 8–11 October 1946. For these sessions, he also served as producer. On 19 November, he was back at Walthamstow recording the London Symphony Orchestra in that venue for the first time. Victor Olof (1898–1976) was the producer for this session and many future ones with Wilkinson as engineer. Their collaboration included a complete set of Sibelius's symphonies recorded between 1952 and 1955 in Kingsway Hall.

Wilkinson married Miriam Tombs in 1938, and they had four children (two sons, two daughters).

Wilkinson's stereo recordings with the conductor Charles Gerhardt (including a series of Reader's Digest recordings and the RCA Classic Film Scores series) and the producer John Culshaw made his name and reputation known to record reviewers and audiophiles. His legacy was extended by the fact that he trained every Decca engineer from 1937 onwards.

Wilkinson, always called "Wilkie" in the music business, was known as a straight-talking man, interested only in the quality of the work. The Decca producer Ray Minshull (1934–2007) recalled Wilkinson's methods in an interview with Jonathan Valin in March 1993:

Wilkinson was born in London. He attended 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.

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.

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.