Review of The Dawn Of Stereo from The Audiophile Voice, Vol. 6, Issue 5.
HISTORIC RECORDING
THIS THOROUGH-GOING documentation of the early days of stereophonic sound reproduction may turn out to be historic in its own right. There may he other 12-hour stereo CDs available for commercial purchase but I have not run across any. If this was a DVD, it could contain 72 hours of stereo music! This feat is accomplished by encoding the original analog stereo tapes, made during the 1950s, using MP3, a popular sound compression program. In case you are over 21, MP3 is the Internet program of choice for downloading rock and hip-hop tunes for free into PCs or portable MP3 players.
This CD has to be played on a PC or MP's player. The output of the PC should then be connected to the input of the best stereo reproduction system you have. I tried three-MP3 software DACs: Winamp, Real Player G2 and MP3 Windows Media. The first two I downloaded, free, from the web as recommended by Balkan Records in their notes. I used a new Dell laptop as the CD player and connected its sound card into my high-end, all-digital, multi channel system. The results were not encouraging. The fidelity was okay, but with both laptop MP3 programs, there was a pop, a gurgle or tick every few seconds. But when I used MP3 Windows Media on a Compaq Presario, I heard no such artifacts. I wish I knew what causes such glitches, but I don't. If MP3 Windows Media is the same as Winamp, then the difference must lie within the computers
Although I have heard some pretty good demos of MP3 audio quality, I have never taken the technology too seriously where classical music was concerned. The lack of a remote control to step between selections and fast forward has to be balanced against the program note file that is attached and the video file that can be viewed to see the tape jackets. But let me tell you that the sound on this disc is nothing if not spectacular from almost any point of view. As far as my ears could tell, there was little compression distortion, the frequency response was as wide as any CD, and there was no audible noise. The bulk of the tracks are derived from master stereo magnetic tapes made in the early '50s before the stereo LP was launched. Most of them come from the collection of Robert Oakes Jordan, a veteran recording engineer operating out of Chicago. The tapes are of early AM/FM stereo broadcasts, TV/AM stereo broadcasts, and many primordial demo tapes used by RCA, Westminster, NBC, Bell Sound, Ampex, and others to help their dealers sell stereo tape players and then their catalogs of prerecorded reel-to-reel stereo tapes.
Make no mistake; the 15 or 30 IPS machines used in those clays were of extremely high duality. The other point to observe is that they used only a single pair of spaced directional microphones. They did not have stereo mixing consoles for spot microphones or artificial reverb machines, pan puts, etc., and so could not monkey with the master tape before, during, or after the recording session. Also, these demos were recorded live and spaces and venues are all natural. What I am leading up to is that the stereo imaging is better on these tapes than on 90 per cent of the LPs and CDs I have heard since then.
I have one caveat, however. To properly hear what these early pioneers accomplished, you should listen to these cuts with VMAx, the Lexicon Panorama mode, the Carver Sonic Holography option or an Echobusters Reality Buster. The microphone technique used in those clays engendered an exceptionally wide stage width. But the crosstalk inherent in the usual home stereo triangle will limit the image width to the space between the speakers and cause other imaging errors. It would be a shame not to hear these musical excerpts in all their full-width glory.
The other notable fact of historic interest is that most of the musical demo excerpts are of classical music. Even the popular music ones are of large orchestral sounds and might properly he called "light classics." The tapes include some verbal introductory descriptions of the history of sound recording and the advantages of stereo over mono. The Gold Standard in those days was concert hall realism. Many of them claim to have finally achieved it. They then hit you with a sample of full orchestral music such as Espana or Berlioz to prove the point. (Actually, it doesn't take too much to add surround concert hall ambience to their exceedingly wide stage, and I auditioned most of the tracks this way to do this review.)
Of course, being an early form of sales pitch, there are a plethora of trains, planes, racing cars, trucks, a ping pong game, roaring lions, Grand Central Station, an indoor swimming pool, walk abouts, a roller coaster, parades, a subway, a rocket launch, thunder, two nickelodeons, a horse race, a howling alley, a construction site, and elephant roars. But many of the musical excerpts are delightful and often serious. I was startled to hear a performance of Prokofiev's Overture on Hebrew Themes with a horn instead of a clarinet. The Thus Spake Zarathustra organ is also well represented on an Ampex demo tape and this was long before 2001 and Stanley Kubrick. The Omegatape demo, track 30, a rendition of 'Chinatown', has the orchestra in phase but the vocalist out-of-phase demonstrating why multi-micing is not a good idea now or then. The Wurlitzer organs never sounded better.
Balkan specializes in CDs of Serbo-Croatian folk music. How they got into this historical stuff I don't know. But this compilation is such a delight that I would urge Balkan to issue this set in a standard CD format. I would limit the CD edition to just the stereo items. There are some five hours (out of the twelve) of the mostly mono Mirage Radio Show with a magical restoration of three very early Caruso recordings, one with Nelli Melba. Some other low-fi mono cuts that are of lesser or no interest to me (and I would suspect most audiophiles) could also be dropped from the CD. Five CDs of the best stereo tapes for the same price of $29.95 or a little bit higher does not seem too impractical to me. Keep the 1933 Mayor Cermak funeral inadvertently AM broadcast in stereo, however.
Ralph Glasgal