The advent of Stereo recording in 1953

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chrisc

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Last year I sold some LPs and CDs belonging to a late sound engineer from Capitol Records in New York

He had started to make some notes as a young engineer fresh out of college.  Here are some from his diary, made in the early 1950's to 1959 when he left RCA for Capitol.  OCR software was used to capture handwritten notes


On 6th October 1953, RCA Victor made its first experimental "binaural? recordings.

At New York's Manhattan Center, Leopold Stokowski conducted a pick-up Orchestra in Enesco?s Roumanian Rhapsody and Tchaikovsky's Waltz from Eugene Onegin. In December RCA continued stereo tests in Manhattan Center with Pierre Monteux and members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Then, in February 1954, RCA took equipment to Boston's Symphony Hall, where Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony were recording Berloz's The Damnation of Faust.

For the first time, RCA engineers captured the performance on both mono and two-track tape. These experiments, combined with further technological refinements employed in Chicago's Orchestra Hall in March 1954, were the first forays into the world of stereo.

At the time that RCA initiated multi-track sessions, disc mastering and consumer playback technology were monaural. RCA Victor proceeded to use two- and three-track equipment to record the world's greatest artists - Heifetz, Piatigorsky, Reiner, Munch, Rubinstein, Fiedler?in anticipation that home technology would catch up to stereo sound.
Finally, in 1955, l/4" 7 l/2 ips stereophonic tape players arrived on the consumer market, and RCA released its first Stereo Orthophonic tapes.  These tapes redefined high Fidelity.

In 1958, the Western Electric Company produced the breakthrough Westrex stereo disc cutter, thereby revolutionizing master disc production. Stereo playback equipment was developed to coincide with the new disc cutting technology. The same year, Living Stereo LP records were launched, ushering in the golden age of stereo high fidelity.  EMI in England had already developed the principle of stereo (horizontal with vertical modulation in a single groove), back in 1935 but inadvertantly allowed the patent to lapse, thereby losing millions of pounds in revenue.

RCA Victor's first two-track sessions in late 1953 and early 1954 were captured on proprietary RCA RT-Z  1/4? 30ips tape machines, wired to a pair of mono mixers, each dedicated to one tape track. Neumann U 47 cardioid and M-49/50 omnidirectional microphones were favoured, as were RCA-designed LC-IA 15" duo-cone speakers in the control room. Three-track recordings were realised on valve amplifier Ampex 300-3 1/ 2" machines running at 15ips and in later years at 30ips, and were mixed down to l/4" two-track masters.

No equalization was used in the original tracking process; the microphone signals were summed  through passive electronics and printed straight to tape.  ln addition, no equalization was used to alter playback takes for artist approval.

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