Jack Pfeiffer's Corner
The Age of Living Stereo

The prospects of stereophonic reproduction of music had been a dream of many years - some experimentation in the early 1930s had yielded some interesting results. Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, working with Bell Telephone, had made some discs using two grooves to carry the left and right information. They were parallel grooves requiring two cutting and two playback stylii. The system was impractical, and couldn't result in any commercially acceptable product.

After the advent of the LP record, with cutting methods becoming more sophisticated and electronic manipulation a practical reality, thought was again directed at the possibility of a stereophonic record, but considering that it was basically a disc cutting problem, recording companies concentrated on the recording problem. In 1953, RCA had two-track professional equipment, and were designing a console to accept multiple inputs. The engineers felt that three microphone input channels for each track were sufficient, and incorporated provisions for splitting a microphone signal between the two.

I was so enthusiastic that I pressed for every opportunity to experiment with live orchestras. The first was on October 6, 1953, with Leopold Stokowski and his Symphony Orchestra in Webster Hall, New York City. Nothing remains of the two-track results of that session, but in December [1953], Pierre Monteux with members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra were in Manhattan Center for recording of excerpts of Delibes' Coppelia. The equipment was only partially set up, because engineers were actively engaged in getting a commercial monoaural recording. But some takes were recorded stereophonically with a two-microphone setup.

Pierre Monteux and the BSO - December 1953 (.wav format, 32 sec., 2.8Mb)
Pierre Monteux and the BSO - December 1953 (.au format, 32 sec., 1.4Mb)
Pierre Monteux and the BSO - December 1953 (.aif format, 32 sec., 2.8Mb)

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