Behind The Scenes (Mar. 1972)

by Bert Whyte

DURING 1971 a considerable number of cassette tape machine manufacturers adopted the Dolby System. The year ended with the giant Sony Corp. becoming a Dolby licensee. In January of this year, Panasonic and JVC concluded licensing arrangements with Dolby Laboratories, and their signing means that virtually every major cassette machine manufacturer in Japan will be producing Dolbyized equipment. As predicted in these pages months ago, the Dolby System is well on the way to becoming an "industry standard." With Advent/Wollensak in this country and most of the European manufacturers already in the Dolby fold, the lone major holdout is, ironically, the originators of the cassette concept, the great Phillips Corp. In the face of the overwhelming acceptance of the Dolby System, it would not be too surprising if sometime before this year is out, Phillips decides to sign with Dolby.

The importance of all this for us music lovers is, of course, the proliferation of Dolbyized cassette equipment on such a large scale that the other major record companies will join Columbia and London/Decca in issuing Dolby "stretched" recorded cassettes.

I can tell you that a major American record company has already been running tests with the Dolby product on their high speed duping equipment, and there is every reason to expect commercial production within the next few months. If all the record companies begin producing Dolbyized cassettes, it is going to help improve the overall quality of this format. Their concerted engineering efforts should be able to correct such annoyances as modulation noise and dropouts, which occurs with exasperating frequency in present recorded cassette production. I think it's fairly safe to predict that by this time next year, we will have Dolbyized cassettes from most of the major record companies with an overall high level of quality that should win new converts to this format.

Okay, so the Dolby cassette situation is well in hand. Now how about what is near and dear to my heart and that of a great number of audiophiles .... Dolbyized open reel tapes? I have received quite a few letters from readers who query why I have not championed this cause. Sorry friends, but if you will just peel your eyeballs a bit sharper you will find that I have commented on this situation a number of times over the past two years.

The fact is that I have made many overtures to Ampex to initiate the release of Dolbyized open reel tapes.

With all due respect to the cassette advocates, I feel that the open reel tape enthusiast has always been the foremost proponent of high quality audio. For years he has lived with a format which has been condemned as "clumsy" (mostly by fumble-fingered nervous nits who don't deserve such good quality in the first place) and he has paid a premium price for his music on tape. The open reel people have put up with these inconveniences for all the good qualities of the format. But the one cross all open reel advocates have had to bear in mutual misery, and the prime reason for the lack of open reel tape growth, is the ever-present, pernicious bug-a-boo of tape hiss. Open reel tape processing by Ampex has reached a consistently high level of quality except for the tape hiss. It is extremely rare to encounter any modulation noise or dropouts, and even print-through and crosstalk are either greatly attenuated and infrequent or absent altogether. By Ampex's own estimate, there are over ten million open reel recorders in use in this country and the recent success of their open reel tape-by-mail program has shown them this market is far from dead. I have talked to hundreds of open reel enthusiasts in hi-fi salesrooms and at hifi shows, who are unanimous in their plea for B Type Dolby tapes. If Ampex will issue these tapes, I guarantee they will be astonished by the vitality and size of the open reel market.

All it takes on the part of Ampex Stereo Tapes to establish a renaissance of the open reel market is an executive decision to produce B Type Dolby recorded tapes. They have the Dolby A Type units to playback their Dolby A copies of the master tape furnished by the record companies they have under contract (which is sonically equivalent to the master tape itself). They have the Model 320 Dolby B Type processor.

They have everything they need to produce Dolby open reel tapes, and it won't cost them a nickel. Perhaps the reason they have not taken this step is that they feel it would not be economically feasible to produce a special run of Dolbyized tapes in addition to regular production. The obvious way around this of course would be to Dolbyize all the tapes, in the same fashion Columbia is doing with its cassettes. Perhaps they have the fear that if they did this, consumers not equipped with Dolby equipment would have an "incompatible" product. No more so than obtains with the cassette, and probably the same procedure of treble attenuation would work as well in this case, as it does with the cassette.

I know my audiophile open reel enthusiasts. For the boon of a Dolbyized tape, they would gladly pay a dollar or dollar and a half more than the regular price. This should be more than enough for Ampex to justify a special Dolby production run. I suggest too, that Ampex issue at least initially, Dolby B Type recorded tapes made only from Dolby A masters. London/ Decca has been recording Dolby A masters since 1966, there are plenty of Vanguard Dolby A masters, and now that Deutsche Grammophon has Dolby A equipment (all the DGG Boston Symphony recordings are Dolby) there is no dearth of Dolby A masters. I further suggest that tape speed remain at 7' ips. The open reel enthusiast generally has fairly high quality amplifiers and speakers and if he is going to pay extra for his Dolby tapes, he doesn't want to compromise in any way.

He doesn't want the Dolby System to be used as a crutch for 3 3/4 ips! Now friends, if we want to convince dear old Ampex that "thar's gold in them Dolby open reel tapes," don't write to one, write to Mr. Don Hall, Vice-President and General Manager of the Ampex Music Division, 2201 Lunt Avenue, Elk Grove Village, Illinois 60007. Tell him your desires, tell him if you have to pay extra for Dolbyized open reel tapes, you're willing to make this sacrifice.

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On the four-channel stereo front, Peter Scheiber, the matrixing pioneer, has been issued U.S. Patent 3,632,886 covering his encoding and decoding matrixing techniques. As you are probably aware, Peter is now associated with Electro-Voice which announced it feels the patent is "basic and will cover all current or announced matrixing systems." That this will further complicate the already snarled situation in four-channel stereo matrixing vis-à-vis the competing systems of Electro Voice, Sansui and Columbia SQ, is to put it mildly. Well, whoever comes up a winner, there is a situation developing which will require some positive action.

No one argues that classical music now is a mere 5 percent of the record market. Sad, but true! Nevertheless, even this miniscule portion is going to want their favorite classics in the four-channel stereo format. The kicker is that there aren't very many discrete four-channel masters available. Vanguard, of course, has the original recordings which started this whole four-channel ball rolling. Columbia has some, RCA perhaps a half dozen, the only London/Decca recording I'm positive of is the Mahler 8th Symphony, and the Deutsche Grammophon/Boston Symphony recordings are all four-channel stereo recordings. The situation is further complicated by the sheer economics of the recordings, especially in this country. We are not going to be able to indulge in the same practices as obtained in the transition from monophonic to stereo. In those balmy days, the recording companies gradually re-recorded all the important repertoire in stereo. Today, even a work as basic as the Beethoven 5th Symphony can cost more than $25,000.00 to record.

The thought of just recording the nine Beethoven, four Brahms and six Tchaikovsky symphonies is enough to give a company fits. You can be sure that a work is not going to be recorded specifically for four-channel stereo. It will have to be something the company is going to record to fill a need in the normal stereo market, with the four channel picked up as a "bonus." Of course, the situation will gradually improve as quadraphonic sound becomes established in Europe, and the recording companies will record four-channel stereo as a normal function.

In this country, the only recourse would seem to be to utilize the Eargle process, or something like it. In this manner, all of the thousands of classical recordings in the vaults of the recording companies would be available for conversion to quadraphonic. The Eargle process was described by me in the April, 1971 issue of AUDIO. My friend Bill Putnam of United Recording Co. in Hollywood has recently listened to some Eargle four-channel stereo and is so enthusiastic about its possibilities that he is contemplating adding an Eargle processing facility to his studio.

What with Bill manufacturing the Cooper delay tube, this frees him from the use of the 80 ips tape speed delay used in the original Eargle process and presumably affords more flexibility.

With a crackerjack engineer like Bill Putnam in charge, and with John Eargle available for consultation just a few miles away at his Altec office in Anaheim, this may someday be an important source of quadraphonic recordings. We will watch this with keen interest.

(Audio magazine, Mar. 1972; Bert Whyte)

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