by Bert Whyte
THE MIDWEST Acoustic Conference in Chicago, the Consumer Electronics Show also in Chicago and the Brigham Young Univ. Audio Seminar in Provo, Utah, have been duly attended and your peripatetic reporter is home from the quadraphonic wars, weary, but hopefully wiser. I am looking forward to a few weeks of R and R before my batman packs my kit and I return to the front lines at the Electron Show at the Royal York in Toronto late in August, followed by the AES convention and IHF show in September in New York.
When one attends these various affairs, one naturally pays attention to the business for which these meetings were convened. However, it must be noted that there are many peripheral activities at these affairs . . . mini meetings . . . demonstrations in private hotel suites . . . perhaps just a casual chat in a corridor, or a drink and some "off-the-cuff' revelations from a panelist or exhibitor. Quite often the information garnered is as significant as the main business of the convention. It all adds up to a tremendous program input to that computer between one's ears, and one hopes that the "memory cores" will ultimately permit a reasonable assessment and evaluation of all that welter of information! Needless to say, at these meetings there were many matters of interest to a very broad spectrum of the audio community, and it is unfortunate that space will not allow detailed coverage.
The term "highlights" has a certain stigma attached to it in these days of predigested, packaged information, so you will have to forgive the use of this expedient. Herewith is my report on a few of the significant developments stemming from the aforementioned meetings.
It is fairly common knowledge among regular readers of this column that I am a hard-core, uncompromising devotee of open-reel recording. For several years I have been advocating the production of Dolby B open-reel recorded tapes, with Ampex Stereo Tapes the target of my unrelenting diatribes.
Ampex was chosen for this assault on the purely logical grounds that they were the largest producers of recorded tapes in all formats, the record companies who were their licensers could furnish Dolby A copy masters, and since Ampex was producing Dolby B cassettes, they had all the necessary equipment for the production of open reel recorded tapes with Dolby B noise reduction. All it really took to start the ball rolling was an executive decision. You will recall that some months ago I gave you the name and address of the general manager of Ampex Stereo Tapes and urged you to write him, expressing your desire for Dolby open reel tapes. During this same period my friend Larry Zide, editor of dB Magazine, was making himself equally pestiferous to Ampex anent Dolby open reel tapes. I know from copies of letters I have seen and by reports from Ampex that quite a few readers did indeed write and give Ampex the "needle"! Well, friends, between my prodding and Larry Zide's pushing and your letters . . . would you believe that just before I left New York for the CES in Chicago I received a phone call from Mike Ayers, Ampex Stereo Tapes' personable and efficient PR man in New York? Mike said, "Okay, you and Larry win ...drop around to the AST booth at the CES, and we'll have a present for you." Yup, you guessed it . . . lo and behold, Larry and I were given a special Dolby B open-reel demonstration tape! By gad, for once, being a pain in the you know-what, paid off! 1 was delighted to receive the tape of course, but was unprepared and surprised by the music on the tape. The unexpected bonus was that the program material was from the Deutsche Grammophon catalog. Those of us on the "inside" knew that all the Boston Symphony recordings made since DGG took over the orchestra from RCA were produced with Dolby A and in four-channel stereo to boot (in fact, I have heard part of the DGG quadraphonic "1812 Overture"). However, we also knew that back at home base in Hamburg, DGG just sat on the Dolby quadraphonic tapes. To my knowledge, not even the regular disc production was cut from the Dolby A master, but most likely from an expanded normal copy. By nature a very conservative record company, DGG was undoubtedly waiting for these new concepts to become more firmly established before they released any material. In any case, kudos to the persuasive, golden-tongued Ampex man who talked DGG into furnishing them with Dolby A copy-masters. The music on the tape that was given to me consists of the opening "Mars" movement of Gustav Holst's Planets, conducted by William Steinberg, and the third movement of Walter Piston's Symphony # 2, conducted by young Michael Tilson Thomas. What did it sound like? Just plain sensational! It is astonishing how much cleaner the overall sound is with the Dolby processing. Complex orchestral textures become much more transparent, every note is clearly delineated. It must be said that the music could have been more carefully chosen to demonstrate the efficiency of the Dolby B system. There are many high level passages in the "Mars" piece and quite a few in the Piston 2nd, in which, of course, the Dolby is inoperative, the circuit at that level acting as a unity gain amplifier. However there are sufficient low level passages as well as rests in the scores, which are heard blessedly free of tape hiss.
I have played this tape for quite a few friends who not only lavished praise on it for its high quality, but who were excited by the implications of this tape.
Ampex can draw on the Dolby master resources of such companies as London/ Decca, Vanguard, and now DGG, and I am very pleased that Ampex has asked me to furnish them with a list of works from their catalogs that would be suitable for production as Dolby B open-reel tapes. If all goes according to plan, you should be able to buy open-reel Dolby B tapes by early fall of this year. I should point out that the tape played back equally well on a Revox A77 with built-in Dolby, and on Ampex and Astrocom tape decks with Dolby add-on units. With the imminent emergence of Dolby open reel tapes, it is timely that the first pre-production samples of the Signetics IC Dolby B chip are being delivered to Dolby licensees. With such other manufacturers as Fairchild and Texas Instruments and possibly Motorola eventually entering into production of the Dolby IC chip, the price is expected to reach levels as low as $3.00 per unit and perhaps even less. This paves the way for really low cost Dolby B playback-only units, which would work right in with the new Ampex tapes, as well as the quadraphonic open-reel tapes with "fore and aft" Dolby B noise reduction, announced recently by Vanguard.
As you may know, the sale of open reel tape decks, especially the higher priced units above $300.00, has been showing modest but steady increase for the past several years. Sad to relate, open-reel recorded tapes have experienced declining sales. Without question the biggest reason has been the curse of tape hiss. I've said it before and I'll say it again . . . the rebirth of the open-reel format when the Dolby B tapes become available will startle the hi-fi industry and prove once and for all the vitality of this format.
At the CES, far from the madding crowds at McCormick Place, Advent was set up in a hotel suite, demonstrating the first fruits of a project announced many months ago . . . to wit, the production of high quality recorded cassettes. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to attend the demonstrations,, but I had several pairs of surrogate ears, for which I have a high regard, who were there and they were most impressed and enthusiastic about the Advent cassettes. What Advent has done is to arrange to use the Dolby A masters from the Nonesuch Records catalog, which is fairly comprehensive and encompasses Both standard classical works and a good hit of esoterica.
Many of the Nonesuch tapes are of superb quality, having been recorded by Marc Aubort, former vice-president of Dolby Laboratories in the U.S. and a top recordists in the classical field with that rare combination of technical expertise and knowledge of music.
Having at least partially solved the problem of high quality source material, Advent proceeded to duplicate their recorded cassettes on chromium dioxide tape at a speed ratio of four to one. This ratio is a far cry from the usual 32-to-1 speed of regular commercial cassette duplication. We know from considerable experience that it is possible to make outstandingly good recorded cassettes on chromium dioxide tape at a one-to-one ratio. A four to-one ratio would seem to be the minimum duping speed that could be used commensurate with modest production quantities. Naturally, overall production would depend on how many slave units were in operation. My informants tell me the sound on these new Advent cassettes was exceptionally clean and not only markedly free of tape hiss, but with little evidence of drop-outs or modulation noise. If the high quality can be maintained consistently, Advent has advanced the case for the cassette considerably. It is to be hoped that their effort is supported and that they gain access to other high quality masters. I for one am looking forward to auditioning these exciting new cassettes.
Interesting aspects of the Midwest Acoustic Conference and the Brigham Young Univ. Audio Seminar were the demonstrations and lectures given by Bill Putnam of United Recording. Bill not only outlined the uses of time delay in pop studio recording via his Cooper Time Cube unit, but expounded on a refreshing new pop recording philosophy. Bill certainly qualifies as among the top half-dozen mixing engineers in the country, and in his lectures he commented on the strictures and limitations of present day pop recording practises. He pointed out that no matter how clever and even innovative most engineers are in their pop mixing, the end result is the inevitable two-channel or four-channel monophonic recording rather than stereo recording in its classical definition. The desires of the pop record producer (and what the producer thinks the public ought to have in terms of sound quality) is a factor of course and unquestionably is largely responsible for a large degree of the inflexible, circumscribed approach to pop recording in the studios. Bill showed that with the Haas Effect working for an engineer who uses time delay in conjunction with typical reverb devices (such as the EMT plates), you get a sort of "something for nothing" enhancement of perspective. The resultant sound has an open, spacious quality more akin to that obtained in a large hall, yet loses little of the "close-up" sense of "presence" considered so vital in pop recording. I don't think Bill is expecting to create an overnight change in recording techniques. The important thing is that there are some new tools available to engineers; there are some alternatives to current studio practices that seem to have considerable potential for the creation of exciting new sounds.
As I certainly don't have to remind you, nothing has been resolved in the battle of the matrixes or matrix versus CD-4 discrete disc. One thing was notable at these recent shows I attended as regards quadraphonic sound. Even among some staunch matrix disc supporters there was a definite "ground swell" for the idea of the combined discrete/matrix disc mentioned some months ago by Ed Canby and Len Feldman. Engineers with impressive credentials have said that this combo disc should not present any particular technical problems, and that the whole thing was really more of a matter of the contending forces sitting down at the peace talk and working out the details. Well, could be, fellas, but I have just been told by the CD-4 camp that while there is merit in the idea, there are some very formidable technical problems in cutting and encoding such a disc, which would take at least a year to resolve. They also contend that with so much information crammed onto the walls of the record groove, some compromises in quality would be necessary, and they would be most unhappy to undertake such a degradation of their system. Now, don't go raising your eyebrow at me! I'm just telling you what the man said.
One last item this month. At the Brigham Young seminar there was a gentleman, who had traveled all the way from Canada at obviously considerable expense, who stated he was attending the seminar because thus far he thought quadraphonic was a big nothing ... he was singularly unimpressed by its supposed virtues ... and he wanted to be shown he was wrong. I don't know whether the seminar made him a true believer or not, but it points up the fact that here was a man who, prior to his attending the seminar, had obviously never had a proper demonstration of four-channel stereo. One can almost guarantee that the demonstrations he heard were not conducted in his home. This is central to the whole proposition of quadraphonic sound ... demonstrations in the average audio salon and certainly in the oversized rooms used for meetings and demonstrations by various technical societies cannot be compared to the quadraphonic experience in the home. It is a serious obstacle to the propagation of quadraphonic sound and some sort of "loaner" equipment scheme worked out by the retailers would seem to have a high priority.
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Bernstein in SQ
The new Bernstein Mass has certainly inspired some mixed feelings among the critics. I myself find this work to be a curious mixture of grandeur and utter banalities which is completely fascinating. It has a touch of Mahler and Poulenc with more than a hint of West Side Story padded out with moronic pseudo-Rock trivia. But the sound itself and the dramatic use of quadraphonics in the CBS SQ record is simply superb.
The listener is really engulfed in sound with the variously placed choral groups, vocalists, and instrumentalists making a stunning impact, It shows what can be achieved with this new medium besides having instruments playing in all four corners.
-George W. Tillet
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(Audio magazine, 1972; Bert Whyte)
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Behind The Scenes (Sept. 1972)
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