THE AWEDIBLE TRUTH

I wish I could remember just when I heard my very first stereo, audio out of two channels. That was back some 40 years when stereo was called "binaural" in most minds, as described in my August account of this period. It was a giddy time, this brief "binaural" era, as Bert Whyte by coincidence (and in his own language) recently confirmed in the June issue, just a few pages away from this department. But at the very beginning, like Queen Victoria, I was not amused. I thought "binaural" was a silly idea. TWO loudspeakers spouting sound at you instead of the familiar and appropriate single system.

And I didn't like the effect I heard.

Yeah, a solo violin, maybe it was in a concerto or a sonata, and what I heard was two violins, one on each side of the demo stage. Phooey! Who wanted that? Hi-fi was complicated enough without having doubled--everything coming at you from different directions.

I will admit that this has caused me some discomfiture in the years since, and I've tried to find reasons, though to be sure, plenty of other listeners at the time had exactly this same reaction.

Why should I have disliked what in a very short time became a major enthusiasm, not only "binaural" sound through loudspeakers widely separated but, in time, true binaural via the first available two-channel 'phones, from Permoflux Corp.? (Whyte also mentions these in his account of the period.) As early as 1952, indeed, I was off to a long stint of "binaural" experiments at Washington University in St. Louis as a temporary visiting member of the Music Department. So my Queen Victoria phase had to be very early on, no doubt around 1950; others may know the precise dates of those first audio "binaural" demos.

For at least a year or so, I do recall a wholly dedicated member of our audio fraternity who was stone blind-and a "binaural" nut, as we might put it. This man, despite his physical infirmity, was everywhere, garnering a host of faithful friends, most of them audio engineers, to fetch and carry the clumsy equipment for "binaural" recording and playback, such as it was in those times, giving the widest possible professional "exposure" for his pioneer two-channel sound. It was some of his younger audio friends who hauled me, ever so reluctant, to hear the new sound, and to hear it again. And again.

For a long time, I was not convinced.

I snorted, I sneered, I talked about the double concerto for a single violin simultaneously in two places. I suppose, alas, I wrote all about it. (I am not planning to find out what I said.) And yet, I think there are constructive reasons why I felt as I did, out of the blue, "knowing from nothing" as they say in New Yorkese. These are worth exploring for the audio light they shed on our current stereo.

First--always first--comes habit and what is familiar. A zany example: In 1927, as a child I watched Queen Victoria's grandson George V and his wife, Queen Mary of the famous hats, drive by in one of those royal open carriages with lots of horses out front--this was at their home castle, whichever it was at the time. Do you know what my instant reaction was? HEY, THEY'RE IN COLOR! Look at their pink faces! Why? Because I had seen these two in hundreds of black and white, or brown, photographs, rotogravure news shots, and in my mind they were familiar, but monochrome, people. All public figures were monochrome, just as all such figures today have a TV screen around them.

Habit? On some other occasion I will hope to describe the immense sophistication of our 1950s mono sound reproduction, essentially created from virtually nothing (the old acoustic sound, minus a trace of reverb or space) in the electrical era after 1925. I was deeply involved, as a writer/consumer, in the later years of that superb development, and by 1950 I was, maybe, a practicing connoisseur in the means by which we created space in mono recordings and, equally important, how we could bring out that space in the mono listening room. It was thus "habit" on an enhanced scale, and I think I at once sensed that this new two-channel sound was going to upset my world of mono playback. It was joltingly new, for myself and many others, both pro and amateur. Of course, it sounded WRONG, especially if you were well versed in the old.

It took a long time for our audio public to adjust to serious stereo appreciation-I mean, those who really listened to their sound reproduction. Literally, this took ear training. One had to learn to glean the good effects of separation and ignore a few harmless falsities that really did not get in the way. Never forget that even a theoretical 100% perfect music reproduction, in engineering terms, will be no more than a complex and non-literal illusion, the kind of illusion we prize, of course.

Stereo ("binaural") was a fundamentally new effect. I suspect that most of us simply did not hear stereo, as we now mostly hear so easily. We did not mentally synthesize a space with music, with players and singers, inside it.

But there was a lot more. I would not bring this up if there weren't other and less controversial factors in the earliest "binaural" stereo. They most decidedly contributed to what now would seem a very faulty stereo effect.

In the days of mono hi-fi and before, we did not worry about precise matching from one component to the next in an outwardly identical series or model.

True, there were areas where differences in response could make plenty of trouble, often unrecognized--the "match" between woofers and tweeters, for instance, when multi-speaker systems first began to sell in various forms. The same counted in our all too casual enclosure of speakers, whether in one enclosure or in several--for example, the generally unrecognized "edge effect" of the speaker box or the need for a precise vertical plane to align the units for better cooperation.

These things, which are automatic today, were largely ignored when we first began to play music in two channels.

Moreover, speaker sound was much more a matter of (mono) taste preference in those days. I well remember what was euphemistically called the "golden" sound, often so advertised.

You name the distortion, the nonlinearity; it was part of the "golden" mystique! Inevitably, with such a pleasantly loose-limbed concept of reproduced sound, there were vital differences, if on a tiny scale, between almost any speaker and the next one. Each was just fine in a good mono hi-fi system, but put two of these together on two different channels that were supposed to fuse into one sound, and you heard two highly individualistic speakers, and not much blend-the unfortunate impact of early stereo.

On a more micro scale, the same went for the other end of the chain, the recording microphones. Ask any broadcaster. Microphones have their own personalities, their individual sounds, to be exploited for the best but avoided for the worst. Would two mikes of the same model blend as one in the stereo reproduction? Maybe. I suspect that a mix of mikes was too often used in early stereo, just for this reason, but we were lucky in that much "binaural" took advantage of newer omnidirectional condenser (capacitor) mikes for smooth and easily blended response.

Then there was the "binaural" listening room, or hall. Who knew anything about that? All-new effects out of our speaker pairs-and plenty of frustrations. As I later found out, any architectural imbalance from one side to the other--say, a space, a corridor, a room behind one speaker and a wall behind the other--was disastrous for the fragile stereo blend we wanted. Indeed, my subsequent explorations showed me most discouragingly how tough it is to find a good stereo setup in the many different places where I tried to show off the new medium to audiences.

At home, most people put room decor first and stereo last. They still do.

But at least today we have a general sense that there must be a nominal symmetry in the speaker placement, and so we do better, with our much better stereo material. If we are real listeners, not background types, we tend to give our speakers equal treatment, which is as it should be. (The background types would never know the difference.) With all these blind spots (or, should I say, deaf spots?) in our 1950s understanding of stereo sound, it is a wonder we got anything at all out of all the "binaural" ballyhoo. I think it must be admitted that stereo survived and went forward mainly because of the sheer momentum and excitement of the times, the ancient bandwagon phenomenon. Practically nobody really heard stereo as it can be, but for a while it didn't much matter--it was the newest fad. There was potential, substance, in that trendy stuff, and in the end it established itself as a nearly immortal factor in our audio business.

I haven't forgotten the most preposterous, the silliest, and the most devastating fault that cropped up in early two-channel sound, from start to end of the entire audio chain: Phasing! I mean, the simple sort, so that if a mono signal emerged from both of your "binaural" speakers, the cones would move backward and forward together.

As simple as that. Out of phase, connected wrong way around, one speaker cone moves out as the other moves in. All sorts of cancellations as the two signals meet in mid-air at the edges and find themselves going in opposite directions. In this case, there is no middle--just a jagged, fluctuating hole.

And the mostly non-directional bass simply departs or is dismally attenuated. People or instruments situated in the middle are bifurcated. Nobody there. Instead, there are two of them, one on each side, weakly. (You have probably seen the ads for solo eliminators in pop recordings, so you can dub in your own voice. That's how they work.) My first-ever stereo sound, the double solo violin? I'll bet you anything the speakers were out of phase.

I think only an older audio man who was around then can confirm the enormous extent of this simple problem in the first years of two-channel sound. I heard dozens of examples, in the highest circles, as soon as I learned to recognize the trouble. It was scandalous! But understandable.

The problem was the adding up. In mono days, polarization, as we might call it, really didn't matter anywhere in the audio chain except within speaker systems and when more than one mike was used in a mono circuit. Nothing, thus, was marked! Speakers were uniformly haphazard, two terminals with no plus, no minus. (I just looked at a few oldies.) Amps had unmarked inputs, at least until the ubiquitous RCA plug and its pro relatives appeared.

Some amp circuits or sub-circuits changed polarity inherently; others didn't. Phono cartridges, preamps, control units, all the rest contributed to the chaos. And the silliest aspect was that however many complications there were en route, it all added up to 50-50-either you ended up in phase, as between two "binaural" channels, or you were out of phase! Maybe 50% of our two-channel music was out of phase in playback. Don't think this didn't add to the confusion.

As for me, after I discovered this interesting phenomenon I had a homemade phase switch in my nand, always, as I listened to "binaural." That way, I could get most of my stereo right side around, not inside out. It helped, and for more years than the audio profession would like to remember.

(by: EDWARD TATNALL CANBY; adapted from Audio magazine, Sept. 1991)

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