Music for People with Two Ears

A little boy, asked by a school psychologist what his ears were for, answered, "To wash." This indicates the low esteem in which we have too long held these excellent conch shells which stand out on either side of our brain, and which serve it so well. Poets make much of our eyes, calling them the windows of the soul and similar fanciful names. Scientists, for their part, seem much taken with the opposable thumb, a device undeniably useful for hoisting cocktail canapes or for wielding stone axes, depending on what stage of civilization you live in. But no one seems to have been much interested in the ears -- until 1958.

A rectification of this neglect now is vigorously under way. Several thousand of your most ingenious fellow-citizens suddenly have become keenly aware of the fact that you have ears -- two ears -- that you bring them home with you each evening, and that you still are wearing them when, after dining, you suddenly conceive a desire for some music and go flip a switch to bring it into being. And nothing could agonize them more -- these well-wishers of yours -- than the thought that the music you propose to enjoy could as well be enjoyed by a one-eared man. It isn't stereo. Hence, sonically speaking, you are only half-living.

Stereo is icumen in. No doubt about this could abide with anyone who visited the Chicago or New York audio show late last autumn. Only a pathetic minority of exhibitors tried there to demonstrate their wares as media for the conventional single-source variety of sound reproduction. All the others had dual-channel stereophonic setups, wherein sound recorded by two separate sets of microphones, on two separate tracks of a magnetic tape, was reproduced over two separate amplifiers and two loudspeaker systems, the latter spaced apart as the microphones had been. Because of the listening conditions which bedevil such exhibitions, held in hotels and trade halls, most of the sound was wretched, but an occasional chord reached out, to perceptive pairs of ears, making clear the incontestable virtue of stereophony. The flute was plainly upstage left, the first fiddles almost visibly in front of it, the trombones clearly over to the right, and the percussion in the space behind them. As if a flashbulb had gone off, the whole orchestra stood revealed. This was no simulacrum; it approximated the real thing, three-dimensional, solid and true.

The theory of stereo is very simple indeed. Its basis lies in your possession of two ears, attuned through eons of evolution for important precision work. You, yourself, may be here to read this today because, 30,000 years ago, a pair of human ears accurately located and identified the sound of a saber-toothed tiger pushing through the underbrush. Now -- saber tooths being extinct -- you listen with an urgency that is different but not necessarily less. If you attend, let us say, a jazz concert graced by Mr. Lionel Hampton, you perform the same process your ancestor did. The vibraphone is somewhat to your right. Its direct sound will reach your right ear more loudly and a trifle sooner than it reaches your left ear. And what does reach your left ear, later by a fraction of a second, will be tempered by a larger admixture of sound reflected from the wall of the hall. The result of this, even with your eyes closed, is that you will have no trouble turning your head to face Mr. Hampton's vibraphone. The fractional second of time differential gives your ears no trouble.

Obviously, then, I am not saying that dual-channel stereo sound, conveyed by two point-source loudspeakers, actually will fool your listening apparatus. It won't. Nothing could, short of a whole wall of loudspeakers, each fed by its individually microphoned sound channel. But your ears have still another virtue. They will abet an illusion, if you really want them to (you have found this out, of course, if you have tried good single-channel high fidelity).

Give them, from two sound sources, the proper timing and lateral spacing of music generated by a group of musicians on a stage, and they will give you a startlingly real three-dimensional picture of the ensemble. It will be a picture more than twice as real as a single-channel reproduction of equal sonic purity, even if the single-channel sound be delivered through a spread array of loudspeakers. Why this should be so I don't know. I think the ears are dissatisfied unless they can perform their whole function, which includes a sort of judgment of distance, direction, and sound-distribution.

Granted, this is not always musically important. An Art Tatum solo or a late Beethoven quartet gains little from sonic perspective: with them the idea is the whole thing. But a musical comedy or an opera, or a march by the Scots Guards, or a Richard Strauss tone poem is enormously more effective when another dimension of hearing is added. You can see why without explanation.

The reason an organ or a concert grand piano should sound better in stereo than in single-channel reproduction is subtler. An organ is not an especially directional instrument: you never can tell which pipe is sounding. But -- an organ is not of itself a complete instrument, either. Part and parcel of its musical personality is the church or hall into which it is built (you hear the hall, you see, instead of the pipe). And what stereo's paired microphones can do is open some of the sonorous space of the hall to your constricted listening room. You get sonic vista. There is no other way you can get it, except by going to a concert (which is not a bad idea, by the way: keeps your ear tuned and keeps you modest about your sound system).

Until now, the only important medium of stereo has been tape. Further, I think tape will survive as the purist's medium. But disc stereo is, technically, an accomplished fact already. Last autumn I heard demonstrations of three disc stereo processes, and any of them -- though not quite so good as the best tape -- was quite good enough to be considered marketable.

The one deemed likeliest of adoption by the record industry was developed by Westrex, a subsidiary of Bell Telephone. It employs a single stylus tracking a single groove. The groove is cut by a stylus which has two driving elements, working at right angles to each other. This is old stuff in laboratories, but in most earlier systems one sound channel is engraved simply side to side (like your present records) and the other straight up and down (like the early Edisons). In the Westrex system the two sets of modulations still are cut at right angles to each other, but neither is purely vertical nor horizontal. Instead, both are partly both, being cut at an angle of 45 degrees to the record's surface. This is hard to visualize, but it works. Its great industrial virtue is that a record so made can be played as a non-stereo record by a non-stereo pickup cartridge. Thus, when a company wants to go stereo, via Westrex, it can simply discontinue its monaural or single-channel discs. The dealer needn't carry two versions of each recording.

As this was written, only Fairchild had come out with a stereo pickup cartridge. However, Columbia and Brush Electronics were each rumored to be readying one using ceramic elements, and among the makers of magnetics, G.E., Pickering, and Electro-Sonic had let it be known that they will be ready when the discs come forth -- probably next autumn. (As a matter of piquant fact, in mid-December of 1957 the first "commercial" stereo disc came on the market. The producer was Audio Fidelity, and I enquote the word commercial, since the shrewd if obvious objective was to secure a copyright on the trademark "Stereodisc." The record, probably good even if no equipment existed to prove it, was a Westrex-cut disc offering on one side selections by the Dukes of Dixieland, on the other, railroad sounds.) Certainly some of the makers of magnetics also will produce inexpensive preamplifiers, probably transistorized, for the pickup's second channel.

For the enthusiast, the really burning question is whether to wait for stereo discs or tool up now for tape, which can be bought right away, or both.

Most will wait for discs. Discs are easier to play, and they will cost less. A plastic-backed raw tape of symphonic length costs at least $1.50 more than the vinyl biscuit on which a disc is cut, and no manufacturer, however clever, can make this fact disappear. Further, tape copying, which requires a play-through for each duplication, is costlier than disc pressing. The common home tape speed may go down from 7-1/2 inches per second to 3-3/4, effecting an economy (without any great sacrifice of fidelity), but I should still predict that in, say, two years, the price of a tape stereo symphony still will be at least $7.50, while a disc of the same content will cost about $5 -- up a little from present levels, but not much.

On the other hand, sliding a plastic ribbon coated with iron oxide past a smooth-gapped recording head is inherently a better method of reproducing sound than making a polished diamond stylus, however compliantly mounted, ride the convolutions of a plastic groove. Moreover, tape stereo is finished with its growing pains. The disc-stereo pickup is going to be a pretty captious beastie for a year or so: to get near-perfect, low-distortion compliance in even one dimension has been a dreadfully hard job for designers. If you really want good stereo sound in your living room before 1959, and are willing to pay for it, I advise getting a tape player. When the disc machinery comes out, and divests itself of its bugs, it will be compatible -- as to input, and the like -- with what you have bought to play tapes. And you'll have another year's savings to spend, won't you?

Which is another way of saying that disc stereo may get to be good, but tape stereo is good right now.

There is something else I'd like to see happen, too, and which tape, if it finally furnishes any sizable part of the public's listening, may bring about: we may at last get rental music library service. During the vinyl LP disc era, we couldn't. One play-through with a bad stylus ruins an LP, and that will apply to a stereo LP just as it does to a monaural LP.

With the foregoing I have more or less covered the case for tape stereo, and will proceed now with the equipment needed to play it. For the real gone high fidelity enthusiast, of course, the whole problem is no problem. He is going to equip himself with two amplifiers and two loudspeakers anyway, since stereo of any kind will require these. And he is going to buy a two-channel tape recorder now, because he can't wait. And he is going to buy a stereo phono-pickup cartridge when stereo discs come on the market, because he is curious to hear them, and because there are some recordings of music or other sounds (steamboats, sports cars, thunderstorms, and the like) which he will not feel the need to keep inviolable on tape, as he does the music he most cherishes. I think this is a very sensible attitude, because it is my own.

How to equip yourself for stereo tape listening depends on what you own already, and the field seems to divide up logically three ways. Mr. A has no sound system at all. Mr. B has a single-channel high fidelity system without a tape recorder. Mr. C has a single-channel sound system including a monaural (single-channel) tape recorder.

Mr. A is likely to emerge from the process having spent (for his whole system) the least money, since he will be shopping for amplifiers and speakers in pairs, and undoubtedly will indulge more modestly in these items than if he were buying only one of each. Mr. B will spend the most money, since he must buy not only a tape recorder, but a second amplifier and speaker not too very different from those he owns already, which may be pretty good. Mr. C's expenditures will be somewhere in between. He has the same amplifier-and-speaker problem as Mr. B. However, he has a monaural recorder which he can either sell, to help pay for a stereo model, or have converted for stereo use.

Mr. A's way may be beset with temptation. Various manufacturers, among them Webcor, VM, and RCA Victor, have put on the market complete, packaged stereophonic tape phonographs, priced at less than $350. They deliver true three-dimensional sound -- in fidelity equivalent to that available in table-top record players. Which is to say, the realism is convincing enough for the average listener whose ears are not "educated" enough, or sufficiently sensitized, to discriminate those differences which are dear to the man who demands the height of fi. I am sure they will sell -- and so they should, to those whose aims are adequate realism plus the convenience of ready-to-play equipment. But they are outside the province of this article, just as ready-made suits would find no place in an article on custom tailoring.

The heart to Mr. A's stereo assembly -- or anyone's -- will be his tape-recorder mechanism. This will incorporate a tape-transport deck, not too complicated, and underpinned with a precision motor thoroughly guaranteed against speed fluctuation. Further, it will have a "stacket" (or in-line, meaning side-by-side) pair of reproducing heads to play stereo tapes, one of which also can be used for the owner's own single-channel recording and playback.

It will also incorporate two preamplifiers, to beef up the tapehead's output enough for a power amplifier to go to work on it, and to equalize the signal tonally (tape recordings need equalizing just as discs do) in compliance with the standards set up by the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters (NARTB).

Currently the criterion by which all other high fidelity stereo tape players for home use are judged is the Ampex, dubbed A-121 or A-122 according to its covering, and priced (on the same basis) from $480 to $500. This you should look at -- and listen to -- even if you can't afford it, as a standard for judging more economical recorders. It is a variant of the company's professional portable stereo machine, the 601-2 ($1000), from which it differs mainly in the latter's heavy-duty construction (continued on page 77) Two Ears (continued from page 48) and its ability to record (as well as play back) stereophonically.

Being able to record stereophonically is not now important to many home listeners, but it may be so as more and more radio stations with both FM and AM facilities begin broadcasts of live and/or recorded stereo music. To wit, you will be able to copy, direct from your tuners, with some loss of fi, but some saving of money.

No doubt in time Ampex will furnish an adapter attachment to take care of this. If you can't wait, though, there are alternatives. One is to buy a semiprofessional recorder unit. I think my choice would be the British Ferrograph 88, a fine, low-distortion, high-precision machine which will cost (prices were not firm at this writing) about $600. Slightly more elaborate is the American Electronics (Concertone) Model 60, priced at $700 without trimmings. This is really professional field equipment that even takes 10-1/2-inch reels. Its speeds are 7-1/2 and 15 inches per second. The high speed gives you easy editing. On the other hand, when stereo discs come out, the tape companies will counter by producing 3-3/4 ips recorded tapes -- more music for your money. Currently, of course, 7-1/2 ips is what everyone's using, but Ampex, Ferrograph and other caterers to the home market are giving you 3-3/4 as well, to insure you against the future.

The other alternative is to get one of the impressively inexpensive "modular" sets put forth by Viking, Pentron, or Bell Sound Systems (at this moment Bell has no stereo-record model, but it will). With these companies' units you assemble your own set from a basic tape deck (about $110), and either playback preamplifiers (about $30 each) or record-plus-playback preamplifiers ($60 to $80 each) or a combination of both. They are very simple to hook up. In long-term action I have heard only the Viking -- the others are new -- and can testify to its mechanical durability. In electronic merits (meaning mainly lack of distortion) I think the Bell products may have a slight edge. In versatility, Pentron would seem the leader by a slight margin. I think what your dealer likes, carries, and will promise to service may be your best guide in choosing. Always, with moderately priced equipment like this, you should listen to the actual item you are going to buy.

Ampex makes combined speaker-amplifiers into which you may feed your tape machine output. These are small, convenient, and good performers, but hard for me to see as especially economical buys. They cost $200 apiece. That price could get you a very good 20-watt amplifier -- such as those by Pilot or Grommes, or the do-it-yourself Heath -- and such a speaker as the beautiful little Acoustic Research AR-2 ($96). For a little more your speakers could be a pair of the new, excellent Eicos ($135 each), with their sweet sounding, non-beaming tweeters, a great asset in stereo work, or twin KLHs ($230 each), which are similar to ARs but incorporate more expensive tweeters. Any of a number of good singleunit speakers in modest enclosures can be had for about $100; let your dealer be your guide.

Bell makes a good complete stereo amplifier, with controls -- the 3-DT -- for about $150. It yields 12 watts per channel, which should be enough. However, it doesn't offer much in the way of equalization for an existing disc collection. Watch for new developments, like Grommes' up-coming mono-stereo preamp-control-unit, which is almost certain to be good and probably will sell for $100 or so, and also one by H. H. Scott. The reason to have a control unit, of course, is so that you can play monaural discs and stereo tapes and stereo discs.

If you are adding a second channel, for stereo's sake, to an existing high fidelity rig, the main factor probably is speaker compatibility. It is nice to have truly twin speakers, but not a necessity. I have teamed a Tannoy in a corner-horn (the earlier acquisition) with an AR-1 (AR-2's big brother: $180) and got excellent results. It is the coloration of the two speakers' sound that must match, rather than their size, price, or tone range. Put your better one on the left, where the first violins would sound. Spacing your two speakers is a matter for experiment; it depends in part on how far from them you listen, and on your room. The critical factor is sonic "fill-in" -- the illusion of sound between the two units. Experiment till you get it, and till neither speaker dominates the other.

Conversion of an existing single-channel recorder for stereo use is worth while only if your recorder is a very good one. And if it is, your dealer or the manufacturer will be able to give directions on how to convert it. What will be needed is another head, or a pair of extra heads already stacked and aligned, and one or two tape-preamplifiers. Worth keeping in mind here is a neat little combined preamplifier-amplifier made by Bogen for $52, the ST-10. (Bogen also has forthcoming a middle-quality stereo tape player engineered by Presto: about $400.) But the stereo-conversion probably will require the aid of a serviceman, which adds to the price. Be wary.

Of course, for the well-heeled, there are preassembled stereo tape phonographs containing the complete shooting match. They include disc-changers and FM-AM tuners as well as stereo tape equipment. Fisher makes two, priced at $1595 and $2495; Ampex has one, priced according to cabinet at $1495 and $1795. Each is in one piece, beautifully cased, with speakers at the cabinet ends, about four feet apart. Bozak, by the way, has a speaker-only stereo cabinet: two Model 207A coaxials in the woodwork of your choice. Not cheap, but handsome in both looks and sound. The same comments apply to the James B. Lansing dual speaker enclosure, the Ranger-Paragon, which features a sort of projecting rotunda in front, to disperse the sound from the opposed speakers. It ought to be unsightly, but it isn't; quite the contrary.

The Ampex and Fisher stereo phonographs, and the Bozak stereo speaker system all settle for a distance between speakers of about four feet, and make up for the narrow separation by beaming the speakers out, or away from each other, slightly. This guarantees adequate sound separation and fill-in, but that doesn't mean you can't do better by experimenting with separate units. As a matter of fact, you almost always can, as long as you can keep firmly in mind that what you want is naturalness. And in that context, remember that not all stereo tapes have been made with this in mind. Some cannot be made to sound natural: they were intended to astound. Avoid them.

Avoid also the pitfall on the opposite side of the path, especially dangerous to Mr. A, the neophyte, in his pristine, untutored state. This is that stereo reproduction delivers a sort of surprise effect: you can be convinced by something that oughtn't to convince you. Your ears will be so happy at the chance to work properly teamed that -- just for the nonce -- they will ignore 5% intermodulation distortion. This tolerance won't last, believe me. If distortion is there, listening-fatigue will begin within the hour, stereo or no stereo. Stereo is not a substitute for high fidelity, it is just an aspect of it. Any component you consider buying for stereo use, you should first listen to with conventional monaural material. The old rule applies -- the listening must be comfortable.

Lastly, remember music. Arturo Toscanini and Art Tatum both died before stereo recording became common. But both of these estimable gentlemen added a dimension to music that no second channel ever could. The possession and proper use of two ears is important, but what's between them is important, too.