[78-L] Electronic stereo and Schwann

[Michael Biel]

Chris Zwarg wrote:
>>> It was a German "innovation" almost as old as 45/45 stereo itself. The 
>>> first RCA (e) appeared around 1961 (Toscanini)
>>>       
>> Why do you claim it was a German innovation??  It was purely American.  
>>     
>
> AFAIK the idea to get a "stereo" signal out of a mono recording goes back to the patents of Kuechenmeister (who BTW was Dutch rather than German) of the late 1920's. He used two acoustic soundboxes with the needles tracing the same groove at a short distance, so one signal was delayed a few milliseconds 

But there were players doing this back in the external horn days.  I 
think Duophone only used one stylus and two horns from both sides of the 
diaphragm, but last year up at the large mechanical music machine 
collection south of Milwaukee I videotaped an external horn machine that 
used two reproducers into two horns with a delay.  Since the horns were 
placed above each other I had to turn the camera sideways to get a 
stereo recording on the two microphones.  That machine must be 20 years 
before the late 1920s. 

> - exactly the same RCA did with two tape playback heads with the infamous Elvis and Belafonte fake-stereo issues (can't comment on other repertoire as these are the only I was ever "treated" to). 

Not quite.  They split the bass and treble and only echoed the treble on 
only one track.  The other track was not echoed and was mainly altered 
only  by equalization.
> The system works reasonably well with larger ensembles such as a chorus or a symphony orchestra, but every soloist - vocal or instrumental - is turned into a duet with him/herself. 

It was more like a quartette.  Three Harry's on one side and one on the 
other.  I bought some of those early ones only because one track was 
nearly untouched.  They later did other types of junk, but this was how 
RCA Victor did all the early Belefonte, Como, and Elvis. 

> You still occasionally hear these mangled versions on German radio; probably nobody bothered to buy new copies. Some cheapo rip-off CDs have used the fake-stereo masters but *mixed back to mono*!
>
> There were other fake-stereo methods as well: Adding "stereo" (out-of-phase) reverb was pretty ubiquitous, and British Decca re-equalized at least some of their fake-stereo LPs with a sort of comb filtering so that certain frequency bands were stronger on the left and others on the right channel, to give an illusion of stereo spread.
>
> Chris Zwarg
>
>
>   
This is what Duophonic usually was.  Most of them were done without much 
consideration of what the original track was.  It was 
one-size-fits-all.  Those first three Toscanini LMEs were done with 
attention to the score and changes made to make it seem natural 
depending on what instruments were playing.  But the untouched monos 
still sounded better.

And don't forget that Australian guy, Parker I think, who did that whole 
series of 20s reissues, some of which came out on the BBC label.

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com