[78-L] fake stereo

[Michael Shoshani]

--- On Sat, 12/10/11, Randy Watts <rew1014 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Some rechanneled stereo folds down to
> mono reasonably well and some doesn't. If all they did was
> emphasize the treble in one channel and the bass in other,
> you can often get listenable results, albeit usually with
> extra reverb. Other processes--not so much. Capitol's
> "Duophonic" process is pretty much hopeless. At least I've
> never been able to get the things to sound like mono. Same
> with RCA Victor's process.

My dad once had a promotional LP of various and sundry big band recordings that was issued for Ford dealers. As a kid I made a cassette copy on our Big Living Room Deck, and when I played that on my Little Mono Portable I was thunderstruck to find that all I got was a tinny, almost ethereal reproduction.

It was not until decades later that I found out that CBS often used a trick of inverting (or, technically in this case, DE-inverting) one channel of their fake stereo to increase the apparent spaciousness. Of course, when  mixed to mono, the result is a disaster since the sound wave cancels itself out, leaving pretty much only the artificial reverberations.

MS