[78-L] Fake stereo

[Rodger Holtin]

"Public Demand"

 

Well, maybe not demand, but what the record execs perceived
to be public expectation – and probably with good reason – because they created it.


 

Anything that was not stereo was clearly old–fashioned and
they were interested in being seen as cutting edge – and anything less would
not be acceptable.  They wanted to
distance themselves from their former crudely-made bottles and still reap the
benefits of re-selling old wine.

 

I think it was the promo material for the first Reader’s
Digest big band set that said something about the records being presented in “exciting,
new up-dated sound,” and that should tell us everything we need to know about “why”
they did stuff like fake stereo and echo.

 

Elvis’s career (and virtually all rock n roll) was born in
an echo chamber of some kind.  Sam
Phillips at Sun didn’t have a basement, men’s room or stair well, but he had an
Ampex 300 or something like it that he could to feed the recorded signal from
the tape back to the input and the slap-back sound of rockabilly was born, and
it moved to RCA with Elvis.  The
approximately three-inch gap between the record head and the playback head
worked out just right at 15 ips.

 

I found this website with interesting information about
Ethel Gabriel, the woman we love to hate, but apparently we owe her a great
deal, if you’ve ever enjoyed anything on a Camden album that you had never
heard before – possibly since.

http://forum1.aimoo.com/theyulelog/categroy/Topic-1-1575096.html#NickName_7734485

 

Apparently she was still alive in 2009 according to that
page, and Wikipee says she’s still kicking

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethel_Gabriel

"Ethel deNagy Gabriel
(born] November 16, 1921) is an American record producer with a four-decade
career at RCA Records…."

 

I, too, enjoyed toying with fake stereo and echo with a Sony TC-355, Ampex
350-2 etc, as well as various audio boards with a panel full of effects
available.  When I mixed sound for a
country music theater, I found out how useful echo of any kind can be in
enhancing poor singers – no wonder Sam Phillips loaded up Presley, Cash and the
rest of his roster with echo – and it created a whole generation and all those
who followed.  Singers with real vibrato
are a thing of the past – let the machine do it.  It was the road sign to the future.  We have arrived.

 



Rodger



For Best Results use Victor Needles.



.

--- On Sat, 3/2/13, Michael Biel <mbiel at mbiel.com> wrote:

From: Michael Biel <mbiel at mbiel.com>
Subject: Re: [78-L] Fake stereo
To: "78-L Mail List" <78-l at klickitat.78online.com>
Date: Saturday, March 2, 2013, 10:23 AM

From: Don Cox <doncox at enterprise.net>
> I remember way back building a little box to give more treble on
> one channel and more bass on the other. (Of course a two-channel
> equaliser could do the same, but I didn't have one.)
> It worked quite well for small group jazz, but not for other records.
> Regards  Don Cox  doncox at enterprise.net

So you were the ONE person who was the "Public Demand" for fake stereo,
so much so that you did it yourself!!  Well, at least you didn't inflict
it on others like the record companies did. :-)

By the way, I didn't go out and buy those three Toscanini LMEs.  I found
two of them in the warehouse of the distributor I worked for in 66 and
67 -- my boss GAVE them to me because they were unsalable even at a
quarter.  I found the third one junking many years later.

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com  
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