THE STEREO REVOLUTION - PART TWO - STEREOPHONIC SOUND

AMPEX LEADS THE WAY
After the initial period of mass audiophilia, stereophonic sound was high fidelity's second act, although the concept was nothing new.  It had been more than 20 years since the first Stokowski/Bell stereo explorations, but by the early 1950s, stereo was still mostly a curiosity.  The Bell company hadn't done much with its research, largely because there was no easy way to make a stereo disc.
There was Stokowski's "Fantasound" system for "Fantasia" but most theatres were not equipped to take full advantage of it.
Now that magnetic tape was available, stereo was a much more realistic possibility.
By the end of 1952, it had been a little more than 5 years since Ampex had built it's first "Model 200" magnetic taperecorder, based upon the "Magnetofon" that Jack Mullin had imported from Germany.  The company was still manufacturing only a single track recorder, but Ampex wanted to make the move to stereo machines.
For this to be a realistic commercial prospect, the recording industry would have to been convinced that "stereo" was the future so that the labels would start recording their acts in stereo.

SHOWING OFF STEREO POSSIBILITIES
Ross Snyder of Ampex then sent a "Model 400" recorder (modified for three channels), to the sales manager at a Los Angeles home audio store.
The sales manager in question, Mr Bill Cara, who chaired the planning for the upcoming audio fair in L.A. pitched to Ampex the idea of having a special exhibit to show off the possibilities of stereo sound.  Ampex loved the idea and Mr Cara took his Model 400 set to a train station in the San Fernando Valley.
He connected 3 microphones, spaced 50 feet apart, along the track, and waited for the next train to arrive.
"Far in the distance, when he heard the train approaching, he turned everything on" so Snyder recalls.  "He got the train going through, stopping, and blowing out a lot of steam."  Cara took the finished tape, which ran nearly 30 minutes, back to his home.
While he and Snyder watched and made suggestions, the tape was cut and spliced and two other recordings Cara had made - of a Wurlitzer organ and of the Santa Monica Symphony Orchestra - were added.
The finished tape was played every half hour at the Audio Fair of Los Angeles, in January 1953, through 3 speakers placed a good distance away from one another for maximum effect.  And the effect was maximum !  "It was really funny to watch people at the fair" Snyder recalls.  The way the 3 microphones had been spaced far apart, created the very real sensation of a train bearing down on the listener.

HOW TO MAKE STEREO DISCS
Despite the effectiveness of these demonstrations, the stereo revolution happened gradually, largely because of the lack of stereo discs.  Beginning 1954 a few stereo releases began to trickle onto the market but the only way to hear them was on an Ampex reel-to-reel tape player, which cost a whopping USD 700,-....
Tapes cost at least three times as much as LP's.  It was because of the large investment required to become a consumer of taped music, that Ampex had decided to go with two channels instead of three.  "We felt stereo would fall flat on it's face" Snyder said, "so two was the smallest number that could deliver any kind of stereo effect."
Meanwhile, and throughout 1957, the record industry scrambled to come up with a way to make stereo discs.  Mindful of the chaos caused by the "battle of the speeds" (33rpm-45rpm-78rpm)(see part one), they proceeded with care to ensure that, whichever method they chose would be adopted uniformly throughout the industry.
They wound up choosing a system designed by Westrex, a Western Electric subsidiary.

ENOCH LIGHT PUTS WESTREX TO THE TEST
One of the first people to put the Westrex cutter to the test was Enoch Light, a former bandleader, whose "Light Brigade" had been popular during the big band era of the 1930s, and who now helped run a label called "Grand Award Records".
Around 1959 he noticed that most people's understanding of what stereo could do, was limited to sound effects records, largely because it was much easier to get an impressive stereo effect with a non-musical sound.
Renditions of table tennis games, with the balls ping-ponging from left to right were a perennial favorite.
Stereo music recordings were more subtle, owing largely to the fact that musicians don't typically run all over the stage.  Recording in stereo meant recording direct to two-track tape.  The kind of stereo effect you got was the same kind that Bell and Stokowski had discovered : a geometric sense of where the musicians were in relation to one another onstage.  Light realized the public needed stereo music to be thrown in their faces (literally) to appreciate its full possibilities. "Stereo wasn't getting across to the average person" Light said.  "I figured that separation had to be emphasized to attract their attention- not ping-pong as such but seperation used as part of a musical continuity."

COMMAND RECORDS
Light's partners were not interested in his idea and so he founded his own label "Command Records" and put together the "Command All Stars Band", built around percussionist Terry Snyder.  Making a record was a slow and tedious process.
They needed to be able to record their performance in such a way, that the left channel would only pick up, say, one of Snyder's bongos, while the right picked up the other.
In the end, the project took some 30 four hour recording sessions during the summer of 1959.  Then came the fastidious process of mastering the tape to disc, a task that required a minimum of 15 Westrex cutters.  All told, what Light had assumed to be a USD 10,000 investment had ballooned to almost USD 80,000.

PERSUASIVE PERCUSSION
Most of the songs on the album, which Light called "Persuasive Percussion" were well known standards such as "I'm in the mood for love", "My heart belongs to daddy" and "Love is a many splendoured thing".  But the album was recorded and mastered with such care and the stereo effect was so dramatic, that it was unlike anything  most people had ever heard.  Even the album's packaging made it seem like a special document for those with discerning taste.  The cover featured an abstract pattern of black dots, designed by the painter Josef Albers.  The extensive liner notes featured a track-by-track description of what aspect of your stereo system each song was designed to test.  "Persuasive Percussion" was like a concept album, with the "concept" being your own hi-fi installation.  Listening to it was like taking a tone test, with the liner notes as your guide. "Can you hear air around the flute on "Aloha oe" or is there a buzzing sound ?" " If the answer to that question is the latter, than there must be something wrong with your cartridge's tracking."
"Persuasive Percussion" was an enormous hit.
What the Ampex demo had done to jumpstart the stereo revolution from the production end, "Persuasive Percussion" did from the consumer end.  Billboard even claimed that it was the only album from 1960 that merited any attention.
Over the next 3 years, Light put 7 more similar albums into the top-10 of the charts.
Soon, other record companies began releasing records in the same vein.  Many of these had the word "percussion" in them, whether they were particularly percussive or not....

ON THE VERGE OF A COME BACK (?)
The magical train of the first stereo demonstrations had left the station and had embarked on a journey that would last for another 20 years.
There are strong indications that the vinyl stereo disc may even be on the verge of a successful come-back......

Acknowledgements
Greg MILNER - Perfecting Sound Forever
The Story of Recorded Music
(P) 2009 by Granta Books

 AMPEX MODEL 200

NEUMANN WESTREX CUTTER

 

 

  ENOCH LIGHT

 

     

 

 

  ORIGINAL ALBUM COVER

 

 TERRY SNYDER ALBUM     

 

 

 

MODEL 400 ADVERTISING  

 

 

 MORE INFORMATION CAN BE FOUND HERE :

 

More about AMPEX and early tape recorders
More about stereophonic sound
More about Enoch Light
Command Records
Persuasive Percussion

Illustrious Instrumentals ( 4 ) Les Baxter

1956( 4 )

  LES BAXTER : THE POOR PEOPLE OF PARIS

Birth Of A Song
 

The original title of the song is "La goualante de pauvre Jean" and it was written by French composer Marguerite Monnot just after the second worldwar.  Lyrics were added by René Rouzaud. In 1954 Jack Lawrence adapted the song but the title was erroneously translated as "The poor people of Paris" because the word "Jean" was confused with the word "gens" ("people") which sounds exactly the same in french.  ("Goualante" means "ballad")

 

In the Hitparade

A recording of the song by Les Baxter (Capitol Records catalog number 3336, with the flip side "Theme from 'Helen of Troy'") was a number-one hit on the Billboard Singles Charts in the US in 1956: for four weeks on the Best Sellers in Stores chart, for six weeks on the Most Played by Jockeys and Hot 100 charts, and for three weeks on the Most Played on Jukeboxes chart.

 Facts and Figures

=> "The poor people of Paris" was the first French song to enter the American and British charts

=> In 1956 two instrumental hits appeared on the American charts and they switched positions between one and two for some weeks.  The first was Nelson Riddle's "Lisboa Antigua" and the second one was Baxter's "Poor people of Paris"

=> Following the commercial success of the lush instrumental "Poor People of Paris", Capitol Records commissioned Les Baxter to create an entire LP expanding upon the global theme, and with "Round the World with Les Baxter" the arranger again proves his unparalleled skill for translating the sounds and textures of foreign lands into sublimely melodic travelogues that capture settings based far more in fantasy than reality.

A Personal Video Selection
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ADAPTATION TREE

 

 

Original version

La goualante du pauvre Jean ( French ) Music by Marguerite Monnot, Lyrics by René Rouzaud

U

Stakkels John ( Danish ) written by Robert Arnold

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Zonder liefde gaat het niet ( Dutch ) written by Will Ferdy and Eugene Beeckman

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The poor people of Paris ( English ) written by Jack Lawrence

 

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY

 

This is in a category all by itself.  The melody is simple and catchy, almost painfully so, and so Baxter throws every musical gimmick he can think of at the listener to jazz it up.  It's all in here : harp, glockenspiel, muted trumpet, pizzicato strings, a disembodied chorus, finger snapping, and, God help us, group whistling ! Yes, the chintziest of chintzy effects in the world, when the musicians put down their instruments and whistle as one! We even get a 'cute' little fakeout from Mr Baxter in the middle, when everyone turns to their neighbour and says "Oh that fading out means the song is over" but no ! The show must go on .....

 

MORE ABOUT LES BAXTER

 

Click the below link to find out more about Les Baxter.

 

More information about Les Baxter

 

 

MORE ABOUT MARGUERITE MONNOT

 

Click the below link to find out more about the composer : Marguerite Monnot

 

About Marguerite Monnot

 

 

 

 



 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

THE STEREO REVOLUTION
PART ONE
RISE OF THE AUDIOPHILES

THE SPEED WAR
The New York Times critic Howard Taubman spoke for many record buyers in 1950 when he admitted that although many 45s (45 rpm) were aurally superior, he preferred LP's "for their sheer listening comfort and continuity of performances".   The "45" format turned out to be perfect for the song-driven pop market, whereas the classical audience embraced the LP.
The so-called "speed war" (companies had been discussing which format would "win" in the end) ultimately galvanized customers because, as soon as it ended, interest in high fidelity exploded.  Although the original high fidelity movement is often remembered today as primarily the purview of Playboy-reading, pipe- smoking bachelors, it was firmly entrenched in the mainstream.

A MAJOR CULTURAL PHENOMENON
On this point, both "High Fidelity", the magazine that chronicled the movement ("a major cultural phenomenon") and "Life" ("a major American enthousiasm") could agree.  What high fidelity actually meant was unclear.   By 1949, it referred generally to high-end audio equipment, usually made (at first) by smaller companies, and sold as individual components.  Soon enough, high fidelity meant what you wanted it to mean.  Predicting that the ranks of the 1 million Americans who had "gone hi-fi" so far, were increasing at a rate of 3,000 per week, the New Yorker reported, "so assiduously has the term high fidelity been plugged and so widespread has been its acceptance, that it has been appropriated by makers of shirts, lipsticks, perfumes, candy and other singularly unrelated commodities."

HAPPY AT LAST ?
By 1953 high fidelity was everywhere.  Annual hi-fi sales topped 70 million us dollars, as dealers reported figures that they hadn't thought possible a year earlier.  The New York Audio Fair drew 20,000 visitors that year, nearly seven times the attendance of 1949.  Life Magazine even published a glossary of hi-fi terms like "golden ear" and even spoke of Alaskan hi-fi lovers' challenge to find "the favored corner location for speakers in the rounded Quonset huts in which many residents live".
On the heels of high fidelity the word "audiophile" entered the parlance, describing the men (the "hifi widow" was a much lamented figure) whose obsessive commitment to hi-fi seemed to preclude any possibility of actually enjoying their hi-fi sets.  "It has broken families and led men to ridiculous extremes in their search for perfect sound" Jennis Nunley wrote, accusing the movement of "creating a crop of mental abberrants".  In "The Ultimate Fi" - a short story published in The Atlantic Monthly - a hi-fi obsessive removes everything in the house that could be a potential sound absorbent - which is to say everything in the house, save for a rug - "the final link with his old way of life, his wife having gone with the one-but-last conversation."  Soon, that goes, too, and he stands alone in an empty room, letting the sound wash over him, "happy at last".

SEARCH FOR PRESENCE
It could be difficult to separate satire from reality.  Two years after Nunley wrote "I give to psychiatry this useful word : audiophilia", ... psychiatry accepted. Audiophilia was diagnosed as a neurosis, characterized by "a tendency to become preoccupied with and dependent upon the bizarre recorded sound" and "the urgency of the need and the final insufficiency of all attempts to satisfy it."  Some doctors even noted a sexual component to audiophilia , a desire for "sterile reproduction without biological bother; in severe cases, the audiophile's record collection even becomes a symbolic harem."  As for the typical woman's hatred of hi-fi, "perhaps in the man's interest on hi-fi she senses a rival as shrill and discordant as herself."
If the audiophiles had a conceptual hook on which they hung their obsession, it was the search for "presence", often described in terms of the living-room versus the concert hall dialectic.  John Urban defined "presence" as "the aural illusion of being in the same room with the performers."  A recorded sound with presence did more than just capture the music perfectly.  It captured the sound of music in a specific space.  The audiophile had to feel the sound flowing over him and bouncing off the walls, as though he were hearing it live.  "Presence" represented the final refutation of the Edisonian belief that recording should only document the sound of music as heard in a flat, non-reverberating utopia.

THE CARNEGIE HALL EXPERIMENT
Audiophiles fought passionately over the real parameters of presence. Some questioned whether complete presence was even possible.    "Ever and always, a loudspeaker will be a loudspeaker" James Hinton Jr. wrote in "The Nation".  "And Carnegie Hall is Carnegie Hall, not anybody's listening room."  That maxim was put to a public tone test on October 10th 1955, by Gilbert Briggs, a British loudspeaker designer, hi-fi writer and a model of the thoughtful audiophile.  At an event hosted by Briggs at Carnegie Hall, the audience heard tapes of music recorded earlier in that room, played back on ultra hi-fi equipment.  They then compared the tapes to a live performance of the same music in front of them, by the same musicians.  This test was something of a letdown.  The audience "clearly had expected to hear Carnegie Hall rock with audio" Edward Tatnall Canby wrote.  Many were disappointed by how poor taped music sounded compared with the live performance.  But that may have been Brigg's intention all along.  He insisted that the recorded music be played at the exact volume level as the live performance so that the former did not benefit from sensory-overwhelming volume.  If music recorded in Carnegie Hall couldn't compete with with live music played in Carnegie Hall, then how could Carnegie Hall be rebuilt in your living room ?  "A heartening conclusion" Canby wrote "and the members of Mr Briggs' audience will think twice, I suspect, before they again demand "concert hall reproduction" from their home phonographs."

SOUND EFFECTS
A curious fact about audiophiles is how many of them seldom (if ever!) listened to music. Instead, they tested their hi-fi sets with what were essentially sound-effects records : church bells, thunder, ocean waves, foghorns and trains...especially trains.  They searched for presence not in "concert hall reproduction" so much as real-world reproduction.  Conly believed these records were popular because they allowed a large segment of the public who knew little about music to experience high fidelity.  He was probably right, but a broader explanation begins with the problem of what makes a shirt or lipstick "high fidelity" and entertains the possibility that the term is no more or less ridiculous when applied to these items than when applied to recorded sound.
As a concept, "high fidelity" suggests quality with an added component of "truth".  Hence, a hi-fi shirt is one that aspires to some Platonic ideal of "shirt-ness".  A high fidelity sound is one that sounds like your idea of what the world truly sounds like.

THE CENTRE OF AMERICAN RECREATIONAL LIFE
As a concept, hi-fi is aspirational and it fits well with the post-war sense of possibility and a conquerable frontier.  One of Conly's smartest observations about the hi-fi movement was its connection with the "growing human flood outward from cities and apartments into countless new suburban dwellings.  The living room was establishing (or perhaps re-establishing) itself as the centre of American recreational life."
Extending Conly's model, we can imagine a map with the concert hall as a central urban hub, and spokes radiating out towards millions of living rooms.  Inside each living room is a hi-fi addict searching for that elusive presence- not just in the metaphysical sense of wanting to be transported to a concert hall ("being there") nut also in terms of the word's more literal meaning ("being here").  The living room was the arena where the audiophile assessed his place in a changing world by plotting his connection to the concert hall.

COMING SOON : PART TWO - HI-FI'S SECOND ACT / STEREOPHONIC SOUND

Acknowledgement
" Perfecting Sound Forever "
(The Story of Recorded Music)
Greg Milner
Granta Publications - 2009