Common usage
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The motion picture era
The first motion picture to be exhibited with stereophonic sound was
Walt Disney's Fantasia, released in November 1940, for which a
specialized sound process, Fantasound, was developed. Fantasound
used a separate film containing four optical sound tracks. Three of
the tracks were audible, and the fourth track controlled the volume
level of the theater's amplifiers. The film was not a financial
success, however, and after two months of road-show exhibition in
selected cities, its soundtrack was remixed into mono sound for
general release.
In the early 1940s, the forward thinking Alfred Newman directed the
construction of a sound stage equipped for multi channel recording
for 20th Century Fox studios. Several soundtracks from this era
still exist in their multichannel elements, some of which have been
released on cd includiing How Green Was My Valley, Anna and the King
of Siam, and The Day the Earth Stood Still. |
The advent of magnetic tape recording made high-fidelity
synchronized multichannel recording technically straightforward,
though costly. Motion picture theatres could afford the cost, and
that is where the real introduction of stereophonic sound to the
public occurred. Stereo sound first became a wide success with the
advent of Cinerama in 1952. Cinerama was a spectacular wide-screen
process fully comparable to today's IMAX. Cinerama practically
required a specially built theatre for its presentation. It used
seven magnetic sound tracks, six of them audible plus a seventh
track that controlled the volume level of the amplifiers. The system
was developed by Hazard Reeves, a pioneer in magnetic recording
technology. By all accounts, including accounts by those who have
experienced the process in rare recent showings, the sound was as
spectacular as the picture and excellent even by modern standards.
The movie industry moved quickly to create simpler and cheaper
wide-screen systems, such as CinemaScope, which used up to four
magnetic sound tracks, and which were capable of being retrofitted
into existing theatres. Cole Porter memorialized the era in a 1954
song:-
If Zanuck's latest picture were the good old-fashioned kind,
There'd be no one in front to look at Marilyn's behind.
If you want to hear applauding hands resound
You've gotta have glorious Technicolor,
Breathtaking Cinemascope and
Stereophonic sound.
Broadcasting in stereo
Radio: The BBC's experimental transmitting station 5XX in Daventry,
Northamptonshire, made radio's first stereo broadcast in December
1925, of a concert conducted by Sir Hamilton Harty from Manchester,
with 5XX broadcasting the right channel nationally by long wave, and
local BBC stations broadcasting the left channel by medium wave. The
BBC repeated the experiment in 1926, using 2LO in London and 5XX at
Daventry. Following experimental FM stereo transmissions in the
London area in 1958, the first regular BBC transmissions using an FM
stereo signal began on the BBC's Third Programme network on August
28, 1962.
WMAQ-FM, a Chicago FM radio station, made radio's first commercial
stereophonic broadcast on December 17, 1953, with the first show of
the series The Northerners, featuring a choral group of the same
name. After several years of experimental stereo broadcasts, the
Federal Communications Commission licensed regular stereophonic FM
radio broadcasting to begin in the United States on June 1, 1961,
with WEFM in the Chicago area and WGFM in Schenectady, New York
reporting as the first stereo stations.
Television: The entire 1956-1957 season of The Lawrence Welk Show on
ABC was broadcast with stereophonic sound in some cities, with one
audio channel broadcast via television and the other over the ABC
radio network. By the same method, NBC television and the NBC radio
network offered stereo sound for The George Gobel Show on October
21, 1958. ABC's Walt Disney Presents made a stereo broadcast of The
Peter Tchaikovsky Story, including scenes from Disney's latest
animated feature Sleeping Beauty, on January 30, 1959 by using
ABC-affiliated AM and FM stations for the left and right audio
channels.
Regular network transmission of stereo audio began on NBC in 1984.
In common usage, a "stereo" is a two-channel sound reproduction
system, and a "stereo recording" is a two-channel recording. This is
a cause for much confusion, since five (or more) channel home
theater systems are not popularly described as "stereo". It is worth
noting that most film soundtracks are not recorded using stereo
techniques, so while capable of stereo playback, most home theater
systems rarely do.
Most two-channel recordings are stereo recordings only in this
weaker sense. Pop music, in particular, is usually recorded using
close miking techniques, which artificially separates signals into
several tracks. The separate tracks are then mixed into a
two-channel recording which often bears little or no resemblance to
the actual physical and spatial relationship of the musicians at the
time of the original performance. Indeed, it is not uncommon for
different tracks of the same song to be recorded at different times,
and even in different studios, and then mixed into a final
two-channel recording for commercial release. Classical music
recordings are a notable exception.
Balance can mean the amount of signal from each channel reproduced
in a stereo audio recording. Typically, a balance control will have
0 dB of gain in the center position for both channels, and attenuate
one channel as the control is turned, leaving the other channel at 0
dB.
The phrase "re-channeled stereo" refers to the artificial
re-channeling of mono recordings to simulate stereo that was common
in the 1950s-1960s. Because of this usage, "stereo" or "in stereo"
is sometimes used colloquially for when two, as distinct from one,
of something are present. |
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