And Now, Stereo

Several million Americans currently own woofers, tweeters, featherweight pickups, three-position rumble filters and other strong magic for hearing music as it really sounds. Recently the hard-core hi-fiers. have been tuning their ears to even newer vibrations--the sounds of stereophonic tape. The record industry, with a fortune invested in disks, is sidling up to stereo tapes with the nervous caution of a man who fears he may be feeding the puppy that will bite him. The industry goes on with the feeding, though, because there is a possibility that the pup will grow up into a big commercial animal.

Simple monaural tape, in which the sound is filtered into a single track as in a standard record, was once expected to replace disks (tape deteriorates far less easily in playing and is free of surface noise). The fact is that monaural tape simply does not' produce better sound than the best LPs; it also costs three or four times as much. Quite another matter is stereophonic tape, which channels the sound into two tracks and plays it back over two speakers, giving an illusion of depth and space. Victor started to produce prerecorded stereo tapes three years ago. Two dozen other outfits are also in the business, and other big guns of the industry are gradually warming to the idea. Westminster has been marketing stereo tapes for a year and a half, and both Mercury and Angel are announcing their first stereo releases. Most of the other majors are recording music on stereo tape and holding it for release when the market seems ready. Victor plans to double its stereo-tape production, hopes to have 100 items in the catalogue (instead of the present 44) by the end of this year. All told, $1,500,000 worth of tapes were sold last year, and 80% of the sum went for stereo.

How Expensive? If stereo is in for a boom, the industry is not agreed on when it will happen or how big it will be. Some experts see tapes sweeping disks out of the market in five years; some believe that disks will always account for the bulk of the industry's sales. Victor Chief Recording Engineer William Miltenburg argues that disks will stay necessary for popular music, if nothing else, because record buyers will be unwilling to pay stereo prices for the one-shot pop hits. This raises the question of how far stereo prices can be cut. Today a stereo recording of Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony costs a whopping $18.95; the same symphony on LP disk sells for $3.98. Much of the basic cost goes into raw materials; magnetic tape is more expensive than the disk's vinyl, and it takes longer to produce tape duplicates than to press disk duplicates.

Some engineers see a possible answer in stereo disks. Several companies have poured money into stereo-disk research; some have developed operating models, but none has announced plans to market one. English Hi-Fi Manufacturer Arnold Sugden now has a single-groove stereo disk that he estimates he can put on the market for about the same cost as an ordinary LP. His disk produces stereo sound with the use of only one needle that vibrates both horizontally and vertically. The major problem for the home user would be to get a steady enough turntable setup to play the record without distortion.

How Good? Whatever happens to the cost of stereo tapes, the price of a stereo rig--inevitably including two amplifiers and two speakers--is always likely to be higher than that of a conventional monaural setup. A stereo rig can easily run into many hundreds of dollars, but for the less well-heeled tape fan, manufacturers are pushing portable models in the $200-$300 bracket.

Technically, stereophonic recording has come a long way. Early tapes sometimes had a solo singer's voice volleying from one speaker to the other like a hopped-up tennis ball. That exaggerated effect (due to incorrect microphone placement during the recording session) is now gone. Few who have heard really good stereo will ever be satisfied with anything else. As a demonstration of just how fi stereo has become, a team of acoustical engineers put concealed speakers on the stage of San Francisco's Opera House. The San Francisco Symphony went through the motions of playing while the engineers ran off a stereo tape of The Marriage of Figaro overture. Few in the audience guessed that they were listening to canned music.

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