The Crack of Dawn

Volume #443

8/30/23

Newsletter #443

The Crack of Dawn

I’m just old enough to remember the advent of stereo.  The very first stereo receiver, the H.H. Scott Model 350 (pictured below), was released in 1961.  It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that stereo became relatively common. I would venture that it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that stereo became ubiquitous.

Stereo can completely separate two sides of the same soundtrack.  For instance, if while recording a song they put one microphone on the singer, and another microphone on the guitar, in playback they can have the singing come out of only the left speaker, while the guitar only comes out of the right speaker.  Each side is called a channel, and this innovation really opened up audio recording.  In a movie recorded in stereo, you can hear a car coming from your left, then have it cross over to the right channel and sound like it’s driving away from you on your right, and it actually sounds like the car just drove past you.

In 1967 the black & white world exploded into garish psychedelic color, and kids began taking drugs, and rock & roll was the perfect music to make full use of stereo.  For years, possibly a decade, how a band used the stereo effect was taken into consideration and meant something.  A fine example of overdoing the stereo effect occurs at the end of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s song, Lucky Man.  Keith Emerson on the synthesizer just keeps panning the stereo back and forth, over and over, and I must admit, if I’m hearing it separated in stereo, it’s always thrilling.  In a cheap, carnival sort of way, sure, but I still like it.  If it’s used with taste, the separation of instruments and voices has a lot to do with the impact of the piece of music, or the soundtrack of a movie.  There are moments of stereo separation in certain rock songs that are, if not famous, then well-known to rockers.  At the moment I can think of two — the middle of Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love with Robert Plant gasping, and the segue from Santana’s Black Magic Woman to Oye Como Va.  Beating congas, a full stop, then the organ comes out the right side. Very cool.

Therefore, I was surprised to learn recently that stereo isn’t used very much anymore.  Apparently, present-day sound mixers crowd everything to the center because there’s a pretty very good chance that the sound will be coming out of a single speaker on a small device.  The sound may get separated back out for headphones, but it’s mono; the same thing is coming out of both channels.  Well, isn’t that a drag?  Stereo is wonderful.

I own an old fashioned, extremely good stereo.  I have Jerry Garcia’s favorite amp, the MacIntosh MA8000 with 300 Watts per channel.  I have two Sonus Faber, five-foot speakers on opposite sides of the living room, and a ridiculously heavy JBL subwoofer in the middle of the room.  I am pleased to report that the thrill of hearing the drums coming from over there, while the guitar is coming from over there, hasn’t faded.  It’s a simple thrill, but dependable.  Once Stereo was achieved – Fantasia came out in stereo in 1940 and it was a big deal – by the 1960s, how did we lose our appreciation of it?  Or did we just lose interest in it?  I suspect that it was simply inconvenient to separate two speakers, so we stopped doing it.

Stereo panning is still in use in movies, thank goodness, so it’s not gone.  Nor is the thrill gone. 

Wait, hold onto your brains, let’s go back an idea.  Santana’s Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen/Oye Como Va was a gigantic hit and is a big part of the sound of 1971 for me.  But it’s more than Santana’s Black Magic Woman/Gypsy queen/Oye Como Va.  It’s a triple-cover. It’s their version of a Fleetwood Mac song, of Hungarian guitarist, Gabor Szabo’s song, and a Tito Punete song.  That Calos Santana and his band had the knowledge to mush those songs together into that great hit is a fabulous synthesis of a lot of varied influences. 

So, I watch a YouTube show called Tech Moan.  It’s a fellow named Mat (with one T), who is about five years younger than me, from Manchester, England, England, with a perpetually stuffed nose, who has an obsession with old audio equipment, as do I.  Except he has the ability to take the items apart and frequently fixes them, which is a miracle to me.  He’s amusing and knows how to shoot and edit the videos.  I’ve spent many happy hours watching him clean away decomposed rubber belts, replace them with new ones (from a wonderous bag he has full of many rubber belts of various sizes), and damn if it doesn’t often work.  Tech Moan seeks out weird audio shit from the 1970s and ‘80s, but really from any time.  He found a fairly contemporary, cushion-shaped speaker made by Bang and Olufsen that looked like a good solid piece of equipment, with a real bass speaker.  Terrific.  So, Tech Moan got another speaker like the first one and attempted to create stereo with them.  They were both new enough to be controlled by blue tooth, but no matter what he did he couldn’t get them to work in stereo.  It’s gone.  Stereo is lost.  If Tech Moan, with two really good B&O speakers, can’t achieve stereo – a thing that Disney could do in 1940 – we’re screwed.

I’m just sayin’ is all.

Good morning.