response 66 of 74:

Feb 19 03:54 UTC 2000

The Dolby guy figured out, as did the rest of us
with early tape players, that you could greatly
diminish annoying tape hiss by turning the treble
way down.  What he also realized is that by recording
the original performance with the treble artificially
boosted up, you could then play it back with the 
treble reduced enough to net out to zero the artificial
treble boost, and there would be little or no tape hiss.  
(The hiss being an artifact of the tape itself, not of 
the recorded sound.)  You could turn the volume way up,
in fact, and there'd be hardly any audible tape hiss.
Thus began the era of really, really loud sound in 
movie theaters.  Or so it was once explained to me.

response 68 of 74:

Feb 19 20:17 UTC 2000

No, you'd end up with the same amount of piccolo sound, since it would be
boosted during recording and quieted during playback.

...or so the theory goes, at least.  I've heard a few people complain that
Dolby does bad things to the tone of music.  I don't remember the specifics,
though.  Anyone?

response 70 of 74:

Feb 21 15:59 UTC 2000

Toscanini reprocessed for stereo.  Miracle Surface:  This record contains the
revolutionary new antistatic ingredient, 317X, which helps keep the record
dust free, helps prevent surface noise, helps insure faithful sound
reproduction.


One of stereo's greatest powers is that of irresistibly enhancing not only
recored and reproduced sound itself, but also its listerenrs' aural
sensibilities and appetitites..... And as we come to appreciate more fully
stereo's far more auditorium-authentic spaciousness, precise differentiations
among instrumental tibmres and source-locations, and superbly natural
'airborne' qualities, most of us tend--conciously or unconsciously--to become
progressivley less satisfied with everything which lacks these newly prized
and wholly delectable attractions.........

...the unforgettable performances conducted by Arturo Toscanini....prove to
be so much mroe moving and impressive than ever before [when heard in stereo]
that even their oldest and staunchest admirers have been stimulated to sense
the still greater drama and beauty which might be unveiled if by some new
technological miracle it were possible to endow even a small portion of the
Toscanini monophonic heritage with at least SOME of the magical appeal of
stereo sound.


[Some ways to do this:]
for example, dividing the frequency spectrum between, and/or differentiating
the loudness levels of, two channels results in distinctively stereo-like
'separation' - if too often at the cost of obvious channel imbalances and
conseequently unnatural sounding reproductiong.  To a lesser extent, the use
of time-delays and phase-shifts have similar advantages and disadvantages.
And while neither any one of these means alone nor several of them in
combination can be depended upon to operate AUTOMATICALLY at maximum
effectiveness throughout a whole composition or even a complete movement,
nevertheless the best results which can be obtained breifly seemed to promise
that it might be possible for a skillful engineer, who is also thoroughly
familiar with both the original performances and the musical scores
themselves, to manipulate a versatile battery of various processing devices
with enough virtuosity and critical taste to achieve many distinctive stereo
qualities, while still retaining the naturalness, relative sound levels, and
tonal colors of the monophonic originals.
        A research project was inaugurated in 1958 under the direction of a
young musician-engineer, Jack A. Somer. ......  After innumerable experiments
Mr. Somer was convinced that extremely complex and versatile equipment could
achieve the desired goal when the operation of that equipment was continuously
controlled by an operator who at the same time could scrupulously follow the
musical score requirements of constant page-by-page, or even bar-by-bar,
changes in instrumentation and sonority...
        The primary means of achieving channel differentiations and
sound-source localizations is frequency spectrum division -- a technical
procedure which finds some justification in 'live' performances from the fact
that a common orchestral seating plan assigns the majority of 'high' toned
instruments to the left.....  Yet, since merely arbitrarily splitting of all
the highs into one channel and all the lows into the other, while effectively
'placing' certain all-high and all-low instruments in definitely left and
right aural locations, often results in unnatural sonic imbalances, greater
naturalness as well as flexibility is achieved by varying (according to the
demands of the music itself) the specific frquency at which the spectrum
division or 'filtering' is made--and also by re-introducing into each channel
varying portions of some of the omitted frequencies.  At the same time,
provisions are made for feeding controllable amouns of the over-all original
signal into either or both channels, which not only further reduces
imbalances, but also, as the level fo the original-signal insertion is raised,
effectively 'moves' some apparent sound-sources nearer the desired position
in the sound picture.
        Even with this considerable control of instrumental separation and
localization, however, there would remain a lack of the 'spaciousness' that
is no less characteristic of true stereo sound.  Here this is approximated
by first by-passing portions of both the 'filtered' and original
(full-frequency) signals through reverberation (time-delay) chambers, and then
reintroducing them at appropriate levels into each channel.  In addition,
small-portions of the 'filtered-echo' signals from each channel are fed into
the other---thus approximating the distinctive true stereo characteristic
which results from each microphone's 'hearing' some part of the direct and
some part of the reflected sound picked up by the other microphones used. 
To enrich the overl-all sound and to give it more natural auditorium
reverberation and balance, a smaller amont of full-frequency echo is added
'out-of-phase' to both channels in order to broaden the total 'curtain of
sound' and to spread it more evenly between the two playback speakers......


(Small print, fills the entire jacket back, with no room for information about
the composer, the piece, or the performer.  There is a one line biography of
the person who wrote the above.  This is a technological miracle they are
selling here, not a performance of Dvorak's New World Symphony.)
It does sound different from the mono, and better.  
But I am used to listening to mono radio as that removes the hiss that you
get on weak stations, and all the classical stations come from 60 or more
miles away so are pretty weak.  Why does stereo hiss but mono does not?

response 72 of 74:

Apr 19 22:33 UTC 2000

<blinks>
This is getting ridiculous....

response 74 of 74:

Jun 11 14:23 UTC 2000

I have before me a Pro Arte Digital record of Bach's Magnificat, conducted
by Joshua Rifkin.  A round gold medallion proclaims that it was Imported from
Europe (Pro Arte Records).  The jacket tells me that the performace was
recorded in New York, at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and
Letters, in Sept and Dec 1982.  Copyright by Intersound, 1984.  Manufactured
in the USA by Intersound, Inc., Minneapolis.

Okay, so we have a record recorded in NY in 1982, manufactured in Minneapolis
no later than 1984, and imported from Europe.

The recording was done on some 17th and 18th century violins, as well as on
a trumpet made in 1978 after a 1746 model from Nurnberg, a 1740-imitation
flute made in San Francisco in 1980, a 1980 New York bassoon imitating a
London 1747 original, a 1979 oboe imitating 1730, a 1982 oboe imitation 1720,
and last but definitely not least, an oboe made by Jonathan Bosworth and
Stephen Hammer, Acton, MA, 1983 (sic!) after Johann Porschmann, Leipzig, ca
1730).

Can someone explain how the oboe player managed to play it in 1982?

It is a very nice recording.