Stereo, Left & Right

The room is dark, save for the rosy glow from the pilot light. On the broad panel--set roughly equidistant from two woofered and tweetered speaker assemblies in massive cabinets--is an array of switches, dials and knobs. This is not the cockpit of the X-15; it is a modern stereophonic rig. Tuner off. Amplifier on. Selector switch on RIAA. All niters out. Left volume control on #5. Right volume control on #5. Turntable spinning at 33 1/3 r.p.m. A metal arm glides with feathery softness over the record. For the moment, the speakers are switched off. Instead, from a tangle of wire punched into the back of the amplifier, a cord trails along the floor to the middle of the room. It snakes up a chair and into an outsize set of headphones worn by the pilot--uh, the listener. In the room, there is silence. But inside the earphones, pouring full-blast into the auditory canals is the sound of--a choo-choo train.

Huff-puff, huff-puff clackety clack it goes. Puffpuffpuffpuff, faster and faster and louder and louder. The whistle wails, and the monstrous noise comes on and on and on and on, straight at the listener. His eyes pop open, his hands grip the arms of his chair in sweaty terror. His eyebrows shoot up past his hairline. As the final shattering wallop thunders in his head, the train runs right smack over him and he topples backward in a shuddering trance.

Tide's In. Next to being actually tied to the railroad tracks, there is nothing like a stereophonic recording to give a person that run-down feeling. But stereo's well-known gift for superrealism has made astonishing inroads with the music-loving public as well as thrill seekers in the past three years.

Like any new toy, stereo at first appealed largely to only a narrow group. The early stereo owner was the status-conscious fellow in the neighborhood--he already had a Mercedes or didn't quite have the cash for one. In the wellappointed bachelor apartment, the stereo rig replaced the traditional etchings as a lure for the nubile. His costly equipment consisted of two speakers, two amplifiers, a special cartridge for his record player, as well as an assortment of optional gear. His stereo library was comprised mainly of trick noises and demonstration records --drum recitals, incoming tides (on the flip side: outgoing tides), the sound of an olive dropping into a martini, an album called Music to Listen By, a Ping-pong game in which the illusion of the moving ball was vivid enough to make a listener's head swivel.

Bad moment. Stereo seemed the an swer to the wildest dreams of the hi-fi industry, which has always made the most of planned obsolescence. Whatever the hi-fi fan bought, it was declared outmoded by all the pseudo-scientific trade journals almost before he could get it wired up, with the warning that only a still newer gadget could keep him in the forefront of the hip. For the trade, stereo had a classic simplicity: all the hi-fi fan had to do was exactly duplicate the equipment he already had (any change or cheaper equipment would spoil the "balance").

But to the industry's chagrin, the hi-fi fans balked at the expense. What was worse, they were discouraged by the news that their expensive rigs were no longer the best, and stopped buying new gadgets to improve them. The hi-fi men discovered they had all but killed off their monaural trade, and not enough new customers turned up to buy the expensive new stereo rigs. The industry went through a bad year.

But as recording companies began turning out genuine music, and stereomakers cut the price and improved the quality of their units, the New Sound slowly corralled many a music lover and audiophile (a music lover who handles recordings at edges only). Once listeners learned to sit in the small area where the sound of both speakers "focus" in proper balance, they found stereo could produce an astonishing sense of being surrounded by the music. Though most soon discovered that the pleasures of being able to "hear" a singer cross from stage right to stage left were limited, stereo did produce a euphoric sense of what devotees called "presence." Today 32% of the nation's 28 million hi-fi fans now buy stereo recordings on platters and tape, and stereo sales--both recordings and sets--are taking a $250 million bite out of the overall $745 million hi-fi market. In Manhattan last week, 125 manufacturers took over six floors of the Trade Show Building to put on their annual Hi-Fi Music Show, and it was all wired for stereo. Room after room displayed a rich variety of the latest models in tape machines, amplifiers, speakers, tuners and consoles--in all, some $6,000,000 worth of equipment designed to give stereo its biggest decibel pressure ever. The gadgeteers were out in the usual force. University Loudspeakers, Inc., for example, is pushing underwater speakers (about $45 apiece) to be installed in backyard swimming pools, so that the devoted music lover can take a plunge without missing a beat.

New Angle. Far more important for stereo fans--and for the future of stereo, for that matter--is the fact that nearly every components manufacturer is marketing equipment for the newest angle in hifi: FM stereo, or Multiplex. Approved last spring by the Federal Communications Commission, Multiplex (MPX) will enable people to receive stereo broadcasts over FM radio. The MPX system can broadcast a live concert or anything else (see chart) by transmitting left and right signals to the FM tuner, which sorts them out for the left and right speakers.* The hi-fi fan who already owns a stereo setup with an FM tuner would need only to add a plug-in MPX adaptor ($39 up) to his tuner; or he can get himself a new, self-contained stereo control unit ($150 up). Since the system is compatible, the listener who has no MPX facilities would hear the sound monaurally on his FM set. The stereo trade is gambling on a big rush for MPX. A few FM stations are already broadcasting MPX stereo, and about 300 others (out of a total of 927) around the nation are getting ready to join -the field.

Forked Tongue. There will remain a hard core of hi-fi fans who will continue to ignore stereo. For one thing, stereo in all its forms is still more expensive than comparable monaural sound. For another, critics complain that stereo speaks with forked tongue. Despite claims that it delivers concert-hall realism, it is really mechanical realism. "We do not hear live performances 'stereophonically,'" says Composer Igor Stravinsky. "Whereas the angle formed by a live orchestra and our two ears is about six inches, the angle at which the stereo microphone hears the same orchestra for us is sometimes as great as 60 ft. Therefore stereo, instead of giving us 'the best seat in the house,' gives us, in fact, a kind of omnipresent seat not found in any house." Stereo, for example, does nothing to enhance chamber music which by its nature requires the compact blending of just a few instrumental voices for proper effect.

Musical Walls. But as long as there are gadgeteers, the stereo business is bound to grow. Richard Ekstract, a director of the H-Fi Show, already is foretelling the day when whole houses will be jumping with electronic sound. Wall paint, says he, will contain "special sound-conducting chemicals mixed right into it. All you'll have to do is take your record player, a 3-in. by 3-in. box powered by molecular electronic amplifiers, and tune it onto your wall frequency. The walls will change color according to the music being played."

With even the walls sounding with brass, there will be no hiding place down here, or anywhere, and the stereo makers will be content.

* An obvious improvement over recent AM-FM experimental broadcasting in stereo, by which a station would broadcast the left signal on an FM frequency and the right signal on an AM frequency; the listener needed a separate radio for each signal, and, moreover, received poor-quality stereo because ordinary AM radio has a limited frequency range and is subject to static and other kinds of interference. MPX, on the other hand, uses a single transmitter that carries two sets of signals simultaneously to a single FM stereo tuner. The main carrier contains a combination of left and right (L+R) signals; a sub-carrier (the multiplex part) transmits the "difference" between the two signals (L -- R). When the two arrive at the tuner, the MPX circuitry divides them again.

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