I conclude that 'digital' = highest fidelity in CD recordings

quote:

Originally posted by GFFJ:
Anyone who stops learning has died really ...

ATB from George

I couldnt agree more with that statement!!! I think it is why we are all here in the first place.

a genuinely new topic in the music room would be as welcome as a cool breeze in the desert :-)

It's interesting that it's the techno/dance/ambient music that you point to as being the best recorded. I don't have a personal frame of reference for that, but I know what a guitar or a piano "ought" to sound like, and analogue is more likely to deliver that for me.

quote:

That is an interesting point, Kuma and I'm theorising why that could be....

Maybe hearing the natural analogue hiss alongside the mono evokes other things aside from hifi purity. I can imagine the hearing of classic jazz in mono brings forth the era in which the recording was done???

Without wishing to second guess Kuma I don't think tape hiss or mono has anything to do with why older (50's) analogue recordings can be more enjoyable than later digital ones (80's) on vinyl. The only way of finding out would be to listen for yourself if possible.

regards,

mat

quote:

It's interesting that it's the techno/dance/ambient music that you point to as being the best recorded. I don't have a personal frame of reference for that, but I know what a guitar or a piano "ought" to sound like, and analogue is more likely to deliver that for me.

Indeed in my opinion, some types of music are ideally suited to vinyl - techno, dance etc were usually created with being played from a 12" single in mind and can sound pretty awesome... also, much jazz and pre-80s was recorded with vinyl reproduction in mind.

Without getting into the whole vinyl vs CD debate, I think you can have a lot of fun buying a modest turntable and a couple of hundred LPs and 12" singles for the same amount as "the next black box"

Regarding the benefits of analogue and digital recording, I don't think you can make too many generalisations, there are good and bad examples of each.

quote:

Originally posted by Consciousmess:
Maybe hearing the natural analogue hiss alongside the mono evokes other things aside from hifi purity. I can imagine the hearing of classic jazz in mono brings forth the era in which the recording was done???

Jon,

I don't think tape hiss is it, tho. Yes the newer reissued stereo LPs have lower noise floor and all that. But the overall presentation of the music is slightly far away.

I can hear some hiss on, say, the KOB on both records and CDs. But the former, the music seems to transcend inspite the noise where as the digital reproduction is a sad ghost of the original intent.

But if you take more recent albums ( such as Fagan's Kamakiriad or even the Naim's own album titles ) which are digitally recorded and made to both CDs and LPs, the difference in presentation is somewhat less.

I don't doubt the phychoacoustics ( mind is a powerful thing ), but I wasn't around back when all those great jazz records are made.

Some stereo mix also has this ping pong effect in that I found it destructing. In spite I can pin point where each musician sits in stereo recordings, some, not all, mono titles sound more coherent to my ears.

A lot of electronica music also sound okey in either formats but maybe CD edges out a bit because some small dance record lebel's QC process isn't that good today. ( hold for disco from '70s likes of SalSoul Orchestra titles. They sound better on vinyl, for sure. )

for classical music, my preferred medium is the cd. cheap, readily available, durable, quiet, great dynamics, accurate articulation, and you don't have to get up in the middle to flip a record.

In that case..........

Can anybody name a CD recorded and mastered in AAD that they regard as superior in fidelity to a good DDD?

This doesn't just apply to electronic music, such as the latest Ministry of Sound release - fantastic fidelity, but even classical music comes into this category. I have the Four Seasons, Romeo & Juliet, Nutcracker, Swan Lake in DDD and these are outstanding... I also have Holst The Planets in DDD, which again is outstanding.

So I offer the question to you again, what CD is there that is AAD and superior in fidelity to a DDD? I've not come across a good one yet so please offer suggestions!! (Sensible please!!).

Many thanks,

Jon

What do you want fidelity or music? You're just not going to get a transcendental experience like Ferrier singing Mahler or Handel in digital because she's dead. I'd rather hear that on a 78 through a blackthorn needle than not at all, even if via a full blown 500 system.

I struggle to understand this quest for fidelity, you're not going to find it outside of a concert hall and even then you'll probably be disappointed because, if amplified, the PA is pants and some unfortunate soul can't live without a constant inflow of cough drops.

As I have stated previously, the DGG 4D recordings are the best recordings I own, and many of the performances are among my favorites.

Also reported previously, I think that the quality of musicianship has only improved over time.

So for me, it's looking forward, not backward, in my pursuit of the enjoyment of music.

Due to the unique nature of each recording process, you need to have two completely separate recording streams of the same performance in order to identify which medium is the better. In other words, you'd have to have mics connected to both analogue and digital recorders and if there need to be both digital and analogue mics, then they need to be there too. I believe this was done by Philips in the early 90s and they decided to go with their analogue recordings with analogue mastering and finally digitising the result. This, if memory serves, was what the Philips Classics label was about.

That said, I also believe that the age of recording techniques is important here. Analogue recording has been around for over a century. Digital recording has only been around for 30 years or so. In my view, the tricks employed for analogue recording aren't necessarily applicable to digital recording and I think engineers have slowly been re-learning the requirements for the different medium, btu that it's a slow process since it's a lot harder to unlearn things than it is to learn new ones.

Also, I've just read a very interesting article in the latest HiFiCritic written by George Foster about someone called Milind Kunchur who has been researching acoustics and human perception of fidelity. Kunchur's view appears to be that, contrary to popular suspicion, the frequency bandwidth of the recording is less important than ultimate rate limit of the recording - the rate of the rise time. His statisical analysis appears to show that humans can detect a slow rise time of anything above 6us which is way below what anyone has been able to measure so far. In fact he started by using digital signals but since the rise time of 16/44.1 signals is so high, he eventually had to build an analogue set with a rise time well below 6us to be able to accurately measure this as the threshold. I believe he mentioned that to get close to the rise time in the digital field the signal would have to have to be a minimum of 24/192, but that to actually beat the 6us rise time you need to be in something like the 700khz sample rate area (which is awfully high). He also points out that statistically, his older subjects (with hearing curtailed at below 15khz typically) have similar results as younger subjects (which is good news for all those in their 40s).

If he's right, then all CDs are fundamentally flawed, and even SACDs and DVD-As aren't that hot. Since analogue media enjoy continuous signals, the limitatio becomes the quality of the reading mechanism - the inertia in your stylus or the azimuth on your tape deck. He also draws another conclusion - which is that in reproduction, the 6us rise time has a significant consequence vis-a-vis the size of drive units. His view is that since larger cones are deeper, this has an immediate consequence on the rise time of the cone for higher frequencies which causes time smearing (or something to that effect) so he advocates going for smaller cones for greater accuracy, which could explain why we're getting such good results from smaller speakers nowadays.

Just some observations to throw in the mix.

That is very interesting Frank.

But the biggest faults with recordings are as obvious as the difference between looking out over the landscape and a photagraph [even a stereoscopic one] of it.

The perpectives are fundamentally altered from what we get in a live musical event because the microphone or microphones are in a place or places that we as an individual listener could never actually get during the performance.

The sonorities of instruments alter as you get nearer them, and so this is also altered if the microphone pick-up is in a very different place the optimal place to listen as a member of the audience, so that what comes is an instrumental tone we recognise, but we know is not what we would hear in real or live music making. How often have you heard a flute player taking on breath in an orchestral recording, when in the concert hall this would never be heard, simply because the microphone for recording so much closer than the liistening position even in the front row in very many cases. The tone become breathy as well, less pure, less well focussed. This applies in various different ways to all the instruments and also to singers, and choirs.

The balances between instruments are also different - sometimes as clear as you can get in a very good seat in a very fine venue, but sometimes significantly less well managed. No recording actually presents musical balances very similarly to what comes in a good hall even if the recording can mimic the superb balances possible from great musicians who self-balance as the result of their training and experience, and who if playing in a great hall/venue may hope that at least in the best seats [usually between one third and two thirds of the way back] the intended balance will be well perceived by the audience.

I would say that any recording that requires any adjustment of the balances of instrumental lines during the course of the performance [usually nowadays by adjsuting relative levels of different channels fed from different microphone] has failed at the first hurdle in terms of musical balance for it should be possible to get a just balance at reharsal and leave it alone after that, as waas so frequently the case in the mono days, which so often involved not only a single channel cut, but only one microphone feeding it.

By definition the ideal microphone position had to be found [during rehearsal] before any recording could start. Not only that, but in case of any make-up sessions the whole seating plan and microphone placement had to be measured and written down in the session paper-work, so that the unadjustable [during the post production work] recording would match with any make-up work to cover faulty parts [or sides in the 78 days] in the recording. This is what is called studio craft, and it declined rapidly with the introduction of multi-track, multi-microphone recordings after stereo was introduced.

Stereo is a special case of a theoretical idea that when actually implemented only serves to undermine the quality of recordings whilst being presented [by the commercial interests selling Hifi and recordings] as a truer representaion of what is heard in the live setting.

In the concert hall the depth from the front to back of the performance group is very small compared to the distance to the best seats. The audience front row may be exciting but not the place to hear a proper and intended musical balance, or the intended musical blend of lucid lines. I have heard people say that sitting in the front row you hear the separation something like stereo. This is true, and is one more reason why from the strictly musical POV, the front row is destructive of the intentions of the players, who attempt to produce lucid independant lines which are however completely blended, and bound together in a focussed unity of the mass of sound. That is why players sit close together to get fine ensemble, fine balances of relative loudness [musical balances], and a bound together focussed - a tightly knit - sound.

If the engineer emphasises the side to side separation of the performing group this may be thought of as being analogous to a 3D cartoon where the characters give the illusion of leaping right out of the screeen in a way that is impossible.

If he gives too much emphasis to front to back depth then necessarily he reduces those instruments he places further back in the musical balance, and it is certainly not true that the instrument that do typically sit at the back are somehow less important in the balance.

This is why there really is a limit to how closee one should sit to a performing group to get the intended balances. You need to sit far enough away to mimimise the diference in the reletive loudness of different instruments as affected by distance and the inverse square law which governs this.

Thus if you have little money and cannot afford the best seats at a concert the next best seats are actually further back, and not at the front, though the price will be much the same for those right at the front and right at the back.

If you doubt me on this, consider two regular features of rehearsals. Firstly a conductor will frequently set the players off, and walk to the back in the hall to listen to how the music is projecting into the best seats.

And ever so often the conductor will have an employee of the orchestra sitting somewhere about half way back [in the hall] and he will consult at various moments about whether some weak instrument [such a glochemspiel] is clear against the rest where it has some important parts to bring out.

The podium is fine for assisting with ensemble, and assisting with cues, giving the tempo and so on, but not a very fine place to assess how the balance goes.

This is fine in a hall which is the regular home of the performing group, but new halls, encountered on tour or at guest appearances, can cause real problems for musical balances to those unused to the particualr acoustic. And the same can apply to certain halls used as studios.

Some early stereo managed to be almost as natural as mono, in that it did not emphasise front to back depth, and preserved the sense of blend rather than the separation of lines [left to right], and altogether managed to sound reasonably natural on most occasions. However with mono you are guaranteed the correct bound together sound without distraction, and with skilled engineering and playing [so that a well made performance musical balance] is well caught by a microphone in the right place relative to the players and for the specific character of the hall, a presentation of musical balances that is as lucid as the very best possible in the great halls and venues.

____________

It seems to me that sonic fidelity [Hifi sound] is a tiny issue compared to those I have mentioned here.

If we are talking in respect of fidelity of sound to the question of the replay sounding accurately like the instrument recorded, then this aspect was being well managed on occasion as long ago as 1930 and in some not so rare cases even as early as 1926 with the advent of electrical recording in the commercial studio.

Tape recording was introduced over the period 1948 to 1952, as direct cutting was phased out.

Analogue tape set back accurate sonority perhaps by twenty years, and it would be several years before most of the quality possible with direct cut would be recaptured.

When I read of someone aiming for Higher Fidelity my heart goes out to them as they are looking at one tiny aspect, and one which even if optimised, will never fix basic musical flaws all to common in much recording made in the stereo era, which is not to say that all mono recording was a grand as the best of it!

ATB from George

quote:

Originally posted by Frank Abela:
That said, I also believe that the age of recording techniques is important here. Analogue recording has been around for over a century. Digital recording has only been around for 30 years or so. In my view, the tricks employed for analogue recording aren't necessarily applicable to digital recording and I think engineers have slowly been re-learning the requirements for the different medium, btu that it's a slow process since it's a lot harder to unlearn things than it is to learn new ones.

hmm.. That's interesting.

Perhaps this is why RVG analogue records always sound more *correct* ( subjectively, mind you ) than the digital counter part.

quote:

Originally posted by GFFJ:

Stereo is a special case of a theoretical idea that when actually implemented only serves to undermine the quality of recordings ...

I disagree. Stereo provides the much needed sense of space and air in recorded music that I find lacking in even the best mono recordings, regardless of left/right, front/back issues. Space ... air.

quote:

It seems to me that sonic fidelity [Hifi sound] is a tiny issue compared to those I have mentioned here.

Again, I disagree. I'm fortunate in the relatively wide range of sonic fidelity with which I can effectively listen to music, but if fidelity is too degraded, the music doesn't reach me. Conversely, as I said earlier, when sonic fidelity is at its best, it adds enormous depth, realism, and emotional connection to the music ... it becomes a major component of the musical experience.

All best,
Fred

It's all about priorities Fred.

Obviously we share a muasical priority.

I have no other, and I learned to listen with a wind-up gramophone. Once you get through the surface noise, you really learn to listen into the music, and ignore the sonics!

I learned well.

I shall never understand stereo or air in music. I never had a conductor ask me to play with more air round me.

More articulation perhaps ...

Very best wishes to you! George

quote:

Originally posted by GFFJ:

Once you get through the surface noise, you really learn to listen into the music, and ignore the sonics!

Like I said, I'm able ... up to the point at which the surface noise overtakes the music.

quote:

I shall never understand stereo or air in music. I never had a conductor ask me to play with more air round me.

Likely you're being facetious here, but it's not something an individual player, or even an ensemble does ... it has to do with the physical space the musicians are in, either the literal physical space or the virtual physical space as rendered with technology.

Imagine being locked in a very small closet, laden with heavy coats, just you and a sousaphonist ... you'd understand "space/air" (or, rather, the lack of it) right quick I reckon! An anechoic chamber would be a very unpleasant place in which to listen to music.

In order for me to listen to music with complexity and density of texture, I need a feeling of space and air in and around the complex textures otherwise it becomes an indiscernible dense blob of sound. A well-designed stereo soundstage gives my two ears a wide field of space and air in which the music floats.

All best,
Fred

quote:

I learned well.

Forgive me George for my inquisitiveness here but I just find this summation rather curious. What possibly could you attribute to learning well (musically speaking) that anyone else who listens to or plays music period cannot experience (whether they listen(ed) on a wind-up gramophone, an awful car radio, a very elaborate system, or anything in between)?

I wonder if it isn't really just the "idea" or "association" with a wind-up gramophone, with mono (not stereo), with harpsichord (but not piano), with this conductor (but not that one), with the past (not the present) etc. that is the most intriguing or pleasing for you?

At the root of it I believe we do share a common belief (but we may express it differently) in that one does not need a fully decked out Naim 500 system to understand or enjoy music. Anything will do for that matter. In fact, since I was a small child I have listened on the most humble, basic "junk" and this didn't stop me from learning and growing and developing a sincere love for music. If anything it helped in this cause. I've only really been exposed to an exceptional musical system and experience for maybe 4 years now (after at least 35 years).

Having said this and knowing that I can easily enjoy my musical experience on just about anything if I have to I also see no detriment in trying to maximize my musical listening experience either where I can (through fine recordings/components).

By the way Frank, very interesting points but if analogue is about 100 years old I'd say it took at least 50 years to really come into its own (about the mid 1950's onward). I think the rate of change happening in technology today is happening so quickly (exponentially, not linearly) compared to the past. Things don't need 50 or 100 years to peak anymore...

Best Regards,
Doug

quote:

I learned well.

Dear Doug,

I learned well as even a ten year old how completely different were the effects of replayed music and listening to a concert performance of it.

This is no comment on what anyone else may have learned, and was not intended to carry that meaning.

Music listening is definately not a nostalgia raising activity for me with one clear exception.

The great music I discovered [in the school record library] from the age of nine came from many of the great luminaries of musical performance then fashionable, such as Toscanini, Beecham, and Furtwaengler. Of course Klemperer was represented [as might be expected in Beethoven Symphonic recordings] and he became my favourite for Beethoven from the start, but the greatest proportion of those early encounters produced no strong affection for the specific performances auditioned, or the artists responsible. Strangely almost the reverse as the time has become more distancing in effect.

I was introduced to Bach's keyboard works on the piano and love them best on a harpsichord; I listened to mainly stereo recordings then, though there were some good mono ones as well, and mainly on stereo replay sets, though there was a very fine mono set, which I eventually used to the exclusion of the posher stereo set. I prefer mono now, and so the evolution has gone quite along way and is still moving. This very week I ordered a set of Bach Harpsichord Concertos from DG played by Pinnock and collegues. Well up until a year or two ago, I still found more than a little to commend in the piano recordings of Pires and Edwin Fischer in the music. I suspect that these long cherished recording will disappear from my collection once I have listened to these HIP recordings ... The change never stops, and I am finding the rate of change of my taste has not slowed down with age, even if the repertoire I am most fond of has been set for almost twenty years, when I finally admitted to myself that I could not ever investigate all the music, but only some of the works of the greatest composers, and at that only in a sporadic fashion. I chose to narrow this my two very favourites, Joseph Haydn and Joh Seb Bach to try and learn everything of theirs before I get too old. This decision I think was one of the very best in my life even after nearly twenty years! Clearly it has nothing to do with personal nostalgia, though it is incredibly conservative from the musical standpoint!

__________________________

Now I am a digital hound, and only use CDs! That or the hard drive and regenerate replay with my PC ...

Such a long way from an old hand-wound gramophone which I bought to play 78s as a 13 year old, and never found off-putting in spite of the surface noise. Over the next ten years I would accumulate via loan [as I only ever owned three myself] about 1,200 78 discs.

But though I learned some of the great classics from them, I have no wish to listen that way to the music now, though the same recordings in good digital transfers have in some cases remained favourites of mine to run alongside more modern efforts.

So I learned some valuable lessons, at a young age, about the difference between replay and concerts, but find listening to music about the least nostalgic activity I indulge in! For nostalgia I look at old familly photos, old letters from my grandmother[ all saved], or, if I am in the mood, listening to the music of Elgar, which has a pecculiar nostalgic resonance for me not found in my favourite music from Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, or Brahms [etc].

____________________

My sole critereon in listening to music via replay is whether the result is musically satisfying in the ways mentioned in my first post on this thread. I find no substitute for a clean and well balanced mono recording in musical terms. There is nothing left to draw your attention except the musical lines ... Musical nirvana, actually.

ATB from George

quote:

Originally posted by fred simon:

quote:

I shall never understand stereo or air in music. I never had a conductor ask me to play with more air round me.

Likely you're being facetious here, but it's not something an individual player, or even an ensemble does ... it has to do with the physical space the musicians are in, either the literal physical space or the virtual physical space as rendered with technology.

Imagine being locked in a very small closet, laden with heavy coats, just you and a sousaphonist ... you'd understand "space/air" (or, rather, the lack of it) right quick I reckon! An anechoic chamber would be a very unpleasant place in which to listen to music.

...

All best, Fred

Dear Fred,

I am not being facetious, but it may appear that I am!

My point is that in a well made recording, even from the days of 78s, I can think of not one favourite [from the musical perspective of being a great performance, which I admire or even love] that is crippled by too cramped together a sound.

I know these recordings can exist, and there are horrible examples recorded of the NBC SO under Toscanini by RCA/Victor in New York where there is no air left at all - the sense of the performance taking place in a good acoustic space. Fortunately these Toscanini recordings do not represent a very high priority for me in terms of their musical qualities either, which is not to denegrate them musically as much as to say that I simply do not like them.

But I do find it difficult to take stereo seriously in terms of delineating the complex musical lines of classical music.

The first one is that I learned even as a ten year old what a good musical balance is from concert going, and also that this good musical balance was independant of the spread of musicians left to right as it came as a great surprise to find that the orchestra sounded as a bound together unity playing on the stage, rather than the violins here, the celli there [with the basses behind], or the flutes here and the oboes there and so on. Truly I found this a surprise [!] especially after listening to stereo recordings of the music played at the concerts, and as indicated in my post to Doug above, I started my migration towards mono replay and away from stereo, which suddenly began to sound less efective in musical balance terms compared to mono, and completely false in its divisions of the musical lines by a sense of pin-point positioning of their generation.

So your analogy of playing a big musical instrument in a closset does not seem to assist me in comprehending the issue of space as it is not a real life situation, compared to concert listening.

Space is a fact, and too much of it is only something that dillutes the expressive aspects of a performance. The longer the acoutic tail [echo for want of a better word] of a hall the more the sound is blurred over and the articulation is dulled and expressive nuancing of tone colour, dynamic, and even rhythmic agogic-push, and agogic-hestitation are smoothed over.

I prefer halls that are dry, like the Royal Festival Hall, or the Musikverien in Vienna [at least when the audience is in and not as in the case of a recording the place is empty and can produces cavernous results], to the generous halls like the Royal Albert Hall, which I find very hard to enjoy music in because everything is covered over in acoustic tail, such that any fast and loud tutti passage become a question of memory and imagination!

But very rare are the halls so dry that the great sonority of the instruments cannot adequately develope. I know one that is regularly used for music and is difficult - The Swann Theatre in Worcester - and I played in there quite a lot, and even a good double bass never sounds well. A poor one sound like so much plywood! Thin and unpleasant ... But such venues are rare - much rarer than the over resonant ones. I can think of very few churches that make good concert venues, though they are often idea for religeous choral music, which is designed for very resonant spaces, and to a large degree actually depends on this ultra-blended sonority to give it full splendour as intended by the composer and performers ...

Bach goes best in a relatively small and unresonant space, where the very detailed contrapuntal linbes retain their lucity throughout ... the Oratorios, Passions, and Canatas go best in a relatively small churches rather than cathedral sized building, IMO, as they are then completely clear, and reflect the size of the churches that they were given in under Bach's own control at the time.

Most Symphony Orchestra sized concert halls are too large and resonant to be optimal for most of Bach's music. The Third and Fourth Orchestral Suites go well on a large symphony orchestra in a typical large hall because the orchesatration is so simply [for Bach] that it does not get lost in a big resonant acoustic, but these are the only two pieces by him that do not benefit from a drier than fashionable acoustic quality.

I hope you do not mind me replying to you in some detail.

ATB from George

Hi George,

No, I don't mind the detail at all.

I agree that too much reverberation in a hall can be potentially detrimental, depending on the program. And I agree that erring on the side of too dry is usually better than too wet, again depending on the particular program. I also agree that a unified orchestral blend is desired, rather than a conglomerate of disparate lines.

However, to my ears at least, within that unified blend I do hear dimensions of width, depth, and distance, and enjoy doing so. I just don't get that with a mono recording ... it sounds too (pardon the pun) monolithic.

But the issue of reverberation is actually separate from the issue of air ... a performance space can be fairly dry as far as reverberation but still lend a sense of space and air, which music needs. A good example is Pick-Staiger Concert Hall in Evanston, Illinois, where I recorded my last two Naim albums, Remember the River and Since Forever ... on stage the sound is fairly dry, with increasing reverberation out in the house. The result is a pleasing blend of the clarity of a relatively dry space with enough reverberation to avoid deadness and sterility.

Best,
Fred

Dear Fred,

I quite agree that a dry as dust recording is painful, and distorts the music actually.

I would always stray on the side of dryness in a venue however, if the ambiance is sufficient to allow instruments to open up their lovely sonorous potential.

As you may know the Royal Fetival Hall [built for the Festival of Britain in the early fifties] was a theoretically pefect hall, which proved to be problematic to say the least as being so dry that the opening concert used thirteen double basses to get the balance usually produced by six or eight!

But the acoustic properties were tamed and a splendid if fairly resonance-light hall emerged.

In the last year the hall re-opened after a major adjustment including the raising of the roof and increasing of the resonance time to reflect other large modern halls.

I suspect the place has potentially been ruined for Bach and Beethoven.

Apart from Vienna [Musikverien] it was one of the few truly great and totally clear large halls.

I have not managed to get to a concert there since the changes ...

As for the sonic architectural sense of space that stereo can bring, I do agree that a pure Blumlein [figure of eight - single point - stereo microphone, directly recorded to two tracks] has the potential to get a very natural presentation of the real deal. The trouble is that when EMI introduced the method commercially in 1955 the whole style only lasted till about 1961, before the whole multi-channel post-production jigged rubbish took over, and it is only in the last few years of the digital era that we have seen a recovery in musical quality in recordings to match AD Blumlein's original thoughts on the subject - patented as early as 1934 - succesfully used in experimental stereo recording [never issued] made in that year.

When tape allowed the possibility of easier preparation EMI brough out the old ideas with complete success for experimets in 1954 and full commercial recording as early as 1955, but soon the artificial would take over. Of course there were other stereo schemes in the fifties but none so fine as the Blumlein recordings ...

ATB from George