Stereophonic sound creates an illusion of location for various instruments within the original recording, in the same way that stereoscopic images give us the illusion of three-dimensional space. A well-configured high- end stereo system can offer an uncanny three-dimensional audio experience in your home. On a proper system, listeners can achieve an audio experience convincing enough to make them believe the vocalist or musicians are actually in the room, allowing them to form an emotional and visceral connection to the music and what the artist intended.
Most people have never heard a good audiophile stereo system, let alone one that produces a three-dimensional image: the two speakers disappear acoustically, and instead the notes coming from the drummer, guitarist, vocalist, or other musicians appear between, beside, and behind where the speakers are set up, creating a seamless soundstage.
Once listeners get to hear what a well-placed speaker pair powered by proper electronics can produce, there’s no going back. The opportunity to bring the illusion of live musicians into the home at the touch of a button, the twist of a knob, or the swipe of a finger – from online libraries so massive you couldn’t exhaust them in a lifetime of listening – is addictive.
In the Beginning
French inventor Clément Ader is credited with demonstrating the first two-channel audio system in 1881. He used a series of telephone transmitters connected from the stage of the Paris Opera to a suite of rooms at the Paris Electrical Exhibition, where listeners could hear a live transmission of performances through receivers for each ear. Scientific American reported:
Everyone who has been fortunate enough to hear the telephones at the Palais de l’Industrie has remarked that, in listening with both ears at the two telephones, the sound takes a special character of relief and localization which a single receiver cannot produce. […] This phenomenon is very curious, it approximates to the theory of binauricular audition, and has never been applied, we believe, before to produce this remarkable illusion to which may almost be given the name of auditive perspective.
Adler's Théâtrophone. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Jules Cheret/public domain.
This two-channel telephonic process was commercialized in France from 1890 to 1932 as the Théâtrophone, and in England from 1895 to 1925 as the Electrophone. Both were services available by coin-operated receivers at hotels and cafés, or by subscription to private homes.
Modern stereophonic technology was invented in the 1930s by British engineer Alan Blumlein at EMI, who patented stereo records, stereo films, and also surround sound. Blumlein was born on June 29, 1903, in London. His future career seemed to have been determined by the age of seven, when he presented his father Semmy with an invoice for repairing the doorbell, signed “Alan Blumlein, Electrical Engineer” (with “paid” scrawled in pencil). His sister claimed that he couldn’t read proficiently until he was twelve. He replied, “No, but I knew a lot of quadratic equations!”Blumlein was a lover of music. He tried to learn to play the piano, but he gave it up and switched to engineering. At the age of 28, his work at the Columbia Graphophone Company (later EMI) gave him an opportunity to enhance audio production and make his mark in history, when he invented what he called “binaural sound” – now known as stereophonic sound.
The story goes something like this. In early 1931, Blumlein and his wife Doreen were at the cinema. The sound reproduction systems of the early talkies only had a single set of speakers – the actor might be on one side of the screen, but the voice could come from the other. Blumlein declared to his wife that he had found a way to make the sound follow the actor. He later patented his ideas with the title “Improvements in and relating to Sound-transmission, Sound-recording and Sound-reproducing Systems,” The application was dated December 14, 1931, and it was accepted six months later as UK patent number 394,325.
Blumlein was killed in the crash of an H2S-equipped Handley Page Halifax test aircraft, while making a test flight for the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) on June 7, 1942. During the fiight from RAF Defford, while at an altitude of 500 feet, the Halifax developed an engine failure which rapidly grew out of control. The aircraft was seen to lose altitude, then rolled inverted and struck the ground, killing all those aboard.
Harvey Fletcher. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives/public domain.
Meanwhile, in the United States, physicist Harvey Fletcher of Bell Laboratories – the “father of stereophonic sound” who would later go on to rock Carnegie Hall – was beginning his push to extend the boundaries established by Blumlein even further.
On the evening of April 27, 1933, seven years prior to his Carnegie Hall event, Fletcher, ever the showman, welcomed a distinguished crowd to Constitution Hall in Washington, DC. Under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, an audience of presidential advisors, senators, and congressional representatives had gathered for a musical performance they assumed to be live. In the first act of the show, played through hidden speakers behind a curtain on the Washington, DC stage, the audience listened to a scene wired from Pennsylvania to Washington.
On the left-hand side of the stage in Philadelphia, a handyman constructed a box with a hammer and saw. From the far right, another worker proffered suggestions to his friend. “So realistic was the effect,” wrote an observer, “that to the audience in Washington the act seemed to be taking place on the stage before them. Not only were the sounds of sawing, hammering, and talking faithfully reproduced through the hidden speakers, but the auditory perspective enabled the listeners to place each sound in its proper positions, and to follow the movements of the actors by their footsteps and voices.”
Next, a soprano sang “Coming Through the Rye” as she weaved her way across the stage in Philadelphia. At Constitution Hall, the phantom of her voice “appeared to be strolling on the stage.”
The show ended with an unforgettable duel in the dark between two trumpet players separated by more than a hundred miles. The two traded licks from their opposite posts in Constitution Hall and the Academy of Music in Philadelphia. But the audience was none the wiser: “To those in the audience there seemed to be a trumpet player at each side of the stage before them. It was not until after the stage was lighted that they realized only one of the trumpet players was there in person.” The crowd was in awe.
This wasn’t simply a show of tricks. It was the grand public unveiling of Fletcher’s ambitious and laborious project, stereophonic sound, which he had first learned from Blumlein. Thanks to the work of Fletcher, the world was now hearing more than their home monophonic sound systems could ever deliver. Stereophonic sound had begun to reach the masses – and they couldn’t get enough.
By the 1960s and 1970s, legions of stereo systems had hit the mass market, popularized by waves of Japanese receivers: single-unit stereo systems that combined a stereo preamplifier, power amplifier, and radio tuner in one box. These receivers, coupled with a flood of low-cost loudspeakers, soon became staples in homes across the world. The stereo revolution had taken over and vinyl LPs, stereo tape cassettes, and stereo FM radio broadcasts reigned on high.
Hi-fi, 1970s style: a Sansui 9090DB receiver, with 125 watts per channel and lots of features. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Aaron Brick.
Hi-fi stereo dealers and manufacturers, drunk on their success selling sound systems to millions around the world, even tried to expand the number of speakers from two to four via a short-lived technology known as quadraphonic sound. Quadraphonic audio was the earliest consumer product offering surround sound, which would one day become popular in home and commercial movie theaters, but in the ’70s it was a commercial failure due to its many technical problems and format incompatibilities.
Quadraphonic audio formats were more expensive to produce than standard two- channel stereo. Playback required additional speakers, along with specially designed decoders and amplifiers, at a time when people were still getting used to the idea of tolerating two speakers and a receiver in their living rooms. But stereo and its ability to produce a three-dimensional image in the home was here to stay, and it was the odd home that didn’t sport a pair of speakers and a row of vinyl stereo LPs.
With the introduction of the compact disc (CD) on August 17, 1982, home stereo reproduction made another fundamental shift, this time in both form and technology.
A Sony CDP-101, the world's first Compact Disc player. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Atreyu.
No longer were we scraping needles across a 12-inch plastic disc. The CD was something new – a 4.7-inch optical disc that needed a laser to do its work. We had entered the era of digital audio. The first commercially available stereo CD player, the iconic Sony CDP-101, was offered by the electronics giant in Japan in October 1982. Born, as Sony stated, nearly a hundred years after the first phonograph player, the CDP-101 made its way to the US (and across the globe) around six to seven months after its initial debut in 1983, where it was priced as high as $1,000.
Following an initial offering of around 20 available discs at launch, the CD format exploded over the next few years. As reported by The Guardian, its unofficial arrival came with the release of Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms album, which was recorded on the latest digital equipment and spawned a tour sponsored by Philips. Released on CD in May 1985, the hit album became a musical mainstay, and vinyl fans and audiophiles began to purchase CD players in droves to adopt the growing format. By 1988, CD sales had eclipsed vinyl and they overtook the cassette in 1991.
Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms CD.
In 1999, just as Millennials and the internet itself were coming of age, Napster hit the web and changed the world forever (again). Allowing a network of global users to easily share music files with each other through a new format known as MP3, the site boomed, forcing the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and other major industry organizations to scramble to catch up (and fetch their high-dollar lawyers). At its height Napster hosted around 80 million users, and it paved the way for other peer-to-peer sites like LimeWire, uTorrent, and many more. While Napster was eventually shuttered in 2001, the genie was out of the bottle, so to speak, and the piles of cash that CD sales had hauled in began to slowly but surely fade away. In October 2001, amid this confluence of assaults on the beleaguered CD, Apple’s forward-sighted co-founder Steve Jobs unleashed perhaps his greatest creation to that point: the gorgeous little MP3 player known as the iPod. In true Apple fashion, the iPod was far from the first of its kind – and some might argue it wasn’t even the best – but paired with Apple’s new iTunes music app, the iPod took the world by storm and became the must-have music accessory. Perhaps just as striking, iTunes sales became a musical powerhouse for Apple, engorging its coffers and changing the way people purchased music – for those who still did pay for it. In 2005, iTunes outpaced CD sales in two major chains of physical stores for the first time. But that modest victory would be short-lived.
A first-generation iPod. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons/Rjcflyer@aol.com.
Pandora’s inception in January 2000 spawned from the Music Genome Project, an “internet radio” service following an algorithm that categorizes music with hundreds of characteristics, allowing it to serve listeners music they’ll like based upon the artists and songs they had previously been listening to, as well as simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down ratings. The first major on-demand service, Spotify, came eight years later, and together the two companies helped rewrite the music playbook. Offering affordable music to anyone online – without the need to break the law or store massive amounts of data – music streaming quickly became an industry giant. In 2014, streaming revenue eclipsed CD sales for the first time, and it did the same for digital downloads in 2015.
From Edison’s famous “Mary had a little lamb” speech, recorded on a tinfoil-layered spinning disc, to making the world’s music available in stereo at the touch of a finger, stereophonic sound is here to stay. For those lucky enough to have enjoyed the wonders of a properly set up audiophile two-channel system, there are few joys greater than the enjoyment of music in the home.
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