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The advent of stereophonic recordings for the home and the equipment on which to play them brought in its wake a whole specialized repertoire of "sound demonstration" discs—recordings which when played on stereo phonographs would provide the hearer with spectacular sonic illusions of motion, directionality and depth (RCA Victor’s Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular, LSP-1773, is a prize example). The snarl of racing cars whizzing past the starting line, the New York City subway, a ping-pong game, the bowling alley, the zing of a rifle bullet toward its target, the soft-shoe dance across the stage—these and a host of other novel effects became showpieces for the home stereo listener.

Wonderful as these stereo sound effects may be as aural novelties, they cannot hold the listener’s attention for long or over many hearings. The substance of almost all recordings worth living with is, after all—MUSIC.

Stereophonic recordings of symphony, opera, Broadway musicals, jazz and popular music literally added a new dimension to home phonograph listening. Such sound is enhanced not only through being spread across a broad frontal arc covered by the loudspeakers—as against being "squeezed" through a single enclosure; but more especially it is enhanced through the sense of localization and depth perspective. A soloist or instrumental choir, recorded in stereo, can be heard in the living room in the same relative placement as it would be in the concert hall, on the opera stage, or in the night club. The sound of instruments and singers emerges from the speakers in genuine aural perspective. In stereo recordings of opera, Broadway musicals or drama, movement across or from front to back of the stage is immediately discernible as such to the listener. These elements of directionality, depth illusion and motion are not to be found on monaural recordings; they are properties unique to stereo. This holds true especially for motion.

Through the great classics of the concert hall and opera remain of necessity inviolate, beyond a certain point, when it comes to exploitation of stereo recording techniques, popular entertainment music is something else again. Such music, after all, is meant to entertain—to delight and even surprise the hearer. So it is that record producers of the stereo era have been industriously devising ways and means of bringing the special properties of stereo to bear on entertainment music, and in a manner that would add something genuinely new and exciting to this type of listening fare. What RCA Victor has chosen to call STEREO ACTION is its special response to the fascinating challenge posed by the new techniques made available through the development of stereophony for the home.

This has involved much more than merely exploiting motion and directionality in terms of shifting instrumental choirs and soloists from one side of the listening room to the other. For meaningful results, it has demanded new concepts in the art of orchestral arranging and a large measure of truly imaginative and creative collaboration between musicians and recording engineers.

The art of "pop" recording has become today, more than ever before, an art of dramatic enhancement through every device of microphone placement, reverberation technique, ping-pong stereo, and the like; but little had been done to develop a whole repertoire of pop musical arrangements that would take full advantage of the complete armory of enhancement techniques now available to the record producer. RCA Victor’s Stereo Action series marks a serious and carefully thought-out step in that direction. The facts of recording history show that musical enhancement by way of microphone and other audio techniques dates back a surprising number of years.

RCA Victor began experimenting with multi-track recordings of soloists well before magnetic tape came into general use—notably with Jascha Heifetz playing both solo parts of the Bach Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra (c. 1947) and with the late, great jazz musician, Sidney Bechet, playing all six instruments of a New Orleans combo in Blues of Bechet and Sheik of Araby c.1940).

After the war came the magnetic tape revolution in recording technology, and with it came a greater flexibility than ever before in using various enhancement devices in the field of popular music recording.

With the coming of stereo and the development by RCA Victor and others of doing master recordings on 3-channel stereo tapes ("triple-tracking"), special new techniques became an everyday part of phonograph record studio production. Every 3-track original has, of course, to be blended to a 2-track working master tape for producing the disc or pre-recorded tape for use on home 2-channel stereo phonographs or tape machines. So, in the process of "blending down," many things that may not have come off in the recording session can be set right in the re-recording. Even before stereo, "post-equalization" and "post-reverberation" were commonly applied in instances where a master tape from a recording session may have left something to be desired. Of course, tape editing techniques play a great part in this, too, so that the combination of all of these devices and techniques adds up to a product created as much by the studio engineers as by the performing musicians. With this wealth of knowledge and dramatic device at their beck and call, it seems only natural that the art of "musical-dramatic" enhancement, applied so successfully over the past decade to monaural entertainment recording, should begin to turn to stereo, no longer as just a novelty gimmick, but as a medium to be used with genuine creative imagination. It is with this in mind that RCA Victor has embarked on its Stereo Action series of recordings that highlight the special listening dimension provided by motion-in-stereo. Some of the "stereo highlighting" on these recordings will be apparent at once to the listener—wherein plectral, percussive, or solo legato elements in an arrangement are manipulated in motion and/or in apparent perspective against a tonal background that shows them and the stereo medium to the most striking possible advantage; but this is merely a first step in the development of a new dimension in the art of orchestral arrangement and entertainment presentation on records, one that should over the years establish a dimension in home musical listening that is truly a law unto itself—to be experienced only in Stereo Action, and only through the art of recording as developed by RCA Victor for the 1960’s and beyond.

DAVID HALL
Music Editor, HiFi/Stereo Review