Adventures In Duophonic

[Jim Rockford]

I love threads like this.

[Ram4]

My uncle has been in the audio business since the 1960's as well as being a guitarist.  I thought I'd share the original post in this thread with him and see if he wanted to add anything.  He most certainly did...

1) Duophonic was simply a poor attempt to synthesize a stereo recording from mono masters.  It truly sucked.  They had various tricks referred to by the writer (of this thread)--bass on one side, highs on the other, delay between right and left, reverb to create phony depth, etc.  Sadly, the Beach Boys were one of the major "victims."  (My uncle thinks the BB were wonderful and was a big fan of the early 70's stuff as well as the classics).

2) The old consoles had a charm if they were "good ones".  They strived to do little wrong as opposed to aspiring to be great as the technology escaped them. They had a mellow sound, if not terribly detailed so they were, nonetheless, easy on the ears.  We had one.  Make no mistake: there were superb audiophile options, albeit quite esoteric. The 1958 Quad Electrostatic remains the most coveted audiophile loudspeaker in history and may still have the clearest sound of any!

3) Only the dumbest, ignorant, stupid asshole engineers and producers bought into the playback though junky equipment philosophy. The fact is, if you truly create a great master, it sounds fucking great though everything, even tiny transistor radios--deep bass excepted. Yamaha became famous for studio monitors with really shitty product because some dolt though it as a good idea; he even covered the tweeter with a tissue! Other dolts emulated his flawed approach. Yeesh. The master tapes I heard when I recorded at Chess Studios (Chicago) were spectacular. The Chess brothers produced terrible recordings from those delightful masters simply because they wouldn't spend the dough to make fine recordings. The technology existed.

4) The alignment of the woofer and tweeter were irrelevant. still are in many cases. For every speaker "properly" aligned, one exists that isn't yet sounds fine; it's a mysterious art mixed with limited science. Ditto for crossovers. Nearly every speaker in existence uses a crossover to separate highs from lows--an undesirable necessity. Even if the principles of good designing were followed, the drivers (individual speaker components) in those days, were not up to high resolution due to materials and manufacturing considerations.

5) Mono was far, far superior.

[leggo of my ego]

The other stereo is pictured below.


Where?

I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours.

Console, that is.

[Micha]

Nearly every speaker in existence uses a crossover to separate highs from lows--an undesirable necessity.

What's a crossover in this context?

5) Mono was far, far superior.

Make that is, not was!