Throwback Thursday

Straight Steer on Stereo

Robert Cobb | Feb 1, 2018

In celebration of our 60th anniversary, Sound & Vision will be peeking back throughout this year at our past six decades of coverage. Given our long tenure, our editorial predecessors have reported on most of the seminal inventions in the history of consumer audio and video technology and have offered up shopping advice, which, to varying degrees, can be viewed today as either timeless or charmingly outdated. As much as possible, we will reproduce articles and reviews as they appeared, with the unedited text mated alongside the original illustrations. We’ll be laying out these articles in our modern format for readability but will include scans of the cover and original page layouts to show how these would have appeared if you had picked up that issue at the time of publication. I’ll warn our readers now that some of what you’ll see will seem quaint or even politically incorrect by today’s standards—as an example, the photo caption from the article below that refers to the model’s “pretty eyes.” (Female models were frequently used for features in the early days to spice things up for the predominantly male audience.) Times have changed, of course, but in keeping to an honest rendering of our past, we hope to give readers a true sense of from where we evolved, and what it might have been like to be an enthusiast in those days.

The first couple of years following our founding in February 1958 as Hifi & Music Review were largely consumed with the roll-out of the industry’s first two-channel stereo gear. Equipment coverage and advertising from those days suggests that there was more than one way to skin this cat. There were a variety of new cutting-edge stereo preamps and integrated amplifiers offered up, some of which included separate tone controls for each channel to account for the mismatch of frequency response between your pre-existing speaker and whatever bargain-basement special you might have picked up to transform your hopelessly passé mono rig to stereo. If you weren’t ready to take that step, there were less expensive converter boxes that combined a stereo preamp with a singular power amp channel; you could connect your stereo source and one of your two speakers, then send the preamp-out signal for the second channel to your existing mono amplifier to power your legacy speaker.

But of course, before you could do this, you had to understand what stereo really is and why you want it. This article, taken from our very first issue, was intended to clarify for readers what this brave new world of hi-fi was all about.—Rob Sabin

COMMENTS

Stereo

Submitted by afficionado on February 1, 2018 - 7:31pm

"Stereo" from the band America (lyrics by Dewey Bunnell/Jimmy Webb) from one of my favorite albums "Perspective"

Stereo
We hear both sides
We sympathize
We live our lives in stereo
The left and the right
The dark and the light
We wrestle with the balance
We change our tone
We leave our phone
And tape record our absence
In lovin' memory

Stereo
We're livin' it in stereo
We fix it so our love is high fidelity
Mix it so we never lose the melody
We try to equalize our lives in stereo

So on we go
From side to side
As we divide
A single life in stereo
The far and the wide
We override
The feedback from the others
The unkind phrase
We lock in phase
We're only really listening to the stereo

Stereo
We're livin' it in stereo
We tune it till we have a perfect parody
Commune with such a fine-cut, crystal clarity
It seems to symbolize
Our lives in stereo

Oo (la, la, la, la, la, la), yeah, yeah, yeah
Oo (la, la, la, la, la, la), yeah, yeah, yeah
Oo (la, la, la, la-a)

Stereo
Stereo
We fix it so our love is high fidelity
Mix it so we never lose the melody
We try to equalize our lives in stereo

Thanks for sharing. Stereo is

Submitted by Bob Ankosko on February 2, 2018 - 4:14am

Thanks for sharing. Stereo is the one format that has never lost favor!

love the mag

Submitted by Billy on February 1, 2018 - 9:08pm

I have off and on subscribed to one version or another of your magazine(s) since the early 1970s. Always informative, good potty reading to say the least. Thanks for 4+ decades of enjoyment! (and happy bowels!)

Thanks, Billy but can we skip

Submitted by Bob Ankosko on February 2, 2018 - 4:12am

Thanks, Billy but can we skip that last part? :)

We Need The Entire Output Of Your Past Issues On Line

Submitted by John_Werner on February 2, 2018 - 11:53pm

Bob, do you think your company will make the entire back issues available online at some date? I sincerely hope so. I started reading your mag as a pre-ten in the early 70's when I was just beginning to develop "the bug" for hi-fi. Oddly enough I was more fascinated in taping which at the time meant reel to reel. I purchased goods through mail order from the classified section of your mag which had both classified and small size ads for a plethora of audio dealers in NYC, Chicago, and few outlier dealers elsewhere. I loved buying my gear this way and credit your mag as well as High Fidelity and Audio for much help in learning about gear and then actually finding dealers who sold the gear. I think my interest in hi-fi quickly became the thing I enjoyed the most. I joined all the record clubs that advertised in your mag too and I got my very own Wollensak reel to reel from Burstein and Applebee in Kansas City and began a lifelong hobby of making mix tapes. I used the advice of your reviewers Joel Vance, Alana Nash, Noel Coppege, and my personal favorite Steve Simels to form my evolving musical tastes. Your old issues probably mean a lot more to many folks than you might ever guess. If we could have all the old issues at our fingertips not only would it be a great historical preservation but a a wonderful reliving of times in our lives when it was an event to get the latest copy of your magazine. Please give my post to someone who may actually be able, and want, to make this happen.

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Throwback Thursday

Straight Steer on Stereo