Music and Sound with Steve Ember; 1980; Part 1

<v Steve Ember>The sound of high technology recording, capturing music with stunning fidelity. <v Steve Ember>Hello, this is Steve Ember, producer and host of Music and Sound. <v Steve Ember>The decade of the 80s. We'll see and hear some of the most exciting advances in bringing <v Steve Ember>the sound of music into the home with a realism that takes us ever closer to the actual <v Steve Ember>experience of live music. <v Steve Ember>The trend began with the various attempts by small record companies in the mid and late <v Steve Ember>1970s to produce a superior product for their audio file clientele by <v Steve Ember>such techniques, says direct to disc recording, greater care in manufacturing and most <v Steve Ember>recently digital mastering, combined with half speed cutting and imported pressings. <v Steve Ember>Recordings with sonic impact such as this one are bound to become more the norm for the <v Steve Ember>industry. The 80s will see digital recordings come of age as the process is picked <v Steve Ember>up by more and more major manufacturers and wider segments of the public become more <v Steve Ember>aware of quality sound. <v Steve Ember>Music and sound is a series of programs that explores the most significant advances in <v Steve Ember>the art and technology of recording.

<v Steve Ember>Each week we present a sampling of the best in recorded sound, including digital, <v Steve Ember>director-to-disc , DBX encoded recordings and other means of capturing the excitement <v Steve Ember>and dynamics of live music on records, as well as the best of today's Dolby encoded <v Steve Ember>open reel and cassette recordings and even some of the landmark 2 track open real <v Steve Ember>performances of the mid-1950s, which introduced stereo as a commercial reality <v Steve Ember>and home entertainment. In addition, we bring you informative audio topics discussions <v Steve Ember>with recognized authorities in the fields of music, professional recording and component <v Steve Ember>high fidelity. How does it all sound? <v Steve Ember>Well, here are some samples. <v Steve Ember>Well hello and a very pleasant good afternoon to you. <v Steve Ember>Welcome to our music and sounds for a Saturday afternoon. <v Steve Ember>I hope the absence of sunshine is going to make you more inclined to stay in by <v Steve Ember>your components because we have quite a listening experience plan for you today. <v Steve Ember>Our headliners, so to speak, will be Johann Sebastian Bach and the National Symphony <v Steve Ember>Orchestra. We'll be wrapping up a series of Bach presentations we've been running for <v Steve Ember>much of this month in honor of the composer's birthday anniversary.

<v Steve Ember>And if you've been with us, you know the quality of sound we've been presenting and the <v Steve Ember>excellent performances of the Brandenburg concertos on original instruments played by the <v Steve Ember>concertos musicais. And we're coming to a numbers five and six today from this open <v Steve Ember>reel tape set. We'll also have a concerto for flute by Bach, also <v Steve Ember>from an open reel tape, and the Bach Cantata. <v Steve Ember>As to the National Symphony Orchestra, one of our major works today is going to be the <v Steve Ember>newly released Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto performance by the NSO, conducted by <v Steve Ember>Mstislav Rostropovich with Isaac Stern as soloist. <v Steve Ember>We'll also be listening to a number of excellent recordings made by London Decca of the <v Steve Ember>National Symphony conducted by Antal Doráti. <v Steve Ember>And speaking of the National Symphony, Lewis Lipnick, the principal contrabassoonist of <v Steve Ember>the orchestra, is going to be my audio topics guest, along with recording engineer Chuck <v Steve Ember>Thompson of National Public Radio. <v Steve Ember>We're going to be talking about the esthetics of recording a symphony orchestra. <v Steve Ember>Those who know Lou Lipnick know that he is a rather outspoken gent, has some rather <v Steve Ember>strong opinions, but they are borne of a great deal of experience in playing music. <v Speaker>[music plays]

<v Steve Ember>Symphonic metamorphosis on themes by Carl Maria von Weber by Paul Hindemith <v Steve Ember>the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in that recording conducted by Rafael Kubelik. <v Steve Ember>The recording made in 1953 and it was of course, a monophonic recording. <v Steve Ember>But I'll tell you, listening to some of these early recordings by the Chicago Symphony <v Steve Ember>Orchestra, it is very easy to be misled into thinking you're listening to stereo. <v Steve Ember>I don't know just why this should be, because they're purely monophonic recordings. <v Steve Ember>But there is a great feeling of spaciousness when listening to them over two speakers. <v Steve Ember>Well, this was, I think, one of the best examples I could find for you of some of the <v Steve Ember>excellence of the monophonic LP era. <v Steve Ember>And Mercury was certainly one of the leaders during that period. <v Steve Ember>We're celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of Thomas Alva Edison's marvelous <v Steve Ember>invention this afternoon. <v Steve Ember>And we're going to continue with another landmark recording also from Mercury, <v Steve Ember>if he remember... The showpiece recording of the 1812 Overture by Peter <v Steve Ember>Illich Tchaikovsky. But Mercury came out with complete with, with live cannon.

<v Steve Ember>I mean, up until this time, the thing had been done with timpani and bass drum and all <v Steve Ember>the rest. But the mercury got rather ambitious when... <v Speaker>[music plays] <v Steve Ember>Well, I don't know if they quite got eight seconds of reverb time out of St. George's <v Steve Ember>Church in New York City, but it sounded rather close, didn't it? <v Steve Ember>That was the Canzon Noni Toni by Giovanni Gabrielli. <v Steve Ember>And we heard the Columbia Brass Ensemble Andrew Casden conducting <v Steve Ember>and one of the first recordings made in quadraphonic sound by Columbia in St. <v Steve Ember>George's Church in New York City, where they work to make in a couple of quad discs. <v Steve Ember>Boy, this takes me back. We've been doing this program for seven years. <v Steve Ember>We started in June of 1972 and quad came in in <v Steve Ember>October of that year and this was one of the first recordings we played on a Saturday <v Steve Ember>afternoon Columbia build at a quadraphonic sound spectacular.

<v Speaker>[music plays] <v Steve Ember>And that's one of my favorite ?targets?. That is my favorite of the Brandenburg <v Steve Ember>concertos, concise, tuneful, rather joyous. <v Steve Ember>The Concerto Number 3 in G Major BWV 10:48 heard as <v Steve Ember>it might have been heard. Were we able to take our ears back to Bach's days at the court <v Steve Ember>of curtain where he wrote these for the elector and this is the set <v Steve Ember>of Brandenburg Concerto played on the original instruments by the concertos musicais of <v Steve Ember>Vienna conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a recording that was released on disc <v Steve Ember>by telefunken, and telefunken and is one of the labels now being represented on Open reel <v Steve Ember>Dolby B encoded tapes by Barclay-Crocker. <v Speaker>[music plays] <v Steve Ember>Our program is consistently in the vanguard of presenting recordings embodying the latest <v Steve Ember>technological advances. Our listeners were the first in the Washington Baltimore area to <v Steve Ember>hear Dolby encoded open reel tapes and more recently, the better Dolby B cassettes.

<v Steve Ember>We were the first to air quadraphonicly encoded recordings and of course, the high <v Steve Ember>technology discs. Perhaps the most exciting advance to come out of the late 70s and <v Steve Ember>pointing the way to industry wide improvements in the 80s. <v Steve Ember>Ours was the first program to feature the exciting new DBX encoded disks, which for the <v Steve Ember>first time capture the full dynamics of live music and presented on record surfaces <v Steve Ember>virtually devoid of noise. <v Steve Ember>We visited project director Jerome Ruzicka at the DBX factory near Boston. <v Steve Ember>Jerry Ruzicka is also a musician and has recently produced digital recordings with Morton <v Steve Ember>Gould and the London Symphony Orchestra. <v Steve Ember>After a demonstration of the capabilities of this new disk medium, we sat down to discuss <v Steve Ember>the DBX technology, only to find that to fully appreciate the new process, one had to <v Steve Ember>go back to the various key developments since the dawn of the LP era. <v Steve Ember>And this we did for about two hours of taping out of which we gave our listeners a very <v Steve Ember>well-received month long series of audio topics covering the basic technology of

<v Steve Ember>recording live music and the many advances including tape noise reduction, <v Steve Ember>digital recording, half speed mastering, and the DBX encoding process that have brought <v Steve Ember>us so much closer to accurately capturing the sound of live music on the vinyl disc. <v Jerome Ruzicka>We discussed tonal balance or frequency response characteristic, spectral response. <v Jerome Ruzicka>The second area that, that comes to my mind is what I would call the <v Jerome Ruzicka>spatial perspective that we have on sound. <v Jerome Ruzicka>And this involves two factors as best as I can define it, <v Jerome Ruzicka>having to do with I'll call the geometric space factor or <v Jerome Ruzicka>the temporal factor has to do with it the geometry of <v Jerome Ruzicka>the actual environment involved in live performance as well as some of the temporal <v Jerome Ruzicka>or time consideration. <v Steve Ember>In other words, creating the feeling of the whole. <v Jerome Ruzicka>Exactly. So let's talk about maybe that the two major ingredients as I see it in the <v Jerome Ruzicka>spatial perspective issue. <v Jerome Ruzicka>The first one, let's talk about the geometry.

<v Jerome Ruzicka>This has to do, I think, with the breath of the sound. <v Jerome Ruzicka>And it to me, it connotes the existence in a live performance of a panorama of <v Jerome Ruzicka>sound, a panorama. And yet. <v Jerome Ruzicka>Having the ability to identify the positions of individual instruments. <v Jerome Ruzicka>So we were experiencing two things in real life and we're asking that they be reproduced <v Jerome Ruzicka>in a home that is I'd like to have that feeling of the panorama of sound, but also want <v Jerome Ruzicka>to be a localized individual instruments. <v Jerome Ruzicka>Over the years, there been some notable advances and let me see if I can't recount a <v Jerome Ruzicka>couple for you. Of course, the biggest when it comes to mind was about 25 years ago. <v Jerome Ruzicka>Wow, what a difference. Listening to monophonic sound and then all of a sudden having <v Jerome Ruzicka>the nicety of uh- of the two channel signal processing. <v Jerome Ruzicka>It's called stereo. And that, of course, was a- was a major is a quantum <v Jerome Ruzicka>step in terms of our perception our- our positive response <v Jerome Ruzicka>to the, to the characteristics of the spatial nature of music. <v Steve Ember>And there are some that would say that perhaps we should go back to some of that <v Steve Ember>classical stereo recording that involved two or at most three or four

<v Steve Ember>microphones rather than the spotlighting that we're getting in 32 channel recordings <v Steve Ember>of symphony orchestras. <v Jerome Ruzicka>I sort of share that philosophy, even <v Jerome Ruzicka>though I've got to admit that the business I'm in would be better served by selling <v Jerome Ruzicka>through two channels of certain kinds of equipment. <v Jerome Ruzicka>But I would say in the era of classical music, for example, when I've been involved <v Jerome Ruzicka>myself in producing some recordings. <v Jerome Ruzicka>I have favored a lower number of channels, <v Jerome Ruzicka>although perhaps I might like a large number of microphones for pickup. <v Jerome Ruzicka>But I personally kind of believe in the real time mix down to two channels that is make <v Jerome Ruzicka>your decision at that moment what sound quality you want in total balance and <v Jerome Ruzicka>store the information, wherever on tape what have you as opposed to piling <v Jerome Ruzicka>into 24 channels, 32 channels and coming back later on and making your decisions. <v Jerome Ruzicka>Of course, I think in the pop music area there, there could, there could be, there <v Jerome Ruzicka>in fact are definite reasons why I think the multi-channel approach makes sense. <v Steve Ember>Many of our conversations are recorded on location for added spontaneity and interest.

<v Steve Ember>Arnold Schwartz for many years had a disc cutting research at CBS and now president <v Steve Ember>of Micro Point and Micro Acoustics and Elmsford New York took us on a tour through the <v Steve Ember>processes of manufacturing cutting stylite for the recording industry and cartridges <v Steve Ember>to faithfully reproduce those intricate groove patterns. <v Steve Ember>Audio topics doesn't just introduce you to technical wizards. <v Steve Ember>We talked to some interesting music makers, such as conductor Frederick Finnell, with <v Steve Ember>whom we conversed at the time of the release of his digitally mastered recording with the <v Steve Ember>Cleveland symphonic winds of Gustav Holst's suites numbers 1 and 2 for military band, <v Steve Ember>a recording which set a new standard not only for stunning clarity but for extended low <v Steve Ember>bass reproduction on disc. <v Frederick Finnell>This is the regulation standard Cleveland Orchestra bass drum, <v Frederick Finnell>which is smaller than most of the 40 big 40 inch drums that you see <v Frederick Finnell>in a lot of other places. This is about a 38 inch bass drum and its two heads are <v Frederick Finnell>natural calf and they're fairly thick calf. <v Frederick Finnell>The drum was tuned by, I would say, about four of us.

<v Frederick Finnell>But I asked them, please, to use my own beater, which I carry with me <v Frederick Finnell>everywhere I go. And it's a- it's a large, uh it's, it's a <v Frederick Finnell>19 inch long bamboo handle. <v Frederick Finnell>Affixed to a round two inch furniture ball, <v Frederick Finnell>a maple furniture ball, and the hole in the furniture ball where you use that <v Frederick Finnell>to screw down when you're making bookcases, you know, you can pile separators <v Frederick Finnell>on top of separators and shelves. And then you screw the one down on the top. <v Frederick Finnell>That and two tubes of epoxy glue to make sure that the handle is never going to fly off <v Frederick Finnell>the thing. And two layers of ordinary automobile <v Frederick Finnell>cleaning shammy, drawn down over the top of this <v Frederick Finnell>thing so as to slightly take away the textural impact <v Frederick Finnell>of wood against skin, get skin against skin this way <v Frederick Finnell>and struck directly, no glancing blows

<v Frederick Finnell>and with, with power and with force and with weight. <v Steve Ember>The question now is how did they capture it with such visceral impact on this disc? <v Steve Ember>Obviously, there could have been a special miking technique because there are only three <v Steve Ember>mikes for the-. <v Frederick Finnell>No miking, no special miking technique except Stan Ridker, who was at <v Frederick Finnell>this session and was one of those unique things that when you can have a session where <v Frederick Finnell>everybody who has anything whatsoever to do with the production of the record is there <v Frederick Finnell>for it. Stan was there for this recording session. <v Frederick Finnell>He's a bass drum nut, too. <v Frederick Finnell>One of my favorite mad people. <v Frederick Finnell>And he suggested that the bass drum, the <v Frederick Finnell>two heads which vibrate in tandem with each other. <v Frederick Finnell>Must vibrate directly at the diaphragm of the microphone. <v Speaker>[music plays] <v Steve Ember>As recorded software improves, dedicated concert music broadcasters must be on their toes

<v Steve Ember>to transmit these more demanding recordings with maximum fidelity. <v Steve Ember>We've had discussions addressing the FM broadcast, medium signal processing, Dolby <v Steve Ember>F.M. and various methods of maximizing reception quality. <v Steve Ember>One of our audio topics guests for discussing FM is John Riser of the Broadcast Bureau <v Steve Ember>of the Federal Communications Commission. <v Steve Ember>We realize not everyone in our audience is a dedicated audiophile and we never lose sight <v Steve Ember>of the fact that the technology exists in service to the music. <v Steve Ember>Each year at Christmas time, we offer a beginners course in audio for those who might be <v Steve Ember>getting into component high Fidelity for the first time. <v Steve Ember>Our last audio topics roundtable was a discussion with three of Washington's most <v Steve Ember>respected audio men representing a group of quality audio stores. <v Steve Ember>An independent dealer and a specialty shop. <v Speaker>You're not dealing with a cabinet where everything is in one piece <v Speaker>and usually the cabinet is very large. <v Speaker>You have complete flexibility of these uh, pieces. <v Speaker>It's much easier to get service on separate components, the

<v Speaker>consumer no longer has to rely on somebody coming to their home. <v Speaker>It's very easy just to take it into a shop and get it repaired. <v Speaker>It cuts down on the cost and certainly, cuts down on the time. <v Steve Ember>And I guess we might add also that it facilitates upgrading. <v Steve Ember>If the bug should bite and you become a hobbyist as well as a music lover, you can always <v Steve Ember>trade up a particular component without disturbing the rest of the system. <v Speaker>Yes. And one advantage of that is that you can do it piecemeal so that if you're <v Speaker>interested in a larger stereo system, you don't have that tremendous <v Speaker>expense all over again. <v Speaker>You could replace either the speakers or the receiver or your turntable <v Speaker>selectively. And most people upgrade this way over <v Speaker>it. You can continuously upgrade actually over a period of years. <v Speaker>Once people, as you said, are bitten by the bug, once they realize that there is <v Speaker>better sound available, there is a tendency to people, for people to move <v Speaker>up, move into better equipment.

<v Speaker>And indeed, you can step up using a component system much more easily than you <v Speaker>can with a uh, a console. <v Steve Ember>Last year at this time, Mike, we talked about the fact that over the years a system in <v Steve Ember>a given price range has become better and better because of technological progress. <v Steve Ember>And we have features and performance formerly found in top line components, finding its <v Steve Ember>way to the medium and lower priced units. <v Steve Ember>But at the same time, we've seen the dollar shrinking in comparison to currencies in the <v Steve Ember>countries where most of our component equipment comes from. <v Steve Ember>Are we at least uh, holding even with the inflation in terms of how much performance a <v Steve Ember>given dollar amount buys in 1979? <v Mike>Well, due to technology uh, high technology of today's electronics <v Mike>acoustical engineering each year, it seems that we get more <v Mike>sound quality for the money we spent last year <v Mike>so that we have the reverse. <v Steve Ember>We welcome questions from listeners and keep them on file to present to the appropriate <v Steve Ember>audio topics guest.

<v Steve Ember>Some of the other sound matters we've addressed in our audio topic series have included <v Steve Ember>Speaker Design with John Hayes of England's I.M.F. <v Steve Ember>Electronics, Moving Coil and Moving Magnet Phono Cartridge Designs with Bob Goodman <v Steve Ember>of ortofon, tape recording and psycho acoustic phenomena with recording engineer John <v Steve Ember>Warren and all manner of other areas of interest to music lovers and audiophiles. <v Steve Ember>We visit the trade shows to be abreast of the latest developments and keep in touch with <v Steve Ember>such respected industry observers as Burt White and Lin Feldman. <v Speaker>We're seeing something by way of digital time delay. <v Speaker>I'm sure you're familiar with this is, I think, the alternative to what we thought would <v Speaker>be the way to handle the ambience of the concert hall, which was quadraphonic sound. <v Steve Ember>I've heard a lot of people say that that is just about as convincing. <v Steve Ember>Listening to a stereo recording over this digital delay system as listening to a quad <v Steve Ember>recording through the appropriate decoder. <v Steve Ember>Would you agree? <v Speaker>Yeah, I would agree if the objective of quad was to have been what many of us thought <v Speaker>it was, and that was the recreation of the feeling of being present at the concert hall. <v Speaker>I think one of the things that confused the quad issue is that once the engineers, the

<v Speaker>recording engineers were given four channels with which to work, they went crazy <v Speaker>and they started putting instruments behind. <v Steve Ember>Not all of our discussions involve the state of the art. <v Steve Ember>We've talked to some rather interesting audio pioneers whose work was in the vanguard of <v Steve Ember>recording and broadcasting in years past. <v Steve Ember>One such guest was Joel Tul, who has served for many years as a tape editor at CBS. <v Steve Ember>Working with such figures as Edward R. Murrow and who invented something so basic to <v Steve Ember>recording as to often be taken for granted. <v Steve Ember>The Editall splicing block. <v Edward R. Murrow>It's important in a splicing block that it become an addition to your fingers <v Edward R. Murrow>that you don't think about it. And this certainly relieved me of an awful lot of work. <v Edward R. Murrow>I was able to do much more work without thinking of splicing, you see. <v Steve Ember>The beauty of a good and repeatable splice is that the listener, for all intents and <v Steve Ember>purpose, is not aware that anything has been cut and joined. <v Edward R. Murrow>Well, if the splicing has been correctly done, you see, I have to keep telling people, <v Edward R. Murrow>and it seems I've been doing it for many years. <v Edward R. Murrow>The first series of articles I wrote about tape recording

<v Edward R. Murrow>and tape editing, I wrote for audio engineering <v Edward R. Murrow>and it began in May 1950. <v Edward R. Murrow>And I kept on telling people that it's not the splicing that really matters <v Edward R. Murrow>too much, except that it should be a good tight splice with no space between. <v Edward R. Murrow>But it's knowing where to cut the tape that counts. <v Edward R. Murrow>And that's what separates the men from the boys every time. <v Steve Ember>It's what goes on up- upstairs rather than at- where the fingers meet. <v Edward R. Murrow>It's what you know, it's what you know about if you're cutting voice. <v Edward R. Murrow>It's what you know about language, grammar, phonetics, <v Edward R. Murrow>hearing, speech, acoustics. <v Speaker>[music plays] <v Steve Ember>One of the very intriguing areas we explore in audio topics is attaining a spatial <v Steve Ember>realism that goes beyond stereo. <v Steve Ember>Many say quadraphonic sound is dead, that it was nothing more than a gimmick, an industry <v Steve Ember>hype to sell more loudspeakers. <v Steve Ember>Yet we still have some dedicated individuals and groups conducting ongoing research into

<v Steve Ember>ways of bringing us heightened realism and sound beyond the two dimensionality of stereo. <v Steve Ember>Digital delay units provide the ability to make our listening environment that of a <v Steve Ember>concert hall, a great cathedral, or a small jazz club. <v Steve Ember>Binaural recording is being done, which when listen to it via headphones, puts us into <v Steve Ember>the environment of the actual recording because the two microphones were placed in the <v Steve Ember>same relationship to one another as our own ears. <v Steve Ember>For the diehard Quadro file there are still Matrixx discs to be found as well as discrete <v Steve Ember>four channel tapes. An exciting new pre amplifier has come on the market, which is able <v Steve Ember>to create a three dimensional sound field from conventional stereo recordings. <v Steve Ember>And if that weren't intriguing enough, recording engineer John Warren demonstrated for us <v Steve Ember>an innocent-looking black box from Japan that produces very convincing surround sound <v Steve Ember>from two channels sources without the benefit of rear speakers. <v John Warren>Binaural recordings have been restricted up until now because you must listen to them <v John Warren>back through headphones to get the effect. If you do, they're spectacular. <v John Warren>It's like nothing you've ever heard before, but most people still like

<v John Warren>loudspeakers for most of their listening while the people at JVC even scratching <v John Warren>their heads about this for a long time and they've developed what they call a <v John Warren>biphonic processor. <v John Warren>And this little box goes into your stereo system. <v John Warren>And when you playback a recording that was made with one of these dummy heads <v John Warren>through the biphonic processor, you can recreate some of that by an aural effect. <v John Warren>It's not perfect. It's not like listening through headphones. <v John Warren>But you will find that if you make a recording using a dummy head when you switch <v John Warren>this biphonic processor in, you do in fact get the illusion that somebody <v John Warren>is behind you, it's not totally perfect as it would be in real life or over headphones. <v John Warren>But it does work and it's very impressive. <v Steve Ember>You hoodwinked me electronically this afternoon playing [John Warren: yes] well, of <v Steve Ember>course, you have a quadraphonically equipped room here. <v Steve Ember>And I forgot for the time being that the tape you were playing was being played on a two <v Steve Ember>channel deck. And I could have sworn there were sounds coming in those rear speakers <v Steve Ember>until you showed me that the rear amplifier was dead as could be.

<v John Warren>Yeah. That's one of our favorite parlor tricks. <v John Warren>I had first heard this demonstration myself at the Acoustic Research Lab of Technique's, <v John Warren>which is a division of Panasonic in Osaka, Japan. <v John Warren>And I walked into this room and they played this tape for me. <v John Warren>And I should say that it's four- it starts off with four spoken <v John Warren>commentaries in four languages. And they said, where is the German and the Japanese <v John Warren>voices is coming from. And I said, well, back there and back there, pointing behind me. <v John Warren>I looked around behind me and there was nothing there at all. <v John Warren>The only two speakers were in front of me, and it's a little bit of psycho acoustic. <v John Warren>I wish I could explain it satisfactorily. According to my theory, it doesn't work, but we <v John Warren>both heard it and it does work. And it's quite effective. <v Steve Ember>And no less respected an organization than the British Broadcasting Corporation has been <v Steve Ember>conducting experiments with an intriguing new system of microphone pick up and recording <v Steve Ember>known as Ambisonic's, which when the individual tape tracks are mixed in different <v Steve Ember>combinations, can create all manner of spatial re-creation, including height. <v Steve Ember>One of our audio topics guests recently was John Hayes, executive director of the British

<v Steve Ember>firm of I.M.F. Electronics, which has been working closely along with the BBC and <v Steve Ember>other research groups at refining this process. <v John Hayes>An ambisonic recording or transmission played correctly <v John Hayes>on systems such as you described is almost uncanny. <v John Hayes>The realism that it produces, if you, for instance, <v John Hayes>as we have put a microphone in the second row of the stalls at the festival hall in <v John Hayes>London um, at the height of a normal person's <v John Hayes>head when replayed the realism <v John Hayes>of being in that hole and having done it myself, the experience is quite <v John Hayes>absolutely shattering. You believe you're sitting there if you shut your eyes. <v John Hayes>It sounds as though you were there listening to the original sound. <v Steve Ember>Yes. The 80s will be an exciting decade for audio with developments that will bring the <v Steve Ember>concert hall into the home with a degree of realism, we can only just begin to imagine. <v Steve Ember>Today's audiophile recordings are likely to become tomorrow's industry standard.

<v Steve Ember>And who can really say what new advances are on the way? <v Steve Ember>One thing we can promise you is an ongoing showcase of disks and tapes exploring <v Steve Ember>the outer limits of sound reproduction and informative conversations with the individuals <v Steve Ember>who make this such a challenging and rewarding field. <v Steve Ember>Let us put your listeners in the vanguard of all the exciting developments in recording <v Steve Ember>art and technology for the 80s with music and sound. <v Steve Ember>We'll open your ears.