The Modern Miracle Of Living Stereo

Fun fact: the film where recorded in mono :)

MVVblog

Sitting here listening to the sound of the video on my single-speaker Bose Bluetooth speaker. Never liked headphones, and so this has inspired me to get a couple of car speakers into some nice 3D printed cases and get back to that glorious stereo effect!

Peter Knazko

Thanks for sharing this! 50 years of playing stereo vinyl and I finally get how it works. My Dad had several Living Stereo records, as well as several of the Mercury "Living Presence" series, some of which he still has. Both, though especially Living Presence recordings, are still prized by audiophiles for their clarity and stereo imaging.

Fred Patton

HAHAHAHAHAH!!! Yes, like a Grommes... I think I burned my hand once...

After 50 years, I NOW understand ! Thank you Fran!

That is a neat video. 😀

Jessica McIntosh

Geez! "Available to everyone"? Everyone with a forklift and dedicated 20 amp fuse in their home's fuse panel. They somehow left out the part where the amplifiers also served as wonderful space heaters for any cold room. Well, we had to start somewhere! :-)

Matt Wietlispach

"Ceramic bars" *cringe* at the harsh shrill sound they produce. Admittedly my first record players used them , and even then (I was a 5-7 year old) I thought they sounded harsh. I have a few of the "Living Stereo records, I must go though and listen to the digitised versions.

Anton

Ok, well I've thrown my airpods in the bin, in favour of these compact and bijou 3 foot cubes. Now... where do I get the roundy orthophonic thingies with the 'canyons of sound' from?

Phil in the kitchen

I actually do own several Living Stereo records and they still sound amazing. They were recorded and cut on site with no dynamic cropping at all and even the most sophisticated turntables get to their limits when playing some of those LPs. After the cropping of dynamics due to insurance issues in the late 60s / early 70s, these records remained unique with their unmatched dynamic range for quite a long time. Living Stereo records were real stereo recordings and - even at that time, there existed stereophonic turntables, pre amps, amps and even headphones. Due to their quality, original records sometimes are almost impossible to be acquired and often cost their bit 😉

Super interesting, they must however had to play the same sound through both speakers just with more gain bias to one of the left or right channels to get the effect. I remember having a slider on my set that would alter the left right amplification bias. Logically there must have been a mono / stereo switch too to avoid any left/right gain adjustment on a mono track ... I don't remember ?

It'll never catch on!

David Peaker

I am just old enough to remember stereo coming in, I guess it was a great leap in disk technology to bring this to the masses.

Dr Andy Hill

I'm sold, where do I buy one as Amazon don't seem to stock them yet.

Leigh

at 1:44 they show a phono with what looks like a child's 45 cheapo tone arm...you'd think in this fancy promo they would have used something high end, I presume they had a moving coil and upgraded tone arms at that point. You can almost make out the cartrige flipper at the front of the arm, at least it looks like one. That would have held a ceramic medium fi cartrige

That was wonderful. Came of age in the '70s and was so proud when I got my first STERIO record player, the fold-up kind. And then began the nightmare of Columbia House Record Club.

Bill Kerr

You just don't appreciate what a huge advance this technology was, and really, continues to this day. And it's easy to see how the next big advance, 'In Living Color,' came from. The connections. Thanks Fran. This was enjoyable.

what year was this from ?

BiggieJohn

Ampex / micom wow and flutter meter holding up a mediocre sony for the tv room.

Nerdful Things

still have the best test equipment for 2 channel back then.. Sound Technology, micom.

Nerdful Things

into that a lot then, (quadraphonic) almost bought some of the test equipment to service it.

Nerdful Things

Please, show us the one for Quadraphonic vinyl! A very brief fad that was commercialized in the late 1960s and didn't last through the 1970s. The disk was still a stereo groove, but "matrix" encoding was used to permit 4 channels to be decoded from the 2 on the disk.

BobC

I can barely sit through a 30-second ad on YouTube, but this was terrific! Where would the consumer have seen this bit of marketing?

Ha! Loved it.

William Alsing

"a canyon of sound, where music is made" Such fun! I really like the animated Nipper at the end.

Eric Strathmeyer

I have spent hours watching Jam Handy videos... memories... Thanks for sharing!