History's Dumpster = GLORIOUS trash! Kitsch, music, fashion, food, history, ephemera, and other memorable and forgotten, famous and infamous pop culture junk and oddities of yesterday and today. Saved from the landfill of time...
It looked like a gorgeous (artificial) fireplace.....
.....that turns into an awesome stereo/liquor cabinet.
The Phono-Sonic Liquor Cabinet/Stereo w/ artificial fireplace is one of the coolest designs ever for a console stereo. Surprisingly, it was also made and imported from communist East Germany for the American market. Like the Soundesign Trendsetter, they are extremely rare in good condition.
They originally came with 3 speed turntables (33/45/78 RPM) AM/FM Stereo receivers and 8-Track tape decks, but cassette decks were added in the late '70s. The speakers were enclosed behind the red velvet and latticework on either side of the fireplace. The cheese points are off the scale with this one!
Remember Microcassettes? They were a dictation medium (but so was the original compact cassette) Invented in 1969 by Olympus as the standard cassette started gaining traction as a popular music medium.
For a spell in the early '80s, Sony actually tried to make them as close to a serious audio medium as they could (as they did with the standard cassette.) Including stereo sound and Metal tape formulation microcassettes.
The Microcassette Walkman even included a very rare microcassette version of the FM Tuner cassettes made for standard cassette personal stereos.
They failed. Obviously. Because no matter what they did, an analog tape rolling at 15/16th inches per second will never sound very good no matter what kind of tape you use (cassettes used 1 7/8 IPS, 8-Tracks 3 3/4 IPS)
In modern digital, It's like the sound of a 32 kbps MP3 to a 320 kbps MP3.
And secondly, people kept LOSING the handful of prerecorded albums on these tapes that were made for the Japanese market.
The Microcassette never went further into general use beyond dictation and in telephone answering machines. They have since been replaced by digital recorders.
Competing with the Microcassette (yes, it did have competing formats), was the Minicassette (developed in 1967 by Phillips) and the even tinier Picocassette (1985 by Dictaphone.)
In my years of record collecting, one thing is guaranteed.
Somewhere, somebody will tell me "Oh, I have an original rare Elvis record. Wanna see it?" I usually do. Because this may come as a surprise to a lot of people, but many, if not most Elvis records really aren't that valuable.
They're everywhere. There are very few truly rare recordings of his that are not available in his other albums. They have also been reissued and altered in so many ways, it's very hard even for a lot of collectors to discern what is a truly valuable Elvis album and one that isn't. And all of his RCA albums sold millions.
Usually unless the label is Sun, or a first pressing, a test or promo pressing, a Quadraphonic release, coloured vinyl or foreign copy or a very special pressing (and your blue vinyl copy of "Moody Blue" isn't one of them. Sorry.) - all still shrink wrapped. the chances are slim it's worth a lot of money. Condition of the jacket and inner sleeve matters as much as the condition of the record itself. And 99% of the time, I'm shown a disappointment.
Especially Elvis' Christmas Album. I lost count of how many people have shown me their '70s Pickwick issues of this album, thinking it's worth thousands.
I know deep down, they truly mean well and it's an old record. And it's Elvis. But if you really want a test in the art of diplomacy, try as hard as you can to let them down easy. I might as well have insulted their mothers by the way they react. (Because often, it was their deceased mother's copy.)
So I try to explain how they are confusing sentimental value with actual monetary value. And it then becomes something Freud himself would give up on.
But I know how finicky serious collectors are. And they have no time for that stuff. But not everyone is a serious collector. Just a clean, scratch free copy will do.
So here's a quick and visual primer on Elvis' Christmas Album. Starting with the actual 1957 edition. Find a 1st pressing in a Still Sealed or Near Mint condition everything and I'll show you something that may be worth a hundred. $1,000 records of any artist are SUPER rare.
Original 1957 copies of this album were in mono (not "electronically
reprocessed" fake stereo) and came in a deluxe package with a photo
album.
The cover artwork was changed for the 1958 reissue. The photo album was no longer included in the package.
Pay attention. Can you spot the differences in the front cover of the 1958 reissue above and the 1964 reissue below?
The 1964 reissue
Back of 1964 reissue cover
(Fake Stereo 1964 version)
And here's the ugly truth: Most reissues from this point on were made in this crappy unbalanced echo chamber of fake stereo. Which hearing this through quality headphones is like hearing "Blue Christmas" in a wind tunnel. All the Pickwick reissues were made off the fake stereo masters.
The cover artwork was changed again for the 1970 RCA Camden budget release.
On this version, there's a different track listing with the more religious songs missing or replaced.
RCA turned over it's Camden line to Pickwick in 1974. On the 1976 Pickwick reissue, the cover art changed AGAIN.)
And with another alternate track listing.....
After Presley died, RCA ended it's licensing agreement with Pickwick. But did not reissue the album again until 1985 for Elvis's 50th Anniversary series. Digitally remastered. With the original artwork and photo album. On green vinyl and original track listing restored.
Subsequent CD/Tape/Vinyl releases had OTHER alternate covers and track listings. It's one of the most blatantly commercialized Christmas albums out there and it's pretty much flotsam and jetsam. Just different packages for more or less the same thing.
When audio recording began, there was only one sound source (monaural or "mono"). The horn of a cylinder or gramophone record player. And all was well. For most people.
For others, something was missing.
You see, the epitome of a perfect recording is not just an incredibly good performance artistically, but also how lifelike it sounds.
The first is actually easier to achieve than the latter. The most lifelike sounding and the very best artistic recording rarely come together. Even today.
The very first experiments in binaural reproduction (an early form of stereo) go back as early as 1881 (no joke!) At a theater in Paris. The sound was transmitted through two telephone wires to special headsets that received the audio. This was used in hotel rooms and by special subscription service. But it didn't garner much attention, simply because the tinny headsets and 19th century telephone line quality audio was so bad.
An early two-channel playback system,
developed and sold in the early 1900s, used a two-channel
phonograph cylinder and two mechanical pickups and horns. But it really didn't sound good and the early recordings themselves have been lost to time. To make stereo sound acceptable on a commercial scale, vast improvements in monaural audio fidelity would have to be achieved.
Here's another early attempt at stereo, it's mono, but used a delay effect.
Enter radio.
There were experiments in stereo broadcasting going back to the early '20s. They utilized two radio station frequencies, two radio receivers (VERY rare in most homes of that time) and a special headset that connected into the outputs of both radios and at a time when most earliest commercial radio stations were very competitive, very hard for stations themselves to negotiate (the earliest duopolies of stations didn't happen until the late 1920s.) But again, this was early 1920's AM radio fidelity, while still an enormous leap from the telephone lines of 1881, still had it's own problems. including skywave interference from distant stations, hetrodyne squeal, harmonics from nearby stations and electrical interference.
However, recording had moved from acoustic recording horns to electrical microphones and reproducers. With the dramatic improvements in recording fidelity, the idea of stereo recording was again revisited. In the early 1930s, Bell Labs and RCA Victor made experiments in hi-fi and stereo recording, independent of each other.
Here's an early RCA Victor Mono Hi-Fi recording session with The Paul Whitman Orchestra in 1933.
Here's a VERY early experimental single groove stereo recording made by Bell Labs in 1934
Magnetic tape was also being developed. The first magnetic recordings were made in 1898 on steel wire and the first magnetic tape was invented in 1928. For the most part, they were merely experimental, first because the lengths of wire or tape needed to make reasonable quality recordings were astronomically long. Second, the tapes were made of steel or paper backed magnetic tape, making them prone to breakage. It wasn't until the mid 1930s when German scientists developed the first successful hi-fi tape recordings and it was initially used for Nazi radio broadcasts.
The very first Stereo system offered to consumers was reel to reel tape in the mid 1950s. But they found limited acceptance. Reel tape was awkward, bulky and expensive. Most records however remained monaural - except for a few made by Cook Laboratories. These records were binaural. as mentioned earlier and used headphones instead of speakers for the best reproduction.
They also used two grooves with two cartridges and pickups
Single groove full stereo records were finally perfected by 1957 and were sold by 1958. They were an instant sensation. But there were still millions of monaural record players and the heavier tone arms would ruin a stereo record. So record companies made records in both Stereo and Monaural (aka "Mono") versions until 1968.
Stereo radio was also being developed. First using a revival of the AM/AM experiment of the 1920s. When FM was established in the 1950s, AM/FM radio combos experimented with using FM for the left channel and AM for the right.
Yes, there were actually tuner components that allowed you to hear FM on the left channel and AM on the right. This crude form of stereo radio was obsolete by 1961 when multiplex FM Stereo was invented.....
Stereo sound is great. And when it's recorded with care, it can be breathtaking in it's own sense of realism. But you're still only getting what's coming from the front of you. Not the ambiance from the rear as you would in an actual live performance. In the early days of stereo recording, most of the early stereo recordings tried to emphasize the stereo ping-pong, left to right, right to left sound, which is fine if you weren't particular with the realism of sound, just the physical effect of stereo sound. Something to show off your fancy new stereo and what it can basically do to your friends.
Many early stereo studio recordings (especially those early stereo records from the late '50s and early '60s) were deliberately mixed to highlight these effects. But most pop/rock recordings were originally mixed in mono and later run through a gamut of fake stereo enhancements (echo chamber, reverb, vocals on one channel, instrumentation on the other) instead of going back to the original multitrack studio tapes - if available, and creating a true stereo mix. If it couldn't be done, and in most cases regardless in my opinion, it should have been left alone. It wasn't until the mid '60s when true stereo mixes of pop/rock albums became the norm. The technology and science of stereo recording was improving
And then came Quadraphonic.
Quadraphonic was first used as far back as 1953 (using 4 track tape) in Europe and introduced to the American market by the Vanguard Recording Society in June 1969. Then RCA followed with a Quadraphonic 8-Track tape
In the early 1970s the very first Quadraphonic LPs came out. But there was a problem. There was no uniformly compatible system for making Quad LPs. There were three incompatible systems SQ (developed by CBS Records), CD-4 (developed by RCA, no relation to Compact Discs, which wouldn't be invented for another 10 years) and QS (developed by Sansui).
This created a lot of confusion. And the government wasn't willing to step in and saw this solely as a civil matter beyond their authority (which would be repeated for AM Stereo in the '80s. But what made AM Stereo different was it was a form of radio transmission and that usually automatically falls under government jurisdiction.)
But it was the consumer that suffered the most. Because most labels allied with one system of Quad or the other. For example, if you liked Santana and had an SQ Quad system, you were in luck. Santana was a Columbia artist then and Columbia used SQ exclusively. However, if you also liked The Doors, you were toast. Elektra used the CD-4 Quad system and while those records will play on an SQ system, you won't get Quad sound (and the basic stereo separation of a CD-4 Quad record was not very good on an SQ Quad system. Or even a basic stereo.
Click to enlarge and read
There was no true winning system in the Quad war. But it seemed like SQ had far more advantages than CD-4. SQ used creative phasing, while CD-4 Quad records required a special stylus and since the system was encoded using something very similar to how FM Stereo radio is encoded at a very high inaudible frequency. So there was a serious record wear problem. If the portion of the groove where the frequency was encoded was worn, the Quad separation of the CD-4 Quad record was gone as well.
And what about Sansui's QS system? I don't have any personal experience with QS, but I have heard it said the QS system was very similar to SQ.
And like the early stereo recordings, studio engineers of the time were eager to utilize all four channels sonically in every way possible. Including putting each instrument on it's own channel. They had to. You see, most recording studios are acoustically dead places, so there was no way to capture the ambiance of a live recording. They could add artificial reverb and echo to the rear channels (as with the early fake stereo records), but it would sound AWFUL if played on a conventional stereo. So most didn't. I say most because I have heard some REAL atrocities in Quad.
Usually the very best sounding Quad albums were the classical albums recorded specifically in Quad.. They captured the sense of depth and space far better than most pop or rock albums.
Click to enlarge and read
The Quad fad had pretty much died out by 1978. Mostly out of consumer exasperation with the competing systems. But also the extra baggage of two extra speakers. But multiple-channel sound was revived by Dolby for use in movie theaters in the late 1980s
Today, the children of Quad, the DTS and Dolby Surround systems are used in home theater setups and even as a limited edition CD/DVD series - AGAIN with competing and incompatible systems, SACD and DVD Audio. They were introduced in the early 2000s. But like the Quad LPs of the '70s, they too have largely vanished due to consumer frustration as well as indifference.
