Stereo records made by Duke Ellington in 1932 are your Phantom Dancer feature artist this week.

The Phantom Dancer is your weekly non-stop mix of swing and jazz from live 1920s-60s radio and TV every week.

LISTEN to this week’s Phantom Dancer mix (online after 2pm AEST, Tuesday 27 May and weeks of Phantom Dancer mixes online at, at https://2ser.com/phantom-dancer/

19th CENTURY STEREO

Clément Ader demonstrated the first two-channel audio system in Paris in 1881, with a series of telephone transmitters connected from the stage of the Paris Opera to a suite of rooms at the Paris Electrical Exhibition, where listeners could hear a live transmission of performances through receivers for each ear. Scientific American reported:

“Every one who has been fortunate enough to hear the telephones at the Palais de l’Industrie has remarked that, in listening with both ears at the two telephones, the sound takes a special character of relief and localization which a single receiver cannot produce… This phenomenon is very curious, it approximates to the theory of binauricular audition, and has never been applied, we believe, before to produce this remarkable illusion to which may almost be given the name of auditive perspective.”

This two-channel telephonic process was commercialized in France from 1890 to 1932 as the Théâtrophone, and in England from 1895 to 1925 as the Electrophone. Both were services available by coin-operated receivers at hotels and cafés, or by subscription to private homes.

ELLINGTON 1932 STEREO RECORDS

There have been cases in which two recording lathes (for the sake of producing two simultaneous masters) were fed from two separate microphones; when both masters survive, modern engineers have been able to synchronise them to produce stereo recordings from a time before intentional stereophonic recording technology existed.

One such case is what we hear on today’s Phantom Dancer, the left and right stereo discs synchronised in 1984 by record collectors, Brad Kay and Steven Lasker.

Here’s another example from 1901!…

MODERN STEREO

Modern stereophonic technology was invented in the 1930s by British engineer Alan Blumlein at EMI, who patented stereo records, stereo films, and also surround sound. In early 1931, Blumlein and his wife were at a local cinema. The sound reproduction systems of the early talkies invariably only had a single set of speakers – which could lead to the somewhat disconcerting effect of the actor being on one side of the screen whilst his voice appeared to come from the other. Blumlein declared to his wife that he had found a way to make the sound follow the actor across the screen. The genesis of these ideas is uncertain, but he explained them to Isaac Shoenberg in the late summer of 1931. His earliest notes on the subject are dated 25 September 1931, and his patent had the title “Improvements in and relating to Sound-transmission, Sound-recording and Sound-reproducing Systems”. The application was dated 14 December 1931, and was accepted on 14 June 1933 as UK patent number 394,325. The patent covered many ideas in stereo, some of which are used today and some not. Some 70 claims include:

– A shuffling circuit, which aimed to preserve the directional effect when sound from a spaced pair of microphones was reproduced via stereo headphones instead of a pair of loudspeakers;
– The use of a coincident pair of velocity microphones with their axes at right angles to each other, which is still known as a Blumlein pair;
– Recording two channels in the single groove of a record using the two groove walls at right angles to each other and 45 degrees to the vertical;
– A stereo disc-cutting head;
– Using hybrid transformers to matrix between left and right signals and sum and difference signals.

Blumlein began binaural experiments as early as 1933, and the first stereo discs were cut later the same year, twenty-five years before that method became the standard for stereo phonograph discs. These discs used the two walls of the groove at right angles in order to carry the two channels. In 1934, Blumlein recorded Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham at Abbey Road Studios in London using his vertical-lateral technique.[7] Much of the development work on this system for cinematic use did not reach completion until 1935. In Blumlein’s short test films (most notably, “Trains at Hayes Station”, which lasts 5 minutes 11 seconds, and, “The Walking & Talking Film”), his original intent of having the sound follow the actor was fully realised.

During WW2, Reichrundfunk in Berlin broadcast Stereo concerts…

27 May PLAY LIST