Electronically re-recorded to simulate stereo

[kap'n krunch]

Some of you QQ brethren have probably seen that I like to go to Thrift shops every once in a while and have gotten quite lucky with the exceptionally clean and minty Classical LPs I have gotten, hell I just sold this Vivaldi Digitally recorded LP for $16 and it cost me..80 cents!
ANYWAYYY...
I got this Ray Conniff greatest hits , which ALSO turned out to be almost MINT and the first song, "S'wonderful" is stated as "Electronically RE-RECORDED to simulate stereo"....now, we are talking early 70s here and technology was not extremely advanced...The thing is that , IIRC , the main trick to do this fake stereo was to boost the high freq on one side and cut it on the other,
BUT
This one is HIGHLY advanced for its time cause BOTH channels sound like they have the full frequency spectrum and separation sounds...perfect! ..Now, I don't know if they actually meant that they actually MIXED it from what I am guessing were two track recordings but bear with me...the brass section sounds very discrete...IIRC , frequency separation would have made the "panning"quite obvious and the rhythm section stays anchored in the middle...
I have both the original Mono LP and the Greatest Hits, and here is the GH...it's the first song...let me know your theories... (ooooohhh; I remember those bouffant hairdos from when I was a kid...where does time go???)

 

[key_wiz]

Some of you QQ brethren have probably seen that I like to go to Thrift shops every once in a while and have gotten quite lucky with the exceptionally clean and minty Classical LPs I have gotten, hell I just sold this Vivaldi Digitally recorded LP for $16 and it cost me..80 cents!
ANYWAYYY...
I got this Ray Conniff greatest hits , which ALSO turned out to be almost MINT and the first song, "S'wonderful" is stated as "Electronically RE-RECORDED to simulate stereo"....now, we are talking early 70s here and technology was not extremely advanced...The thing is that , IIRC , the main trick to do this fake stereo was to boost the high freq on one side and cut it on the other,
BUT
This one is HIGHLY advanced for its time cause BOTH channels sound like they have the full frequency spectrum and separation sounds...perfect! ..Now, I don't know if they actually meant that they actually MIXED it from what I am guessing were two track recordings but bear with me...the brass section sounds very discrete...IIRC , frequency separation would have made the "panning"quite obvious and the rhythm section stays anchored in the middle...
I have both the original Mono LP and the Greatest Hits, and here is the GH...it's the first song...let me know your theories... (ooooohhh; I remember those bouffant hairdos from when I was a kid...where does time go???)

that's clearly a true stereo mix to my ears.

The original was recorded at Columbia's 30th Street studio in 1956, where 3 track recordings like "Kind of Blue" were later made. What year did they install the first 3 track deck?

Perhaps since this is a GH package, the original release was mono from 3 track and they really meant to say "remixed" rather than "rerecorded"? Or didn't think that consumers at the time would know what a "remix" meant? The word 'simulate' certainly seems odd, but at this point I'm more likely to believe the album was mis-labled rather than this is some sort of stereo 'simulation'.

 

[key_wiz]

Trying to do a bit of online research (this historical stuff fascinates me) and the mystery only deepens! lol

According to Ray Conniff's website, S'Wonderful was recorded June 15, 1956. Notes on the page that read as recent comments by the webmaster (not someone who was present for the recording -- but I could be wrong. I don't know who "Doug" is) say the recording was in mono. But perhaps he really meant the released LP was mono?

The sound is a bit more primitive than on later albums, perhaps due to the fact that it was recorded in mono. By the time Ray released his first stereo Lp, 's Awful Nice in 1958, the sound was much more polished.


And the page also makes references to "mixing" and adding echo to previously recorded tapes, so at the very least they were bouncing stuff onto different tape machines.

When some months later in February or March 1956 Mitch asked me to do ten more tunes in order to have an album of 12 tracks, I insisted that we get the same engineer, Fred Plaut, who recorded "Begin the Beguine" and "Stardust" because it had a good sound on that single.

So we got Fred and Ernest Chapman and we taped the ten new songs, and then we went to mix them. Here I asked Fred, "what happened?" We had a great echo on the first two tunes and now there was no echo at all on the ten other tracks. So, Fred saw I was unhappy and he said to me, "Why? Would you like to add echo to the tape?" and I said "Yes, could we do that?"

So we went to Columbia Building at 799th Seventh Avenue 52nd Street corner New York and we sent the original sound recorded in the 30th Street studio through a speaker on the bottom of the stairwell area. We put a microphone on the 6th floor of that Columbia building. Then we taped that and we added that echo-sound recording to the original tape. So it was a stairwell echo! So we re-echoed the whole 's Wonderful album with the exception of "Begin the Beguine" and "Stardust" which were yet ok. And we had a better quality. That sound... great!

https://www.rayconniff.info/discography/original/s-Wonderful
Trying to find when Columbia installed their 3-track recorders at 30th St, but I can't. The closest I can find is this paragraph on a 'history of Columbia' webpage.

Although Columbia began recording in stereo in 1956, stereo LPs did not begin to be manufactured until 1958. One of Columbia's first stereo releases was an abridged and re-structured performance of Handel's Messiah by the New York Philharmonic and the Westminster Choir conducted by Leonard Bernstein (recorded on December 31, 1956, on 1⁄2-inch tape, using an Ampex 300-3 machine).

https://www.zippia.com/columbia-records-careers-1578061/history/
The Bernstein recording was done at Carnegie Hall, but it does show that they had the 3 track recorder as early as late 1956, and maybe were recording onto 2-track before then.

 

[key_wiz]

Also sounds to me as if the horns/vocals that are in the right speaker are echo'd in the left speaker. That might be the 're-recorded' bit they are talking about.

They don't seem to have quite that same slap-back effect on the original mono

 

[kap'n krunch]

that's clearly a true stereo mix to my ears.

The original was recorded at Columbia's 30th Street studio in 1956, where 3 track recordings like "Kind of Blue" were later made. What year did they install the first 3 track deck?

Perhaps since this is a GH package, the original release was mono from 3 track and they really meant to say "remixed" rather than "rerecorded"? Or didn't think that consumers at the time would know what a "remix" meant? The word 'simulate' certainly seems odd, but at this point I'm more likely to believe the album was mis-labled rather than this is some sort of stereo 'simulation'.

thank you so much for your extremely informative posts and that's why I thought it was basically REMIXED to Stereo..now I feel better

 

[key_wiz]

After reading the notes and listening to the two versions, I'm thinking that the echo that was added later from the stairwell for the original mono was removed and replaced with a tape echo to get a cleaner and more stereo sound. Hence the 're-recorded to simulate' bit.

But I can't listen to that stereo mix and think that there weren't 3 separate tracks recorded. At least two tracks and what would have been some very nifty reprocessing for the early 70s.

However it was done, it sounds s'Marvelous.

 

[kap'n krunch]

After reading the notes and listening to the two versions, I'm thinking that the echo that was added later from the stairwell for the original mono was removed and replaced with a tape echo to get a cleaner and more stereo sound. Hence the 're-recorded to simulate' bit.

But I can't listen to that stereo mix and think that there wasn't 3 separate tracks recorded. At least two tracks and what would have been some very nifty reprocessing for the early 70s.

However it was done, it sounds s'Marverlous.

it does sound Wonderful!
Especially since the LP I got is quite minty, and Columbia LPs usually are not, they tend to be quite "clicky", especially the Classical ones which you'd expect to be a notch better than the Popular releases....

 

[kap'n krunch]

this is how Side one of the (stereo) Greatest hits looks like in Hybrid view:

(The Rush one was side C and D of the LPs from MP which I mixed the fade out with the fade in and it came out quite good!)

 

[MidiMagic]

Although Columbia began recording in stereo in 1956, stereo LPs did not begin to be manufactured until 1958. One of Columbia's first stereo releases was an abridged and re-structured performance of Handel's Messiah by the New York Philharmonic and the Westminster Choir conducted by Leonard Bernstein (recorded on December 31, 1956, on 1⁄2-inch tape, using an Ampex 300-3 machine).

The Westrex stereo phonograph record process was not available to record companies until very late in 1957. Nobody could make stereo LPs until 1958.

 

[barfle]

I have both the original Mono LP and the Greatest Hits, and here is the GH...it's the first song...let me know your theories... (ooooohhh; I remember those bouffant hairdos from when I was a kid...where does time go???)

One thing that seems to have been tried on simulated stereo was using a graphic equalizer to boost and cut alternate frequency bands for each channel. I can’t tell you with certainty any records that were made that way, but it seems like it would give a decent stereo effect. It wouldn’t be a heck of a lot more expensive than just sending highs to one side and the lows to the other, and it would play pretty normally with a mono cartridge.

 

[kap'n krunch]

Trying to do a bit of online research (this historical stuff fascinates me) and the mystery only deepens! lol

According to Ray Conniff's website, S'Wonderful was recorded June 15, 1956. Notes on the page that read as recent comments by the webmaster (not someone who was present for the recording -- but I could be wrong. I don't know who "Doug" is) say the recording was in mono. But perhaps he really meant the released LP was mono?

The sound is a bit more primitive than on later albums, perhaps due to the fact that it was recorded in mono. By the time Ray released his first stereo Lp, 's Awful Nice in 1958, the sound was much more polished.


And the page also makes references to "mixing" and adding echo to previously recorded tapes, so at the very least they were bouncing stuff onto different tape machines.

When some months later in February or March 1956 Mitch asked me to do ten more tunes in order to have an album of 12 tracks, I insisted that we get the same engineer, Fred Plaut, who recorded "Begin the Beguine" and "Stardust" because it had a good sound on that single.

So we got Fred and Ernest Chapman and we taped the ten new songs, and then we went to mix them. Here I asked Fred, "what happened?" We had a great echo on the first two tunes and now there was no echo at all on the ten other tracks. So, Fred saw I was unhappy and he said to me, "Why? Would you like to add echo to the tape?" and I said "Yes, could we do that?"

So we went to Columbia Building at 799th Seventh Avenue 52nd Street corner New York and we sent the original sound recorded in the 30th Street studio through a speaker on the bottom of the stairwell area. We put a microphone on the 6th floor of that Columbia building. Then we taped that and we added that echo-sound recording to the original tape. So it was a stairwell echo! So we re-echoed the whole 's Wonderful album with the exception of "Begin the Beguine" and "Stardust" which were yet ok. And we had a better quality. That sound... great!

https://www.rayconniff.info/discography/original/s-Wonderful
Trying to find when Columbia installed their 3-track recorders at 30th St, but I can't. The closest I can find is this paragraph on a 'history of Columbia' webpage.

Although Columbia began recording in stereo in 1956, stereo LPs did not begin to be manufactured until 1958. One of Columbia's first stereo releases was an abridged and re-structured performance of Handel's Messiah by the New York Philharmonic and the Westminster Choir conducted by Leonard Bernstein (recorded on December 31, 1956, on 1⁄2-inch tape, using an Ampex 300-3 machine).

https://www.zippia.com/columbia-records-careers-1578061/history/
The Bernstein recording was done at Carnegie Hall, but it does show that they had the 3 track recorder as early as late 1956, and maybe were recording onto 2-track before then.

Again , thanks so much for your investigative work...I was reading the page in your links and found out that the song itself was RE-RECORDED for the Greatest Hits LP...NO WONDER!!!!!
https://www.rayconniff.info/node/45
in the page you so nicely linked , it mentions it in the last paragraph
"Ray re-recorded the title song in 1969 which was included on his Greatest Hits album. I feel this was a mistake; fans are expecting the original hit on a greatest hits compilation. Although it was in stereo, the new recording lacks the punch of the original. Unfortunately, the liner notes lead the listener to believe that it is the original and that make them wonder if the recording wasn't as good as they remembered"

Cheers!

 

[key_wiz]

Again , thanks so much for your investigative work...I was reading the page in your links and found out that the song itself was RE-RECORDED for the Greatest Hits LP...NO WONDER!!!!!
https://www.rayconniff.info/node/45
in the page you so nicely linked , it mentions it in the last paragraph
"Ray re-recorded the title song in 1969 which was included on his Greatest Hits album. I feel this was a mistake; fans are expecting the original hit on a greatest hits compilation. Although it was in stereo, the new recording lacks the punch of the original. Unfortunately, the liner notes lead the listener to believe that it is the original and that make them wonder if the recording wasn't as good as they remembered"

Cheers!

Mystery solved!