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For those born later, or those whose memory has faded (like mine), one could go back to the mid through late '50s and early '60s, and read the press: Audio, Stereo Review, et al. The time of transition from single channel mono to stereo in home entertainment. Hitherto, some lucky few had 'stereo', and sometimes even three channel tape recordings. But the majority of consumer market hi-fi was essentially one-channel, using records (also, a transition had not long before been made from 78 rpm to 33 1/3 rpm, plastic).In reality, stereo itself is the most serious impediment to getting the level of sound and spatial quality we seek. Two channels are not enough, and ALL phantom images between the loudspeakers are corrupted by acoustical interference ...
The big complaint from everyone was the 'artificialness' of stereo. The artificialness of recordings ('ping pong' effect, instruments wandering around and not staying put, and so forth), plus the 'big hole in the middle'. Paul Klipsch advised a center channel speaker/amplifier, and devised an electronic circuit to 'simulate' a third channel (his customers had money); David Hafler adopted a more plebian approach, offering a switch on his preamp that would compress the 'width' of the soundstage, all in an attempt to lessen the 'stereo with a hole in the middle' image.
Also, prior to stereo, reviewers never talked about imaging, front to back depth, soundstage or any of that. How could they? And in spite of it all, we had (have) some very natural sounding mono recordings, many that put to shame what is offered today. So was stereo a thing of progress, or just something different that required a radical adaptation?
The late journalist Tom Nousaine (Stereo Review, Sound 'n Vision, Audio, Sensible Sound, Audio Critic and probably a lot more I can't remember) brought it all back home in 1997, when he wrote that, thanks to multi-channel, Stereo is as Dead as the LP (the title of his Audio Critic article). He went on about the problems inherent in stereo, more or less rehashing everything that was known in the late '50s, but had been pushed aside and mostly forgotten--that stereo was a kludge, albeit one that offered some good things, yet along with the good, a lot of not so good (or at least a lot of things that could be better).
At that time, Tom (probably had just read Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book ), predicted that by 2005 two-channel recording "would be history" (his exact words). He wrote: We will be having stereo 'revivals' where the excess production capacity of fully amortized plants will have folks squeezing out the last few dollars from a dead technology, as they are now with tubes and LPs.
Now, Tom was not a fool, but he demonstrated two important things that were always known. First, one should never try and predict the future or one might, like Francis, appear foolish in hindsight. Second, his point (that he got totally correct) was how multi-channel exists to correct stereo.
With the nascent multi-channel scene (Tom wrote when 5.1 was becoming practical, along with 'new and exciting' tech such as Dolby Digital, DTS, and DVD!), he had hope. We know how it played out. Approaching 2022 there is no indication that two-channel stereo is going away, or that multiple-channel musical recordings (I'm not talking about movies) will ever replace stereo recordings. But who knows what tomorrow will bring? I'm not going to attempt predictions.
I appreciate the work of men like Toole, who are serious about making serious contributions to an wholistic home listening experience. But when I think about what brings me musical pleasure (I mean music from a recording), I'm more and more listening to the old mono stuff. Furtwangler, Knappertsbusch, the jazz scene, and the others from the pre-stereo era. Funny thing... I can do that with one loudspeaker! But I know I'm an outlier.