AES British Section lectures - December 2007

Christmas special!

Barry Fox

On December 11th the UK Section of the AES hosted "Christmas Special!" by Barry Fox. Barry is Consumer Electronics Daily's Contributing Editor for Europe.

Barry started by giving his opinion on the Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD battle, which he summed up as: "bloody stupid". He then compared the battle to the original wax-cylinder recorder battle between Bell and Edison.

Barry then went on to introduce the main topic of the lecture which was a look at the history of stereo recording, celebrating the 50th anniversary of its standardisation by the RIAA in March 1958. Barry started by discussing the break-through of stereo which was started by the Disney recordings of Fantasia and the film industry's attempts to differentiate itself from television. He then covered various techniques which have been used to recover "stereo" sound from mono-recordings, by going back to the original recordings. Barry then went into how the original stereo recording equipment was developed during the war and how it made its way to America. Then Barry covered the first BBC experiments with stereo recording and broadcasting, delivering the left channel over the radio and the right channel over the television! Barry played a wide array of stereo recordings throughout the lecture, demonstrating how the technology evolved and the effectiveness of the various techniques employed.

Barry finished by playing some radio bloopers as a Christmas treat. There was a lively discussion throughout the lecture. A recording of the lecture is available from the UK section website at www.aes.org/sections/uk/meetings/a0712.html.

Report by Tim Harris