I’m not altogether certain, but I’m pretty sure that the first golden-era RCA Living Stereo record I ever owned was LSC-2234, two French works for piano and orchestra, featuring Arthur Rubinstein, Alfred Wallenstein, and the Symphony of the Air. I’m positive I didn’t appreciate it at the time. To my adolescent eyes, the two-speaker banner running across the top of the jacket looked quaint, a relic from the early days of stereo records.
LSC-2234, recorded 1958
At the time (the late 1960s) I considered newly-recorded records to be vastly superior to oldie-moldies such as LSC-2234. That goes to show what a dummy I was. RCA Living Stereos produced from 1958 through about 1963 represent a high point in recorded history, a gramophonic golden age. I still have my copy of LSC-2234, and despite some wear & tear—especially on the jacket, which has suffered water damage—the disc plays beautifully. That’s true of most golden-age Living Stereo discs: as long as the owner hasn’t abused them terribly, the odds are that they’re nearly as good as the day they were made, allowing for the inevitable clicks and pops that befall analog records over time. Living Stereos are the Rolls Royces of vinyl.
RCA’s engineers had been recording in stereo on a regular basis as of about 1956 or so, with experimental sessions starting in 1954, but until stereo LPs were ready for prime time, those recordings were released in mono, with a trickle of open-reel stereo tapes marketed to early-adopter audiophiles. Once the two-head Westrex disc cutter arrived in 1958, stereo LPs became viable. RCA drank deep, apparently betting the farm on the success of the new technology. To that end, the company provided its finest engineers with state-of-the-art equipment. The whole shebang was powered by vacuum tubes, transistors being yet mostly restricted to lab desks and experimental doodads. Tanklike three-track Ampex tape recorders caught the signals from cutting-edge condenser microphones, after which the engineers meticulously ensured a quality transfer from tape to disc, all with a minimum of tweaking and fiddling. Many works were put down in expansive single takes, and even if not, editing was discreet and handled with the utmost musical integrity. The chain of excellence continued right on to the manufacturing process: RCA upgraded its pressing plants to yield some of the finest vinyl discs in the history of records. Those heavyweight discs with their vermilion and gray-letter “shaded dog” labels—Nipper the Dog is centered within a shaded patch of plum-colored background—can hold their own even against today’s most posh audiophile-grade vinyl pressings.
It didn’t hurt any that RCA had a bevy of Olympian artists under contract: Arthur Rubinstein, Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky, William Primrose, Leontyne Price, Jussi Bjoerling, Robert Merrill. The glory days of Toscanini and the NBC Symphony having passed, RCA focused on its two most prestigious orchestras—the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Fritz Reiner and the Boston Symphony with Charles Munch. For light-classic fare, RCA could offer Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, while Morton Gould and His Orchestra alternated between easy-listening albums and explorations of contemporary American concert fare. The pop-music stable was no less aristocratic: Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Chet Atkins, Jim Reeves, Henry Mancini. Foghorn-blast tenor Mario Lanza hovered somewhere between pop and classical, as did the right-to-the-edge-of-tacky Voices of Walter Schumann.
Not all Living Stereos are equally fine. Acoustics varied from venue to venue, and the pop-oriented engineers were a less consistent bunch than the tight-knit crackerjack team responsible for the Red Seal catalog. Nonetheless, the overall average is very high, and at their best, Living Stereo vinyls represent a peak of recording artistry. None of them are absolute-sound affairs that provide utterly transparent windows to the music. There’s a Living Stereo house sound, thanks to those tubed condenser microphones and thick tapes: it’s warm, perhaps a bit more midrange-y than is considered ideal today, evenly balanced throughout the range. Modern listeners unaccustomed to the sound of condenser mics, 1950s tubes and underlying tape hiss might find Living Stereos a bit mushy at first, but ears adjust quickly enough. Flaws include occasional bass overloads (especially in the earlier days) and some notable failures to capture the shattering magnificence of the Chicago Symphony brass at full throttle. But those are small gripes. That clarified-butter RCA sound is a beautiful thing in and of itself. If we allow that no recording can ever precisely capture actual live music, RCA’s shortcomings are so musically compelling as to counterbalance any inadequacies. It’s no wonder that the harder-core the audiophile, the more ardent the admirer of golden-age Living Stereo.
To be sure, that admiration is partly bound to a culture of nostalgia. Modern-day audiophiles are mostly mature guys whose formative years coincided with Living Stereo’s glory days and therefore hear through the aural equivalent of rose-tinted glasses. But it isn’t all misplaced yearning for the geeky passions of adolescence. Living Stereos really are spectacular. The Reiner/Chicago album of Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta was made in 1958, but it trounces every recording made since, both musically and sonically. Reiner had the music in his DNA. The Chicago Symphony stood second to none for sheer technical virtuosity, burnished tone, and mind-as-one ensemble. The 100% tubed analog recording process caught it all with breathtaking vividness and rightness. It has been the ultimate reference recording of the Bartók from the get-go and is likely to remain so in perpetuity.
It’s an open question as to how long Living Stereo actually lasted. The LSC numbers continue into the 3000s (box sets were numbered in the 6000s) then give way to RCA’s later ARL prefix. So maybe LSC = Living Stereo. Or maybe it ended with the coming of transistors, in which case the terminus is right around the time the dual-speaker banner disappeared for good, as of LSC-2456. Was it the introduction of Dynagroove at LSC-2661, a technique that employed computerized mixing techniques? Hard to say. Surely Living Stereo cannot extend to those flimsy, sleazy Dynaflex discs of the 1970s, even if in some cases—such as the Gerhardt/Korngold movie score albums—the audio itself easily passes muster. Living Stereo must include superb vinyl pressing in the mix of gramophonic virtues.
What I can say is that golden-age Living Stereos, those produced between 1958 and about 1963, stand proudly amongst the crown jewels of audio recording. I’ll allow that the present-day remasterings on SACD provide superlative rebirths of these iconic records. Ditto the Classics Records vinyl reprints, and I have no doubt the forthcoming series of 200-gram remastered releases from Analogue Productions will be better yet. Still, the original vinyls were made from then-new master tapes, unlike modern remasterings that have to depend on aging magnetic sources, and more to the point, those originals are the only Living Stereos that reach us with the full documented approval of everyone concerned—artists, producers, engineers, technicians. So even if an individual Living Stereo has become distressingly clicky, or is pestered by irreparable groove damage, an underlay of authenticity yet remains. And when a vintage Living Stereo is in tip-top shape, it sets the gold standard for vinyl playback.
Some vintage Living Stereos have become horrendously expensive, while others in superb shape can be had for only a few shekels. The big-ticket items reached the digital realm years ago but many of the discs by lesser-known artists have remained locked in vinyl. It’s unlikely that the sum total of RCA Living Stereo will ever be available in digital format. But wouldn’t it be cool to be able to acquire the whole thing—all 3000+ single discs and 100 some-odd box sets—in one gargantuan “Original Jackets” set of double-layer SACD/CD discs? Or better yet, in modern audiophile-grade vinyl?
For now, though, I’m digging both my shelf of original vinyls and a hefty treasure trove of fine digital remasterings. Reiner, Fiedler, Munch, Monteux, Morton Gould, Arthur Rubinstein, et al., brought back to life as though they were just here yesterday, courtesy of a core group of no-compromise engineers and the combined brilliance of generations of audio designers and manufacturers. Living Stereo turned out to be more than just a clever brand name; the best of those recordings have in fact outlived their original creators. They just might wind up outliving us all.