Periodically the recording industry flexes itself into a new technology. Sometimes the transition goes smoothly, and sometimes not. Consider the move from acoustic to electric recording in the mid-1920s, as emergent radio brought microphones, amplifiers, and speakers into the picture, replacing Edison’s recording horn and all-mechanical process. It was a gigantic paradigm shift but relatively free of retail trauma. The records themselves remained the familiar 12” or 10” shellac discs running at 78 rpm, so people could continue playing them on their acoustic Victrolas. Anyone who upgraded to an electronic record player heard expanded dynamic and frequency ranges from those same records, so really it was a win-win all the way around.
The shift from 78s to LPs in the late 1940s was distinctly more angst-ridden, since a new phonograph was needed. Adding to the confusion, for a few years in the late 1940s the two dominant American record companies, Columbia and RCA Victor, faced off in a battle between record sizes and speeds. Columbia’s entry was the 12” vinyl long-playing record; RCA’s was the 7” 45 rpm disc with the large hole in the middle. People put off buying new phonographs until the dust settled, which it had by about 1950 when RCA capitulated and began releasing LPs as well. (45s remained the format of choice for pop singles, however.)
Many of those early LPs are disgracefully strong in the treble. They’re downright shrill, in fact. But that’s only when played on modern equipment. The treble-poor, swooshy and thumpy early LP phonographs benefitted mightily from that enhanced treble; our ‘shrill’ was their ‘brilliant’. Nowadays we need to remaster those original tapes to tame that strident treble.
Exaggeration made a strong selling point for early LPs, and when the time came for the move from monophonic to stereo, the record companies were primed and ready to ping-pong themselves silly with stereo demonstration records that tossed the soundstage in every direction, all in the interest of exploiting the capabilities of the expensive stereo phonographs required to play the new records. Starting in about 1958, when the Westrex system was introduced as an international standard for stereo records, the party was on with sounds flung here, there, and everywhere.
It’s worth remembering that most of those early stereo phonographs were manufactured with the speakers fairly close together and thus excessive channel separation was required in order to hear any separation at all.
In England, Decca was working understated miracles with stereo reproduction, often in the acoustical splendor of London’s drafty old Kingsway Hall or Vienna’s rococo Sophiensaal. Those Decca engineers were men (sorry, no women) of taste and musical refinement who were thoroughly familiar with the sound of live music in a concert or recital hall. They knew perfectly well that stereo reproduction isn’t so much about left-to-right as it is about front-to-back. The two channels create a stereophonic effect that gives the audio a depth unobtainable in single-channel recording. Most of the Deccas from the late 1950s through early 1960s evince only subtle channel separation but, when played on high-quality equipment, reveal an astonishing level of depth and detail. Consider Pierre Monteux conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony, released here in the United States on RCA Red Seal but recorded by those crackerjack Decca engineers. Not only is the performance peerless, so is the audio. Vibrant, immediate, and clear, it would be a credit to the finest high-def digital engineering available today.
But no glitz. Decca wasn’t into ping-ponging instruments around the room or shoving a microphone next to a tambourine and making it sound as though it had a ten-foot circumference. Yet there were customers, particularly of the audiophile variety, who craved those trashy effects if for no other reason than to demonstrate their pricey gear. So Decca’s American subsidy London Records got cracking and came up with the “Phase4” moniker for a series of wildly over-engineered records that are remembered by folks of a certain age (that’s me) with a mix of fondness and exasperation. Oy, that in-your-face Phase4 sound. Violins crammed over to the farthest left possible, brass to the farthest right, harps inflated to the acoustic size of church organs, apparent five-foot-tall triangles, violin soloists who drowned out an orchestra playing en masse, the whole heated up with unrestrained knob twiddling to ensure that high and low frequencies were as exaggerated as possible. Given that the tonearms of the day tended to jump out of grooves containing very low frequencies, Phase4 focused on treble brilliance. Thus, like those early 1950s LPs, Phase4s need at least a modicum of tempering to be rendered listenable on today’s equipment.
After establishing the series with band records, Gershwin spectaculars, and various mid-brow fare from mid-brow conductors such as Stanley Black, Phase4 headed uptown and began recording Antal Dorati, Leopold Stokowski, Bernard Herrmann, Ruggeiro Ricci, Ilana Vered, and other A-list folks with an equally starry roster of orchestras, including the London Symphony Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic, and the Philharmonia. But the glitz never quite faded away. Consider the bestselling album of Scheherazade that was festooned with Andy Warhol-ish photos of veteran conductor Leopold Stokowski along the edges. Between Stokowski squeezing every drop of Hollywood-ish gush out of the LSO and the engineers twisting every knob on their 20-channel mixer, the record zooms towards the outer boundaries of vulgarity on all counts, despite the overall refinement and nuance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral masterwork.
But it’s fun. Loads of fun. As are almost all the Phase4s, now roaring again out of a speaker near you thanks to a nifty box set of 41 particularly prime specimens. One does not buy this set for subtlety, or for tasteful jacket design, or for particularly good performances. Musically it rarely rises above plain-jane mediocrity, and often—especially in the “spectaculars” conducted by veteran Decca hack Stanley Black—sinks well below that. A few memorable performances slip through— Bernard Herrmann’s albums of his own film music in particular. Most are humdrum, such as the phoned-in Mendelssohn Violin Concerto from Ruggeiro Ricci that stands out mostly for the almost comic loudness of the solo violin. There’s plenty of plain old bad playing. The set lacks even one single definitive performance of anything, although there’s a Carmina Burana that has held up pretty well. Then again, Carmina Burana is tasteless dreck, so 20 channels of unrestrained knob-twiddling isn’t likely to cause much harm.
More than anything, the Phase4 box set is a period piece, an artifact of a time when stereo sound was fresh and exciting, tubes burned brightly, giant mushy speakers heaved enthusiastically, and cherrywood Magnavox consoles with disc-destroying record changers plopped down their heavy tonearms with a meaty bass-enhanced thwunck. You probably had to be there. Well, I was. Anyone for a delectably tacky sprint through The Immortal Works of Ketelbey, brought to you by Eric Rogers and the Royal Philharmonic? Or if that’s just too sophisticated, there’s always Flamenco Puro Live!, featuring the most sonically inflated—and channel separated—guitars you ever heard.
Ah, stereo. For a while there it really was the best thing since sliced bread.