Introduction
The decade between the mid-50s and the mid-60s of the last century are considered the ‘golden age of the vinyl record’. The most important artists of the time made recordings of exceptional quality – both artistically and technically. Three fortunate circumstances came together for this:
- Extraordinarily talented artists such as Maria Callas, Birgit Nilsson, Gundula Janowitz, Jascha Heifetz, Yehudi Menuhin, Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Sviatoslav Richter, Glenn Gould, Gregor Piatigorsky, Mstislav Rostropovich, Pablo Casals, Carlos Kleiber, Fritz Reiner, Herbert von Karajan, Arturo Toscanini, Leonard Bernstein, or Duke Ellington, Harry Belafonte, Nina Simone, Miles Davies, Billy Holiday, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. You probably have further favourites. The aim here is not to be exhaustive, but to provide examples of the unrivalled artistic quality at the time
- The introduction of stereophonic sound and thus for the first time the technical possibility of reproducing sound realistically.
- Quality-obsessed sound engineers (such as Leslie Chase or Lewis Layton at RCA, Kenneth Wilkinson at DECCA or Robert Fine at Mercury) and producers (such as John Pfeiffer or Richard Mohr at RCA, Wilma Cozar at Mercury or John Culshaw at DECCA and Walter Legge at EMI).
RCA Victor, one of the largest record companies in the world, was at the forefront of these developments. RCA Victor emerged in 1929 from the takeover of the ‘Victor Talking Machine Co.’ (the world’s largest producer of Emil Berliner’s gramophones at the time) by the ‘Radio Corporation of America’ or RCA, founded in 1919. Companies such as ‘General Electric’, ‘Westinghouse’ and ‘AT&T’ had pooled some of their radio electronics-related patents in the Radio Corporation of America and received corresponding shares. Until the early 1970s, the company was one of the most important and innovative manufacturers of consumer electronics. With the acquisition of the Victor Talking Machine Co. in 1929, RCA also acquired the rights for the Americas to the famous Nipper/‘His Master’s Voice’ trademark from Emil Berliner’s Gramophone Company. The Gramophone Company retained the rights for Europe, which were absorbed by the British ‘Electric and Musical Industries’ (EMI) through a merger with the Columbia Graphophone Company in 1931. That’s why you’ll find the same Nipper logo on records from different manufacturers on both sides of the Atlantic:
Fig. 01 – Nipper/”His Master’s Voice” Trademark (painting by Francis Barraud)
By taking over the Victor Talking Machine Company in 1929, RCA also acquired the rights to the traditional Victor ‘Red Seal’ label, which from then on functioned as the label for classical music within the RCA Group. Many of the ‘Living Stereo’ label recordings later appeared – at more favourable prices – on the Red Seal label.
Brief History of the Living Stereo Labels
The ‘Golden Era of RCA Records’ began in the autumn of 1953. With Charles Munch and Arthur Fiedler in Boston, Leopold Stokowski in New York, as well as soloists such as Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, Leontyne Price or Gregor Piatigorsky and others, RCA Victor had already many top-class musicians under contract. In the autumn of 1953, Fritz Reiner – who had just taken over as conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra – left Columbia Records to enrol with RCA Victor. By the time of his death in 1963, Reiner had recorded a total of 63 albums with his Chicago orchestra for RCA . He thereby far outshone all other classical RCA artists.
RCA began with their first experimental ‘binaural’ recordings in their Manhattan Centre in New York in October 1953 with L. Stokowski and a programme of G. Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody No. 1 and Tchaikovsky’s Waltz from Eugene Onegin. In February 1954, the first commercial stereo recordings were made by RCA Victor (Jack Pfeiffer and Leslie Chase ) in Boston’s Symphony Hall with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Ch. Munch and H. Berlioz’s ‘La Damnation de Faust’. This was followed by a program of Richard Strauss (Zarathustra, Heldenleben, Salomé) with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Fritz Reiner in Orchestra Hall, Chicago in March 1954. These early recordings were made in parallel in mono and in stereo (left, right).
Fig. 02 – First commercial RCA stereo recording – Ch. Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra: Berlioz‘s La Damnation de Faust, Symphony Hall, Boston, 1954
The recording technique was rather simple and was essentially based on the findings of the Bell Laboratories, which had already been made in the 1930s. For the early recordings of Strauss with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Fritz Reiner in 1954, only a few microphones were used in Orchestra Hall in Chicago: Three main microphones, suspended from a rope stretched across the Hall from balcony to balcony, namely one Telefunken U-47 each on the left and right behind Reiner’s console for stereo recording and another U-47 in the centre directly behind the console for mono recording. In addition, there were one or two support microphones, sometimes also a U-47, sometimes an RCA’s own 77-DX. In other words, these large panorama recordings in stereo were made with 3 or 4 microphones! Recordings were made with Ampex tape machines. Audio historian Michael Gray believes that the recording venue, Orchestra Hall, had an influence on the success of Fritz Reiner’s recordings in Chicago that should not be underestimated. The stage of the concert hall was very wide and not very deep. This geometry meant that the recording engineers had to position the stereo microphones very far apart. This and the highly sensitive U-74 microphones used resulted in this huge acoustic panorama.
However, the 2-track technique did not yet create a homogeneous spatial impression, even in stereo. The recording engineers at RCA experimented a lot and finally copied a solution from Mercury Records in the course of 1955: instead of recording with 2 tracks, from 1956 they recorded with 3 tracks – each fed by one microphone. Sometimes one or two back-up microphones were added, depending on the musical programme. Sometimes the main microphones were arranged in a line behind the conductor, sometimes, similar to the DECCA tree, in a triangular formation. That was it. The 3-track master tape was then cut to 2 tracks, which then provided a very realistic 3-dimensional sound impression.
RCA’s first 3-track recording was Arthur Fiedler’s ‘HiFi-Fiedler’ from 1956, and this setup was retained with slight variations until the mid-1960s. In other words, the classic Living Stereo recordings were mostly made with 4-5 microphones. After that, RCA – like other recording labels – began to record in multi-track, which simplified the recording process considerably, but was rather detrimental to the spatial impression and the overall recording quality.
Fig. 03 – First commercial RCA 3-track recording – the Boston Pops Orchestra under A. Fiedler: HiFi-Fiedler, Symphony Hall, Boston, 1956
When the music labels began to switch their recording technology to ‘binaural’ in 1953, consumers’ playback equipment at home was still exclusively mono. The labels operated on the assumption that consumers’ equipment would catch-up and be converted to stereo over the years. As there was no commercially viable method for cutting or playing back stereo information on a vinyl disc at the time, the first stereo tape players with ¼‘’ and 7 ½ ips were launched in mid-1955 and RCA Victor began to market pre-recorded stereo tapes (so-called ‘stereo orthophonic tapes’). Stereo technology thus reached the first end customers from 1955 onwards and completely redefined ‘high fidelity’.
Fig. 04 – RCA Victor – Pre-recorded Tape – Richard Strauss, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Reiner, 1956
However, records were still produced and sold in mono. It was not until 1957 that EMI in London began to use the cutting process for multi-channel recordings (vertical-lateral technique), developed by Allan Blumlein in 1931, for the production of commercial stereo records. In 1958, the Western Electric Company in the USA followed suit and modified its Westrex cutting system so that it also became possible for RCA Victor to cut, produce and sell stereo records.
Corresponding record players in stereo were offered in parallel to the development of the cutting technology, so that records in stereo were also commercially available from 1957. In this year, the major record labels began marketing their respective stereo record series as premium product lines:
- RCA with their legendary ‘Living Stereo’ series,
- DECCA with its ‘ffss’ (full frequency stereophonic sound) series and
- Mercury with its Living Presence series.
However, as the majority of consumers still owned mono record players and this only changed very slowly, most record companies released new albums in both mono and stereo until the end of the 1960s. The discs were – at least in the early years – recorded both in mono and in stereo (3-track); the 3-track recordings were not mixed down to mono at first.
RCA Victor used the Living Stereo label as a marketing tool for its early stereophonic releases from 1958, when the stereo LP was introduced. It positioned the records in the premium segment to make it clear to consumers that these were high-quality stereo records. They were correspondingly expensive. The recordings were mostly of classical music, but also included jazz and rock ‘n’ roll (from Henry Mancini to Chet Atkins and Elvis Presley). The label was only used in the phase of the introduction of stereo records – i.e. between 1958 and 1965. By the mid-1960s, the new ‘stereophonic’ technology had been sufficiently introduced. RCA began to record in multitrack and in 1963 introduced a new technical innovation in the cutting process with ‘Dynagroove’ (consisting of 2 components: 1. tracing compensation for conical styli and 2. dynamic equalization), so that the label ‘Living Stereo’ was no longer used, but from then on ‘Dynagroove’ was printed on the cover as a sign of quality. However, the Dynagroove process was controversial from the outset and by about 1970 RCA quietly stopped using it. RCA was not able to match the legendary quality of the Living Stereo series, partly also due to the changes in the recording process.
Due to its outstanding qualities, the Living Stereo series has been so successful over the decades that original editions now fetch top prices on the collector’s market and various manufacturers still release new editions of the recordings under licence today:
- BMG Classics on CD
- Sony/BMG on SACD
- Chesky Records on vinyl
- Classic Records/Acoustic Sounds on vinyl and SACD
- JVC on XRCD
Highlights of the Living Stereo Catalogue
Let’s move on to the recordings. The albums presented here are just a small personal selection. Other people may prefer other albums.
The first Living Stereo album released by RCA Victor in 1958 was the 2-track recording of Richard Strauss’ “Also sprach Zarathustra” and “Ein Heldenleben” by F. Reiner and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, recorded at Orchestra Hall, Chicago, in March 1954 with a 2-track RCA 1/4″-RT21 at 15ips.
Fig. 05 – R. Strauss – Also sprach Zarathustra
Fig. 06 – R. Strauss – Ein Heldenleben
One of the reasons why the recordings in the Living Stereo series with Reiner and his Chicagoers sound so lively – apart from the recording technique – is that Reiner only recorded the pieces after he had rehearsed them extensively with the orchestra and played them several times in concerts. This meant that the pieces were in the musicians‘ heads and could be recorded in one piece (’take”). These long takes convey much more of a live impression than a recording made up of many short takes, which later became the norm (today, a dozen takes per recording are normal). An example of this is the finale from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade, which was famously recorded in February 1960 at Orchestra Hall, Chicago in a single take without cuts on 3 tracks and is one of the absolute highlights of the Living Stereo label.
Fig, 07 – N. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade
Another fine 3-track recording from Chicago is Sibelius’ Violin Concerto with Jascha Heifetz and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Walter Hendl:
Fig. 08 – J. Sibelius – Violin Concerto
For comparison, a 3-track recording from Symphony Hall in Boston: the aforementioned HiFi-Fiedler with the Boston Pops Orchestra under A. Fiedler; recording: Symphony Hall, Boston, 1956.
Fig. 09 – Arthur Fiedler – HiFi-Fiedler
Another noteworthy 3-track Boston Pops recording under Fiedler is G. Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with Earl Wild on piano:
Fig. 10 – George Gershwin – Rhapsody in Blue
Interestingly, after the termination of its distribution contract with EMI in 1957, RCA Victor concluded a similar agreement with DECCA. Under this new agreement, DECCA made a number of high-calibre recordings for RCA Victor with top European orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic under Fritz Reiner and the London Symphony Orchestra under Jean Martinon. Three of the most famous of these commissioned recordings – and three of the most legendary Living Stereo recordings – were made in the late 1950s with the orchestra of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden under Ernest Ansermet, George Solti and Alexander Gibson at Kingsway Hall in London. The recording engineer for all three recordings is DECCA’s top engineer Kenneth Wilkinson, who used a classic DECCA tree:
Fig. 11 – „The Royal Ballet – Gala Performances“, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden under Ernest Ansermet, Jan. 1957
Fig. 12 – Bizet: Carmen Suite & Gounod: Faust Ballet, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden under Alexander Gibson, 1959, recorded at Kingsway Hall, London
Fig. 13 – „Venice“, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden under George Solti, 1959, recorded at Kingsway Hall, London with the famous Aldwych-Holborn underground line, which always had to be taken into account by the Decca sound engineers and still became audible sometimes
Kingsway Hall in London warrants a brief digression, not least because its fate has astonishing parallels with Austria’s best recording venue, the Sofiensäle in Vienna: Kingsway Hall was built in 1912 as a Methodist church. Due to the spectacular acoustic properties of the church, it was regularly used for orchestral and choral recordings by the major British record labels from 1926 onwards. The excellent acoustics were more a coincidence than the result of acoustic planning: the hall had high stucco ceilings, a wooden floor and wooden panelling on the walls. In particular, on the floor below, there was a large costume hire warehouse for stage and film, which acted as a perfect variable damping system for the hall (similar to the Sofiensäle, which also had a wooden floor over a former swimming pool). Kingsway Hall became Britain’s most important recording venue, with thousands of recordings, many of them milestones in recording history. This is all the more remarkable as the Hall presented a number of extreme problems that would normally have put recording artists and engineers to flight: the Hall is located on one of London’s main thoroughfares, the Kingsway, and also directly over a tube line. In other words, the recording technicians constantly had to contend with the street traffic outside and the underground trains rushing past below them every 10 minutes. The outcome of this battle can be heard in many famous recordings. As the Methodists and the record labels found themselves in difficult economic waters in the 1980s, nobody could afford to maintain the building. And so Kingsway Hall was demolished in 1998 to make way for the Kingsway Hall Hotel, which opened in 2000.
In addition to the large orchestras under contract, such as those in Boston and Chicago, RCA Victor also had its own session music orchestra in New York from 1940, the so-called RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra, which was made up of musicians from the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera and the NBC Symphony Orchestra. By 1962, the orchestra had become a major burden for RCA, not least due to the escalating trade union regulations, so that RCA Victor increasingly shifted its recording activities to Europe, particularly to Rome. First at the Rom Opera House and later at the RCA Italiana Studios. There, RCA recorded milestones of the Italian opera discography in the 1960ies with Anna Moffo or Leontyne Price, Giuseppe di Stefano, Richard Tucker or Carlo Bergonzi under Erich Leinsdorf, Georg Solti or Georges Pretre. As an example, here is a recording of Puccini’s La Bohème from the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma from June 1961, shortly before the founding of the RCA Italiana Orchestra. The Roman Opera House Orchestra is still playing here under Erich Leinsdorf with Anna Moffo, Richard Tucker and Robert Merrill. The recording proves that the RCA technicians really understood their craft and were not dependent on specific recording locations.
Fig. 14 – G. Puccini – La Bohème
The ‘Living Stereo’ label was, as already mentioned, not limited to classical music, but also produced a lot of rather simple light music for everyday domestic use, nevertheless of outstanding quality. One of these border crossers between classical and popular music was the composer, arranger and conductor Morton Gould, who recorded many effective percussion music and marches for RCA Victor, such as this album ‘Brass & Percussion’ from 1957:
Fig. 15 – Morton Gould – Brass & Percussion
Another percussion specialist was the drummer, composer and arranger Dick Schory. Mr Schory was a percussionist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Fritz Reiner. At the same time, Mr Schory had a second and much more successful career as an arranger of popular music for various percussion ensembles. Mr Schory did not take himself all too seriously and sometimes posed naked on a record cover, wearing only a loincloth and a club. The covers of his albums were also often adorned with half-naked young ladies. But regardless of this, his records were cleverly arranged musically, played with the best musicians, always excellently recorded and – with or without half-naked ladies – real bestsellers. They were classic showpieces for the technical prowess of the RCA Victor engineers. The discs for RCA Victor were also recorded at Orchestra Hall, Chicago by Lewis Layton and sound accordingly. The album Supercussion is an example for a late Living Stereo production already sporting the Dynagroove label, indicative of the slow fade out of the Living Stereo series.
Fig 16 – Dick Schory’s Percussion Pops Orchestra – Supercussion; Orchestra Hall, Chicago, 1962
Another popular artist on the Living Stereo label was the guitarist and founder of the so-called ‘Nashville sound’ Chet Atkins. Atkins spent almost his entire artistic career at RCA Victor. He was so involved there that from 1957 he was even put in charge of the RCA Victor Nashville Division, which was responsible for country music within the RCA Victor Group. In this role, Atkins even produced some of Elvis Presley’s early albums – which we will come to later.
Fig. 17 – Chet Atkins– In Hollywood; Aufnahme: Hollywood, California, Okt. 1959
However, the Living Stereo label also released more sophisticated light music such as Harry Belafonte, Henry Mancini, Sam Cooke and Elvis Presley:
Harry Belafonte recorded his album ‘Sings the Blues’ in New York and Hollywood in 1958. It was his first stereophonic album.
Fig. 18 – Harry Bellafonte – Sings the Blues
… and then, of course, Belafonte at Carnegie Hall. In April 1959, Harry Belafonte played 2 charity concerts in aid of two New York schools at Carnegie Hall. The resulting live concert album, released by RCA Victor under its Living Stereo label, is one of the classics of high fidelity and is still often used in hifi demonstrations today.
Fig. 19 – Harry Bellafonte – Live at Carnegie Hall
At the end of the 1950s, a successful detective series called ‘Peter Gunn’ was shown on American TV. The film score was written by Henry Mancini (who would later also write the film score for The Pink Panther). The film music for Peter Gunn combines rock ‘n’ roll and jazz elements in an innovative way. It was the first album to win a Grammy from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences of the United States in 1959. Interestingly, a certain ‘John Williams’ plays the piano on the album, who himself would later become the most successful film music composer of all time
Fig. 20 – Henry Mancini – Peter Gunn
Toni Harper began her career as a child star at the age of 8. She recorded her first album ‘Toni’ with none other than the Oscar Petersen Trio for Verve Records at the age of 18. At the age of 23, she recorded the album ‘Night Mood’ for RCA Victor Living Stereo before retiring at the age of 29:
Fig. 21 – Toni Harper – Night Mood
„Elvis is Back!“ was Elvis Presley’s 4th album and the first of several comeback albums in the course of his 20-year career as the “King of Rock ”n’ Roll’. After a spectacular start to his singing career in 1955, Elvis was drafted into the 3rd Armoured Division of the U.S. Army in March 1958 for his 2-year military service, most of which he spent in Friedberg, approx. 26 km north of Frankfurt am Main. A two year break is an eternity for a King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and the album was a complex balanced mix of tracks that would appeal to his old fans and at the same time attract new ones. The album was Elvis’ first stereophonic recorded album and was produced by Chet Atkins. It is a 3-track recording from the RCA Victor Studio B, Nashville, Tennessee from April 1960.
Fig. 22 – Elvis Presley – Elvis is Back!
After a long period of silence around the major record labels of the Golden Age, they gradually began releasing their original master tapes in HighResolution Audio (mostly 96 kHz/24 bit or 192 kHz/24 bit) from around 2014. In contrast to analogue technology, every copy in the digital domain is identical to the original. The degradation of quality that reduces the quality in the analogue copying process does not exist in the digital domain. These digital ‘master files’ are first-generation copies of the original master tapes and therefore come closer to the original recording than any previous release on a sound carrier, especially vinyl. At the same time, this also marks an end point in the development of playback technology: it is simply not possible to get closer to the original music event in retrospect than through the master tape. This first-generation copy of the original master tape – which was previously only available to the sound engineers who were present at the recording – can now be enjoyed by everyone at home. Not only does this make it possible to enjoy the treasures from the ‘golden age of vinyl’ in the digital age, but – provided you have the right playback equipment – you can even get closer to the original sound of the recordings than with the old tapes or vinyl records.
Modern high-end playback devices are designed to play digital music files, regardless of file format or resolution quality – from simple MP3 files and CD files to original master files in DXD resolution (384 kHz). The Model 2 of the ‘Digital Audio Systems’ plays digital files with a resolution of up to 384 kHz at 24 bit streamed from the internal hard drive or via the Internet. It can be controlled either conventionally on the device itself or, more conveniently, from the sofa via a tablet with a multimedia user interface.
Fig. 23 – DAS HD-Player Model 2
© Alexej C. Ogorek
For a pretty complete listing of the Living Stereo discography:
- Wolfgang Beinhauer – RCA Victor – Die frühen Stereoaufnahmen – Living Stereo, 1992
- Website: www.shadeddog.com
