The Birth of Stereophonic Recording

By 1941 the Germans had perfected a recording technology that not only gave them enhanced capabilities for communications and propaganda, but also fundamentally changed the way that music is recorded and produced. That technology was magnetic tape. Strangely enough, their advances were either missed or totally ignored by the Allies until after the war.

Thanks to some mysterious backdoor cold war diplomacy, the German Radio Archive now has hundreds of breathtaking recordings from the World War II period, interpretations of both classical and romantic repertoire from artists of great stature: the conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, the pianist Walther Gieseking, and great orchestras such as the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin Radio and the State Opera. Some of these recordings are the very first experiments in stereo, which give us a window into the future of audio.

The author, who is an internationally known mastering engineer and professor of music, has extensive experience in analog tape technology. He has transferred hundreds of historic magnetic tapes by artists such as Leopold Stokowski, Duke Ellington, Woody Guthrie, David Bowie, and Richard Thompson. His extensive research of the earliest magnetic tape recordings, enabled by a College of the Holy Cross research grant, culminated in two weeks in Berlin in the spring of 2014.

The presentation will detail the unique cooperation by three competing German companies from 1935 to 1945 to perfect magnetic recording. Their success not only meant the replacement of the phonograph, but also ushered in a new age of multitrack recording, editing and post-production. Original excerpts from the German Broadcasting Archive will be played, examined, and compared.

Finally, the author will draw some strong conclusions about the effects on the post war music industry, which holds special significance for recording engineers and musicians specializing in recorded music since 1950.