Music, first and last, should sound well, should allure and should enchant the ear. Never mind about the inner significance.
The development of stereo recording techniques begins in the latter half of the 19th century and continues unabated to the present day. Thought today’s sophisticated technologies allows for the advent of some of the most realistic surround sound stereo recording systems ever known, the best of them still lack some level of realistic sound production when compared to the binaural stereo recording techniques that were developed at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, a process where the recording is made in such a fashion so as to reproduce the way our ears capture sounds and then play it back into the corresponding ears.
This analysis will cover the history of stereo recording techniques, focusing on the main developments from the late 19th century and those in the 20th century. Also included will be the close relationship between the development of stereo recording techniques in the film industry and for the home stereo industry. A conclusion will address the different kinds of developments that are taking place in stereo recording techniques that are meant to supplant today’s most sophisticated technique, Dolby Digital Surround 5.1.
The first recording of a human voice occurred in 1877, when Thomas Edison recorded “Mary had a little lamb” on the first tinfoil cylinder phonograph (Schoenherr 1). Charles Tainter was responsible for the first lateral-cut records in 1881, but no machine existed to play them on. A second phonograph type was invented by Cichester Bell and Charles Tainter in 1885, a Graphophone that utilized wax-coated cylinders cut with vertical grooves (Schoenherr 1). Cylinders remained the popular form of stereo recording until the 1890s when phonographs went through a number of transformations and modifications, including the improvement of the gramop...