The legend
Those who are fortunate enough to own a copy of Eric Kunzel’s vinyl album “Time Warp” can attest to the record’s ability to reproduce life-like sound. Released in 1984, the album was produced by Telarc with the late Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra masterfully recreating the sound of spaceships zipping around the soundstage, leaving listeners with that eerie feeling of being in outer space themselves. In Gerry Goldsmith’s The Star Trek theme, a music room becomes a virtual space ship that travels faster than the speed of sound. You would be awed by how Don Dorsey’s Ascent and Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra seem to transport into the listening room the rumbling lows of timpani being struck in quick succession.
Telarc is known for recreating sound so vivid and real that one can practically feel immediacy. The listener is conveyed right where e center of what Telarc wanted the listener to experience. The roar of the canons in Pyotyr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Overture of 1812, for example, conveys the listener to the center of the battlefield as Napoleon’s army advances, and then uplifts him with the church bells pealing in joy for Russia’s triumphant defense.
This is what the magic of stereo imaging can bring: a soundstage where one can experience sounds that are faithful to the original and palpably real. To think that Telarc produced most of these records long before surround sound became a known commodity. With a properly set up full-range stereo system, one can give Dolby’s system a run for its money. Just imagine: only two channels against six or seven of the 7.1 surround sound configuration!
Long before Telarc, Clarity, Chesky, and other recording companies, which masterfully harnessed the beauty of stereo sound reproduction, there was Emory Cook and his binaural recording. In the 1950s, the American press was abuzz with stories that if read today would be mistaken for an urban legend.
On an icy morning in the quiet, charming town of Pound Ridge in New York’s Westchester Country, Emory got a curious call from a local real-estate agent who narrated to him the complaint of a client who had just moved into the town, a stone’s throw away from Emory’s home. The client was threatening legal action against the agent for not disclosing that the house he was sold was located near a railroad track. He fretted about the noises made by trains passing by his newly acquired house — whistling, rumbling, chugging, hissing and screeching in the stillness of the night forcing him into sleeplessness.
But the only railroad train sounds in Pound Ridge were those in Emory’s recording, “Rail Dynamic,” one of the first titles in his highly acclaimed series called “Sounds of Our Times.” Emory was the first to embed onto vinyl the realism of a passing train. The recording brought him fame and won for him the applause of the growing but highly critical audiophile community.
Stereo recording today basically means “left-right.” A hovering helicopter on a stereo recording, or Emory’s recording of a train, will run from left to right and back. For Emory, stereo is much more than hearing sound from the far left to the far right of the soundstage. He wanted depth and space with an entirely different image.
For his train sound recording, he placed his microphones on both sides of the track, creating a space under it so that the cable wouldn’t be cut by the passing train. This binaural technique affords the mikes to record the passing train on the same plane of movement. As the train bulldozes forward, it gives the listener the experience of being run over by a train. This was far better than a “left-right pass-by” recording. Binaural captures refined tinges being produced by diverse moving parts on either side of the train; adding an accurate dynamic to the reproduced sound on playback.
In order to play back binaural disks, a listener would need two separate pick-ups (LP cartridges), both of them monaural. Since the two pick-ups on a playback system had to be kept in very precise alignment with each other, Emory also had to invent and market a system that could do this. He created a “binaural phonograph adaptor” or “binaural clip-on” which functioned as an outrigger that could be used on an existing standard tone arm to hold a second pick-up.
While this process was far superior to a normal stereo playback, it proved cumbersome to some and too complex for many audiophiles. The process was fine-tuned over time, such that the playback process would no longer need separate pick-ups. Clarity Records had successfully done this with Mary Stallings’s “Fine and Mellow” vinyl album.
The phrase “thinking out of the box ”fittingly applies to Emory Cook. This audio engineer and inventor used his “Sounds of our Times” and Cook Laboratories record labels to demonstrate his philosophy about sound, his recording equipment, and his manufacturing techniques. From 1952 to 1966, he recorded, manufactured, and distributed some of the highest quality audio recordings in the world. The 140 titles on Cook Records include European and American concert music, US and Caribbean popular and traditional music, as well as mechanical and natural sounds. Emory Cook and his wife Martha donated their record company, master tapes, patents, and papers to the Smithsonian Institution in 1990. The legend lives on.
* * *
For comments or questions, please e-mail me at audioglow@yahoo.com or at vphl@hotmail.com. You can also visit www.wiredstate.com for quick answers to your audio concerns.
