Stereophonic Sound - Early Broadcasting

Early Broadcasting

Radio: In December 1925, the BBC's experimental transmitting station, 5XX, in Daventry, Northamptonshire, made radio's first stereo broadcast—a concert from Manchester, conducted by Sir Hamilton Harty—with 5XX broadcasting the right channel nationally by long wave and local BBC stations broadcasting the left channel by medium wave. The BBC repeated the experiment in 1926, using 2LO in London and 5XX at Daventry. Following experimental FM stereo transmissions in the London area in 1958 and regular Saturday morning demonstration transmissions using TV sound and medium wave (AM) radio to provide the two channels, the first regular BBC transmissions using an FM stereo signal began on the BBC's Third Programme network on August 28, 1962.

Chicago AM radio station WGN (and its sister FM station, WGNB) collaborated on an hourlong stereophonic demonstration broadcast on May 22, 1952, with one audio channel broadcast by the AM station and the other audio channel by the FM station. New York City's WQXR initiated its first stereophonic broadcasts in October 1952, and by 1954, was broadcasting all of its live musical programs in stereophonic sound, using its AM and FM stations for the two audio channels. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute began a weekly series of live stereophonic broadcasts in November 1952 by using two campus-based AM stations, although the listening area did not extend beyond the campus.

Tests of six competing FM-only systems were conducted on KDKA-FM in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during July and August 1960. The Federal Communications Commission announced stereophonic FM technical standards in April 1961, with licensed regular stereophonic FM radio broadcasting set to begin in the United States on June 1, 1961. WEFM (in the Chicago area) and WGFM (in Schenectady, New York) were reported as the first stereo stations.

Television: A December 11, 1952 closed-circuit television performance of Carmen, from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City to 31 theaters across the United States, included a stereophonic sound system developed by RCA. The first several shows of the 1958–59 season of The Plymouth Show (AKA The Lawrence Welk Show) on the ABC (America) network were broadcast with stereophonic sound in 75 media markets, with one audio channel broadcast via television and the other over the ABC radio network. By the same method, NBC Television and the NBC Radio Network offered stereo sound for two three-minute segments of The George Gobel Show on October 21, 1958. On January 30, 1959, ABC's Walt Disney Presents made a stereo broadcast of The Peter Tchaikovsky Story—including scenes from Disney's latest animated feature, Sleeping Beauty—by using ABC-affiliated AM and FM stations for the left and right audio channels.

With the advent of FM stereo in 1961, a small number of music-oriented TV shows were broadcast with stereo sound using a process called simulcasting, in which the audio portion of the show was carried over a local FM stereo station. In the 1960s and 1970s, these shows were usually manually synchronized with a reel-to-reel tape delivered by mail to the FM station (unless the concert or music originated locally). In the 1980s, satellite delivery of both television and radio programs made this fairly tedious process of synchronization unnecessary. One of the last of these simulcast programs was Friday Night Videos on NBC, just before MTS stereo was approved by the FCC.

The BBC made extensive use of simulcasting between 1974 and around 1990. The first such transmission was in 1974, when the BBC broadcast a recording of Van Morrison's London Rainbow Concert simultaneously on BBC2 TV and Radio 2. After that it was used for many other music programmes, live and recorded, including the annual BBC Promenade concerts and the Eurovision Song Contest. The advent of NICAM stereo sound with TV rendered this unnecessary.

Cable TV systems delivered many stereo programs utilizing this method for many years until prices for MTS stereo modulators dropped. One of the first stereo cable stations was The Movie Channel, though the most popular cable TV station that drove up usage of stereo simulcasting was MTV.

Japanese television began multiplex (stereo) sound broadcasts in 1978, and regular transmissions with stereo sound came in 1982. By 1984, about 12% of the programming, or about 14 or 15 hours per station per week, made use of the multiplex technology. West Germany's second television network, ZDF, began offering stereo programs in 1984.

MTS: Stereo for television

In 1979, The New York Times reported, "What has prompted the industry to embark on establishing high-fidelity standards now, according to engineering executives involved in the project, is chiefly the rapid march of the new television technologies, especially those that are challenging broadcast television, such as the video disk."

Multichannel television sound, better known as MTS (often still as BTSC, for the Broadcast Television Systems Committee that created it), is the method of encoding three additional channels of audio into an NTSC-format audio carrier. It was adopted by the FCC as the United States standard for stereo television transmission in 1984. Sporadic network transmission of stereo audio began on NBC on July 26, 1984, with The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson—although at the time, only the network's New York City flagship station, WNBC, had stereo broadcast capability. Regular stereo transmission of programs began in 1985.