ABSTRACT
At the September 2000 Audio Engineering Society convention, the AES Historical Committee featured its first historical exhibit, aptly named ‘When Vinyl Ruled’.1 In a room in a distant wing of the Staples Centre, Los Angeles, far from the trade show exhibits of the latest audio technologies, visitors could see displays of vintage gear, photographs, advertisements, and a working control room set-up from the 1960s complete with an Ampex Model 300 3-track, half-inch tape recorder, a custom-built Universal Audio 12-input, 3-output vacuum tube recording console, designed by legendary engineer Bill Putnam, three McIntosh tube amplifiers, three Altec 604 speakers – even a classic ‘Recording’ light for effect. Most importantly, the organizers had procured direct analogue half-inch tape copies of original 3-track studio masters of several classical and popular recordings, including Elvis Presley’s ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight?’, Peggy Lee’s ‘Old Devil Moon’ and cuts from Henry Mancini’s original score for the TV series ‘Peter Gunn’. I had listened to those records many times before, but hearing the playback in mono, stereo and discrete three-channel sound was a transcendent listening experience. The music contained air, dynamics and an acoustic identity that imparted a sense of physical space. In contrast to later twentieth-century CDs, the recordings sounded threedimensional, like artefacts of an earlier time, products of the 1960s Space Age in which they were made.
