Stereophony Sampler, Vol. 2

Well, I seem to have a thing for Second Volumes of stuff... take for example this stereo demonstration tape from an outfit called Stereophony Incorporated, out of St. Paul, Minnesota. This demo tape, done in wonderous 2-track stereo, dates from around 1957, I believe, and has the usual fluffy pop and light classical things that audiophiles of the day drooled over. And, even though there is a tracklist of sorts on the inner liner notes, all the tracks are still announced, by a Real Announcer Guy! I can never get his name, but he's got one of those Real Announcer Voices...

The music... there is, of course, an assortment here, including a nice cut of gospel singing, and something called a "Voicestra". The explanation is this: a Voicestra is a group of human voices backing up a solo instrument. Novel, I think... very 50s. The remaining cuts do a good job of showing off just how spiffy and keen stereophonic music could be. Remember, a vast majority of the recorded library out there was monophonic, except for those audio geeks that had the stereo tape machines. Also consider that people were paying anywhere from 8 to 15 1950s dollars for tapes that had a run length of 15 to 20 minutes! The norm for the time was a mono tape that you could reverse... to get to the B-side, or 2nd mono track, you had to flip the tape over... 2-track stereo tapes only played ONE DIRECTION!

To give you an idea of what was out there, I have also included scans of the leaflet catalogue that came with this tape. Granted, this isn't the offering of a COlumbia or an RCA, or even a Bel Canto, but they were a quality house, even though they only lasted in the consumer market for a relatively short time.

I dubbed this on the Otari, as it does the best job for 2-track tapes (duh! silly me, thinking I was gonna get a decent dub off of a 4-track machine!)... I switched over to 4-head mode after the dub and boy! What a DIFFERENCE! This makes me want to go back and re-dub the Dixieland In Stereo tape...

So, I give you the full size scans of:
The front of the box,
The back of the box,
One side of the inner liner notes,
The other side of the inner liner notes,
One side of the catalog leaflet, and
The other side of the catalog leaflet.of the reel box.

Sit back, put on your audiophile smoking jacket, and enjoy the Stereophony Sampler Volume 2!