Saturday morning stereo

[Hartley118]

Originally Posted by Ted Kendall

Possibly on the original 1958 experiment (I don't have the file to hand), but not on the regular Saturday transmissions, as an examination of Genome will show. The Home Service was transmitting normal programme. The Third and TV frequencies had no scheduled programmes on Saturday mornings.

Many stereo experiments parallelled Saturday Club on the Light, as programme budgets for stereo were severely restricted. Items such as Stanley Unwin giving an illustrated talk, providing his own sound effects, were a godsend.

Found it! - in the Radio Times archive. Just to add interest, it wasn't on a Saturday, but on Sunday May 11th 1958 . The programme was titled 'Lend Both Your Ears'
https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/page/d3c...a75e1f?page=24

I've attached a photo of the relevant bit of the Radio Times page with the instructions on how best to listen.

Martin

[Davewantsone]

Well it was Saturday morning. The broadcast was from the BBC Light programme (Saturday club which had lots of live music) providing the LH channel and the TV or Third programme the RH channel. The Radio Times confirms this.

[Hartley118]

Here's a nice classic period video broadcast on May 10th 1958 to prepare listeners for getting the best out of that first experimental stereo broadcast the following day.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/how-to...-radio/zh6p7nb

Martin

[BristolHoxa]

Originally Posted by Tractorfan

Hi,
A while back, possibly in the 90s, the Beeb were celebrating some milestone or other and broadcast a programme simultaneously on both radio and television, to give the impression that the radio and TV sets were 'talking' to each other.
I think the late Peter Cook was the male radio voice and Josie Lawrence was the female TV voice.
For some odd reason, I only recorded the radio part, and have Mr. Cook speaking and then listening to silences.
Anyone else recall this?
Cheers, Pete.

Arena Radio Night 18/12/93 - I have the TV part on VHS...should we synch it and produce a stereo version (say TV left and radio right)?

[edit] someone has done it! I haven't looked yet to see if Cook puffing his cigar through the centre circle of Test Card F is there yet...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...BsrfRp90H7uYW7

[Synchrodyne]

In the late 1950s/early 1960s twin transmitter stereo experimental era, it appeared that the different transmitter combinations used in different countries were the result of using what was readily available rather than what might be preferred from ab initio considerations.

In the USA, the FM-AM combination was the norm, I suspect because at the time, many radio stations operated both an FM and an AM transmitter in the same market. As a result, the hi-fi equipment makers produced tuners and tuner amplifiers with separate and independently separately tuned FM and AM sections that could be used to receive FM-AM stereo transmissions. These usually also had provision for the future addition of FM multiplex decoders on the assumption that a single-transmitter FM system would eventually be approved by the FCC. The AM sections of these dual tuners were often of the high quality, wideband type.

In Japan, the AM-AM combination was used, I imagine because FM was then very new in Japan and there were very few transmitters. The equipment makers thus produced tuners and tuner-amplifiers with dual independent tuners. Usually one of those was of the conventional FM-AM type, and the other was AM-only, for the second stereo channel. With a pair of valved AM tuners in the same box, they (necessarily) had different IFs. As in the American case, these AM tuners were sometimes of the wideband type. Dual-tuner equipment was apparently available until around the mid-1960s.

In the UK case, as already noted, the use of a radio channel (both FM and AM) for one channel and a TV channel for the other appeared to be because that was what was available on Saturday mornings when the experimental transmissions were made. This ersatz arrangement was I think less likely to elicit dedicated equipment from the UK makers. However, somewhat fortuitously, the Jason/Jasonkit JTV TV sound tuner arrived on the scene in 1958 3rd quarter, and so provided a means for high quality access to the TV sound channel side of the stereo broadcasts.

Attached are some Wireless World items relating to those broadcasts.


Cheers,

[Richard_FM]

I heard a Cliff Richard Concert was televised with the sound in quad, I assume on two BBC radio stations each carrying 2 channels. I assume this was around the same time as the other 1970s broadcasts with quad.

Were any quad tuners made with the ability to tune into two different stations?

I've heard about the Arena radio evening, but somehow managed to miss it when it was on.

The BBC4 repeats of Top Of The Pops are in the era when the sound was simulcast in stereo on Radio 1, which I remember worked quite well at the time.

There was an experimental show a few years before which did a similar set up.