Re: [ARSCLIST] Early stereo mass market tapes

[Roger and Allison Kulp <thorenstd124@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Tom,
 Didn't bel Canto reissue most of this stuff on Lp ?
I'm sure we've all seen those cazy spectrally-coloured
vinyl records they issued.Many of these were in
print,though not on coloured vinyl,well into the 60s.I
must admit I have seen very few of the stereo
demonstration recordings on tape.Mostly on vinyl.Last
year,I scored one of the real classics of this genre
(?) ,"Bob and Ray Stage a Stereo Spectacular" on
eBay,for six bucks.
                        Roger Kulp

--- Tom Fine <tflists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi Roger:
> 
> Yes, I totally forgot Omegatapes and Audiophile. The
> record labels don't "count" in my interest 
> because of course they all got into the tape game.
> I'm more interested in these little companies 
> that sprang up to do tapes only. Some did morph into
> record labels but it seems like most just died 
> out after an initial "hifi bug" craze.
> 
> Here's a for instance. Bel Canto did original
> recordings back in the mid-50's, before they became 
> one of the major duping houses in the 60's. One of
> their tapes is "That Geller Feller" by Herb 
> Geller. I think it was recorded while Geller was
> under contract to Mercury/Emarcy but the material 
> was never issued on Mercury to my knowledge. It's a
> good album, along the lines of Geller's mid-50's 
> Emarcy records, which were all mono. So, what
> happened to the Bel Canto masters and was this stuff
> 
> ever reissued? That's the kind of info I'm seeking.
> 
> Another thing I'd love to know is what ever became
> of some of those crazy stereo demo tapes like 
> "Sound in the Round"? I have the quarter-track
> version, which is vastly inferior to the little 
> snippet of the 2-track version that's on Ampex's
> original 2-track stereo demo tape they included 
> with their first consumer tape machines.
> 
> There were some funny, interesting and creative
> stereophony tricks and gimmicks going on in this 
> very early tape era that never made it to the stereo
> LP era two years later. By the time 
> quarter-track became the consumer format, the tape
> business seemed to be much more just an adjunct 
> to the LP business like 8-tracks and then cassettes
> would later be. The next time tape was king was 
> the very end of the LP era, right before CD's became
> the mass format. The two years between LPs and 
> CD's, if memory serves, cassettes outsold LPs
> because the Walkman was king and the boombox was
> still 
> a very strong presence.
> 
> -- Tom Fine
 

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