Early days of NICAM Stereo

I don't have an account there and, for some reason, it keeps saying I am solving the Captcha incorrectly even though I'm not - any idea what's going on?

Hmm, perhaps try sending an email to the admin? There's a contact link on the Metropol homepage. I've had trouble recently signing up to a forum where the Captcha didn't work.


Failing that, I'd suggest putting them in a ZIP file and uploading to a site like MEGA or WeTransfer.

I've emailed the admin on that site but, in the meantime, I've uploaded the files I have from the site to WeTransfer - they're all available at https://we.tl/3cSDxJdUIK

That's brilliant, thank you very much for uploading them!

By pure coincidence I was rewatching some old (old old old) HIGNFY today and noticed that series 1 was in mono, and series 2 onwards (from Autumn 1991) was in stereo with again some interesting mixing decisions - Ian and guest on the left, Paul and guest on the right, Angus in the centre, reflecting the real life setup. You can still hear it through the bad compression on here:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xro33f

I wonder whether they set up the stereo image that way because that's how it's done on radio panel shows? On Just a Minute and similar the panelists are often panned slightly off centre.

I don't see how else it would be done, you want to match what's being seen on screen.

The sudden change on in HIGNFY might be because of a change in studio, it did change a few times until it settled on The South Bank

Last nights TOTP on BBC4 seemed to have a stereo track in places - could it be, then, that it was being producted in stereo as early as August 1984?

Hmm, I'm listening to it now and to me it sounds like fake stereo, though it still folds down to mono. I don't suppose they were experimenting with the same system Yorkshire did.

Also worth considering that in the early days of stereo many broadcasters ran in M/S rather than L/R for both production and recording - so the recordings could have Mono Sum and Stereo Difference tracks.

Have to say that M/S is a genius way of doing stereo while maintaining backwards compatibility.

Here's a 2 minute extract from the start of the show:




https://up.metropol247.co.uk/092017/1506803142_22413625.mp3