BRILLIANT CORNERS

Stereo is the most successful audio gimmick of all time. While dashboard record players, quadraphonic LPs, and MQA have gone the way of Ron Popeil's hair-in-aspray-can infomercials, stereo remains king. And I am guilty of loving it.

- ALEX HALBERSTADT

That old expression "men love with their eyes" applies to listening, too. Enabled by the advent of a second channel, the fanning out of musicians across a soundstage fills the room and gives the eyes-and not only the ears-something to do. And I happen to enjoy the soundstage. It may be an utterly artificial delight, but who doesn't love hearing a tambourine coming from 10' to the left of the left speaker? So when I came across an article in which someone likened mono to listening to music through a hole in a wall, the metaphor made sense. Why would anyone want their music congealed in a blob directly in front of them when they could hear it separated out in space?

As always, though, it turns out that things aren't quite so simple. A number of listeners I respect-often the very same folks who enjoy low-powered tube amplifiers, vinyl, vintage gear, and horn speakers-consider the soundstage a distraction, or at least a compromise whereby we trade some of the music's life force for a visual spectacle created not by the artist but by the engineer.

I've often wondered what these listeners were going on about. For me, their conviction simply wasn't borne out through personal experience and seemed like one of those perversely contrary hipster positions, like preferring a foot-pedaloperated sewing machine to an electric one. When listening to stereo and mono versions of the same record, I've consistently preferred the stereo mixes (here I'm talking about stereo-era records, not "electronically rechanneled" records from the mono era, which are the sonic equivalent of a bad hairpiece). For me, even early stereo Beatles LPs, and other examples of awkward hard-panned left-right mixes, were preferable to music emerging from a single point between the speakers. So for years I scoffed at mono records from the stereo era as something anachronistic and embarrassing, a sop for Luddites who desperately clung to the past.