Word: sonics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...when stereo was born. Some items may appear again on reissue lines, such as Angel's Great Recordings of the Century. But most will not. Nor does electronic rechanneling of the old recording into stereo solve the problem. "To put it bluntly, electronic stereo is presently nothing but sonic vandalism, a fact recognized and even privately admitted by the record companies themselves," says High Fidelity magazine.* Thus wise collectors are buying up the choice items still available. Among them...
Time Lag to Infinity. The sonic boom-boom room by Howard Jones was lined with aluminum panels that responded with chimes, thuds and snatches of live radio programs as viewers moved in front of light-sensitive holes in the panels. Spectators first wiggled their fingers in front of the holes, ere long were prancing about frenetically in an attempt to activate as many different ones as possible at the same time. When they realized how silly they looked, they progressed to Terry Riley's Time-Lag Accumulator. There each viewer individually recorded laughs, hoots and remarks on a tape...
...appears that the much-derided sonic treatment of crops may indeed be a sound agricultural technique. A Canadian woman scientist working under carefully controlled laboratory conditions has found that sound-treated wheat seedlings grow three times as large as those given conventional care...
Beyond the sound barrier, the main obstacle to commercial supersonic flight is the miles-wide swath of broken windows, cracked plaster, frazzled nerves and aching eardrums that might be left behind by sonic boom. Resigned to it, airlines are planning either routes over water and desert or subsonic speeds over populated areas. Either solution could cut deeply into the time-distance economies that could otherwise be gained by flying huge planes faster than the speed of sound...
...appears that operators of supersonic transports may have a happier choice. On the basis of preliminary experiments, two scientists at California's Northrop Corp. believe that the sonic boom may not after all be a necessary evil. Last week, at a meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Aerodynamicists Maurice Cahn and Gustav Andrew suggested that an electric field projected in front of a supersonic plane might eliminate the boom, and lessen drag as well...