Mondo Knows Facts
Stereo was patented in 1931
Alan Blumlein described two channel recording years before anyone sold it His aim was making sound follow the picture in cinema. Two microphones and two loudspeakers gave direction as well as tone. Household stereo arrived in the late 1950s, when both speakers and records became affordable. It sits in Mondo's music collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
Where this comes from
Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.
Go further
More facts like this
The moving coil loudspeaker arrived in 1925Chester Rice and Edward Kellogg described the design still used in most speakersThe first recording was played back on tinfoilEdison's phonograph cut sound into a sheet wrapped round a spinning cylinderThe stereo LP arrived in shops in 1958The major labels moved from one channel to two within a single yearAlan Blumlein patented stereo recording in 1931His patent covered coincident microphone pairs and the mid-side techniqueEarly Beatles stereo mixes were made without the bandThe group sat in on the mono mixes and left the stereo versions to engineersOne valve microphone defined the studio soundThe Neumann U47 has been behind countless vocal recordings since 1947
🎵 Musicfact 162 of 200
← → to keep reading, or swipe
Tags: stereo, history, inventions
Stereo was patented in 1931: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- Alan Blumlein described two channel recording years before anyone sold it. The figure is taken from Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a music fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Music shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.