Symphony No 3 in D major Op.29 The Polish
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Suite No 3 in G major Op. 55
Paris Conservatoire Orchestra
In March 1953 Decca's chief engineer Arthur Haddy engaged Roy Wallace who had worked for ten years on binaural sound for Lawrence Savage ( a pioneer of binaural recording). Wallace developed a technique using three microphone, left, centre and right, mounted in a triangle on a Dexion frame. Roy Wallace recalled that it was a crude attempt to recreate the artificial head that he spent about a year making. When Arthur Haddy first saw the array, he remarked: "It looks like a bloody Christmas Tree!" Ever since the array has been known as a "tree". Since Wallace used three microphones but only two recording channels he adapted Decca's six channel mono mixer to two sets of three. In an effort to keep the work on binaural recording secret early recordings were made in continental Europe. Wallace used three Neumann M50 microphones on his "tree", for these sessions. The M50 being an omnidirectional microphone required that they be separated by boards being placed either side of them. This enabled the sharply directional sound stage that Wallace required to be created. Decca's tape library filed Wallace's binaural tapes in a new BN ( for binaural) series. We have therefore described these recordings as binaural rather than stereo.
Adrian Boult remarked that on the 6th June 1955 he was in Paris because "the Decca Record Company chose to send an elderly British conductor to record Russian music with a French orchestra."
