Thanks Have Fun
I think we had some more detailed discussion of this in Part I of this thread. There is an interview with Arnold Sugden in Part I.
Also, in case it makes it a bit clearer what Thorens said about Sugden...
Pioneer of Single Groove Stereo
Arnold Sugden and His Remarkable Connoisseur Turntables
Arnold Sugden was the enthusiastic managing direct
or, technical director and owner of the Connoisseur
company. The tireless innovator tackled practically
everything concerning sound reproduction and recording.
Pick-up arms, cartridges, amplifi ers, loudspeakers,
and even microphones all came out bearing the
Connoisseur label. As early as 1950, Connoisseur was
manufacturing a 33/78 rpm turntable, a high quality
pickup with interchangeable heads, and a two-speed
disc recording system.
All this is the more remarkable if you know that
Sugden left school at age fourteen and never had any
formal engineering training, wrote Reg Williamson
in the U.S. magazine Audio Amateur. But, from the
outset of his career, he demonstrated a natural fl air for
Connoisseurs name has long been forgotten among most audiophiles, and in Germany this
brand never played a role. Despite this, A.R. Sugden (Engineers) Ltd., at home in Englands
Brighouse, West Yorkshire, garnered a reputation for itself in three decades as a manufac -
t urer of record playing products with unique detail solutions. Something that hardly a soul
in England knows is that Connoisseur had already presented the fi rst stereo records to an
amazed public in 1956 two years before the big record companies came out with them.
Arnold Sugden
continued working
in his shed even
after retiring
engineering design of an intuitive kind that is all too
rare these days. No matter what the problem, Arnold
Sugden would come up with an ingenious answer and
a high precision product a remarkable man, very
much in the Edison tradition.
The fi rst commercial tape recorders represented serious
competition for the record. Two-track tape heads
even allowed recordings to be made in stereo. When
Sugden experienced his fi rst stereo presentation on
magnetic tape in 1952, it both fascinated and alarmed
him: Was this to be the end of discs and the product
range he had so carefully nurtured? Or could the improvement
of stereo reproduction be captured on disc
and a new lease of life be brought to the long-playing
record?
Combination of Lateral and Vertical
Methods of Recording
To answer the question, the head of the company
fi rst got himself a tape recorder with two channels
and made some stereo recordings. He decided that
it should be possible to record both channels in one
microgroove by driving the cutting stylus laterally with
one signal and vertically with the other, while retaining
the independence of the two signals. That was in no
way a natural conclusion, for in the U.S. Emory Cook
had already experimented with binaural records
on which each channel was cut as a separate set of
tracks. They required two cartridges starting on the
disc in synchronization to reproduce the recorded
material. Cooks records were, nevertheless, an ergonomically
impractical idea. Sugden thought that the
main advantage of his system would be that it would
play for the same length of time as a mono record.
Additionally, a cartridge conceived for a single groove
stereo would also be able to reproduce mono records.
It was just after the coronation in 1953 that Mr.
Sugden constructed his fi rst moving-coil cutter head,
and the fi rst experimental lacquers were cut, Roger
Maude reported in the English magazine Hi-Fi News.
The 15Ω coils required only fi ve watts to drive them
fully, which was well within the capabilities of the
Connoisseur 20W amplifi ers he was using. This cutter
head was continually refi ned to give good separation
and a bandwidth extending up to 15kHz. Sugden still
needed a corresponding cartridge for stereo reproduction,
so he simply took two crystal cartridges, mounted
them at right angles to one another, and coupled the
two styli with a fi ne wire link.
Connoisseur type B
three-speed turntable
Sensation in Londons Waldorf
After three years work, the lacquer stereo discs were
ready for public demonstration. On May 26, 1956,
people stood in line in London to experience the sensational
spatial sound coming from one single groove
at the British Sound Recording Associations exhibition
at the Waldorf Hotel. The record industry, which had
not shown much interest up to that point, stormed
Sugden to get sample discs and cutters. EMI even
sent a large, mobile-recording studio to his factory so
sample discs could be cut from a variety of their own
master tapes. However, two years later an international
committee agreed to adopt the 45/45 system
of groove modulation, proposed by Alan Blumlein as
early as 1931, and Connoisseurs system was dropped
in the interest of uniformity.
Despite this setback, Connoisseurs business developed
positively within the framework of the English
hi-fi boom. In 1959, the variable three-speed turntable
Type B featuring a synchronous motor was introduced
to the market. The chassis was crafted in a heavy zinc
alloy die casting, well ribbed for strength, and fi nished
in silver hammer. It was drilled to take the Connoisseur
Super Lightweight Pickup. The full twelve-inch platter
was lathe-turned and manufactured of non-ferrous
material. Underneath the turntable, a large stroboscope
disc was fi tted that could be viewed through a