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first commercial broadcast stereo
When the first stereo LP's came out in the fall of 1957, it greatly increased the source material for in-home stereo, which was, up to that time for me, prerecorded tape (played on a VM 710 with 12AX7 tape-head preamp and an in-line stereo record/play head added).
That advent of the stereo record raised the awareness of stereo and so soon in the Philadelphia area WFIL and WFIL-FM began a 30 minute nightly broadcast in stereo -- as I can now frame it, sometime between late 1958 and early 1960.
Sure, all those phasing issues were there. My setup included a Heath FM-3 tuner heading a sorry hi-fi chain and a home-brew octal-tube AA5 modified with a 6AL5 as a voltage-doubler detector (lowered the distortion I had hoped, right wa2ise?).
Anyway, the thrill of the situation for an electronics nerd was the ability to cobble together a system and hear stereo over-the-air.
It didn't last long though. How many listeners could they have had?
BTW: The Fisher 800 had the dual tuning but was replaced with the FM-stereo 800B with just a single tuning knob.
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