I probably shouldn't have called this article "The History Of Monitors", because the name can be a little confusing, but it's important in telling the story. In the recording field, "monitors" refer to properly set up speakers. The way you listen to music (at home, in a studio, in your car, etc) has an awful lot to do with how your monitoring system (aka speakers) are set up. In fact, it's probably the most crucial element in bringing the music to the listener - you can enjoy a good record a lot more with properly set up quality speakers as compared to a little computer speaker or tiny earphones. Though you might not expect it, monitoring didn't start out with two speakers - and in fact, it's not ending up that way either.

When the process of recording and playback was being developed, the concept was simple: record a single sound, play back a single sound. You needed only one device to convert the recorded energy (whether it was on wax cylinder or acetate or whatever) to physical energy - pushing air back and forth so you can hear the sound. One speaker was all that was necessary - more commonly known as a monophonic (mono=one, phonic=sound) system.

It wasn't until the early 1960's when engineers came up with a way to take advantage of 'spatial' sound - you could define (on a one-dimensional plane) WHERE a sound is via with two speakers instead of one. Some of the early rock records (the Beatles are a good example) took literal advantage of stereophonic recordings and put half of the band on the left speaker and the other half on the right; this wasn't actually the intent - it was meant to give a new "spread" to singular sounds. It wasn't until the early 1970's before it's art was actually mastered.

A flirtation with quadrophonic sound systems in the early 1970's failed (two separate needles on a record, four channels on a reel-to-reel tape deck), but the idea never really went away; in the early 1990's, some companies came up with neat tricks that would make the ear hear things coming from behind or off to an extreme side with just two speakers (QSound, for example) - but this was a patch for a more elegant solution. Only recently has "surround sound" literally added a dimension to hearing sounds by using additional speakers.

The new "5.1" Surround system is a set of *6* speakers - front left and right, rear left and right, a center speaker and a subwoofer (for super low frequencies) that is slowly making it's way (with the help of a new technology called DVD) into home listening systems. Still, this type of system is still two-dimensional. Perhaps it's all you would need to watch an exciting movie or hear a big record, but I'm waiting for the remaining dimension - having speakers above and below...