It’s four o’clock in the morning, the night is saturated with a drizzling rain, and I’m somewhere outside of Frankfurt in Germany, sitting in a mobile recording truck parked behind a concert hall. The beer ran out a couple of hours earlier, so now it’s just me, the engineer, and Lou Reed, along with a couple of grey plastic heads and a set of earphones. Lou’s got the earphones on and he’s laughing to himself. He pulls them off his head and hands them to me.

"Fantastic, listen*” he says. I slip on the phones, and close my eyes. The sound of Lou’s sqll-out concert three hours earlier hits my ears, But it’s not just the playback of a live recording, there’s something different in the sound. In fact, with my eyes closed, it sounds and I feel like I’m sitting in the best seat in the hall. The sound surrounds me, I can feel the height! of the roof above me, the chairs scraping in the row behind me, the rock and roll pouring in at me just like I was sitting in the concert hall.

Manfred Schunke nods at Lou and me and our cackling laughter. He knows what we’re hearing and in his ' remote Germanic fashion he approves of our enthusiasm. Out of the corner of my eye , I can see him patting the grey plastic heads as he puts them in their carrying cases for the night.

Manfred has developed a binaural system of recording sound that is quite different from normal stereo. It has the effect of quadrophonic sound, but is a two-channel signal completely compatible with stereo recording and records. The secret is his grey plastic heads.

“We measure the heads of 40 Germans and from this we, get ap average, then we build the head,” Manfred tells Lou and me as we get back to the hotel' in search of more beer. “God,” I think, “what happens if my head’s not the right size for all this?” But I just nod and Lou nods and we catch the amusement in each other’s eyes.

Lou discovered Manfred and his plastic heads somewhere in the Black Forest and now he’s taken Manfred out for the first time to record the first binaural rock recordings in a concert hall. “We call it artificial head, 3-D sound,” Manfred explains.

Binaural sound or artificial head, 3-D sound or whatever you want to call it, is achieved with the grey plastic head. What happens is that inside of each ear cavity of the head there is a microphone

so the head is hung in the concert hall and “hears” the show just as someone’s ears would hear the show. Since depth perception and other phenomena of sound that make sound sound real are peculiar to the human head the plastic head hears the way humans do. For instance, you know a particular sound is in a certain position in relation to you because, the sound does not reach each of your ears at the same time or with the same frequency. So a sound on your left is going to reach your left ear before your pght ear and is going to, sound louder and fuller to your left ear than your right ear and your brain is going to tell you the sound is to your left. The grey plastic head has ears too, 1 and it hears the same way, so when you play back the signals recorded through the head’s ears on headphones, the sound will be almost identical to actually having been theje. The result is very three-dimensional and not at all ‘like normal stereo. It sounds alive and it sounds like you were there as it happened.

CBS Labs and others who have experimented with binaural sound find fault with it because it does not function • with the accuracy and clarity of stereo, since stereo is an» artificial, relative event created a£ an electronic phenomenon. The faults of binaural sound (and there are several, if you’re usea to stereo) are the same faults you find with sound when you hear if live—the bass frequencies are very monophonic, the high frequencies do weird things, and there is a significant level of ambient ’ sound information. But it’s rock and roll real, and as such, it is the most exciting thing I’ve ever heard when it comes to recording sound. It is, in truth, much, less “artificial” than stereo and head and shoulders above the bullshit quadrophonic process that a bunch of old fnen who never listened to rock or loved it have failed to foist on the public. Jr •

So Lou and I have pursued' this crazy binaural system, and we’ve learned a lot about it. Lou flew Manfred into New York for* Lou’s sell-out shows at the Bottom Line and we taped a King Biscuit Flower Hour in binaural. Now, binaural works, whether you play it back over a cheap tape recorder or 6ver the radio or on a thousand dollar hi-fi. But you have to be wearing “open aiir” headphones to get the full effect (headphones that don’t have solid cups that close off your ear). Binaural will also work to some degree with closed or cup headphones and on stereo speakers, but you really only .get the effect with a pair of lightweight open phones.

JVC, Senheizer, and a few other firms now offer binaural recording systems—for a couple of hundred dollars they’ll sell you a plastic head and a set of microphones built into a headphone assembly to stick in the ears. They’re not as precise as Manfred’s, but they will accomplish the same effect. If you record with them and walk around the head while you’re taking, when you play back the tape it will sound like someone is walking completely around you as they speak.

Since We’ve begun to pursue binaural, Lou and I have encountered problems with maintaining the integrity of the binaural and stereo signals and using them together: We’ve been working on his next album for January, which will be basically stereo (although there will be some binaural elements).' v But we’ve also discovered that there is a whole other way of recording music and other sounds which needs 'to be explored. Binaural recordings of symy phony Orchestras or choral works iri cathedrals would; for instance, leave any comparable stereo or quadrophgnic records standing still, mainly because the binaural recordings would sound just like being there.

It’s difficult to describe binaural in print. And sometimes it’s difficult to translate binaural into a commercial recording, but Lou showed me, and I want to tell you that there is another way of recording rock arid roll that may well be the answer to a new kind of live and studio album. At the moment, it’s just Manned and his two plastic heads and Lou and me wno know about it, plus the noveltyTieads from JVC and Senheizer, but I can’t help but believe after hearing it, that the time is not far off when you’ll be buying records that say they were recorded in binaural sound, and when you listen to them you’ll have an experience that is more human and • more real than any recordings available, to date.