Thanks to George Conklin for photo and commentary:  

One of the little known pioneers of WTIC (although not an "alumnus"), Gerry Dyar, died Monday 08/07/2017 in Vernon.

Gerry, a buddy since Bulkeley High days (class of 1949) , was an MIT guy and audio engineer at Margolis Audio at 28 High Street in Hartford.

In the mid 1950's Gerry engineered the first WTIC stereo broadcast.  It was a sacred concert from an Episcopal church in Hartford.

He 'flew' an array of two microphones in front of the balcony, and used a fine tuned home Ampex stereo recorder.

In those days engineers had not figured out how to create a stereo broadcast signal, so it was left and right on the AM and FM transmitters.

Listeners at home had to position two radios to hear the stereo.
    
Those of us in the WTIC studio heard the broadcast on matched receivers.  We could hear some left/right shifting of the sound field because the limiters in the phone lines to transmitters were not matched.

Here is Gerry recording on a 'tuned' consumer Ampex for the first stereo broadcast on WTIC.  He is monitoring stereo on the headphones.  We only had one Ampex speaker, and could not use it during performance.

I think I remember Patricelli complaining about the intro / outro by a person using some Latin.  Patricelli did not like the 'accent'. He was used to hearing church Latin.  Our narrator was a Protestant Seminary professor - classic academic Latin.

George

From Dick Bertel:

Gerry undoubtedly laid the groundwork for the  stereo broadcasts that followed.

In 1957 I was selected to host the Sunday Stereo Concert series.  By now, commercial stereo LPs were available although some of them were mono recordings remixed for stereo effect.

The audience was instructed to tune their AM radios to 1080 and their FM radios to 96.5. The news desk in studio F (Grove Street Building) was equipped with two RCA 44 BXs about three feet apart suspended from a pipe over the desk.  I sat between them and read my script.  Because I was essentially talking into the empty air, my voice sounded hollow, as I recall.  However, when I got to the word "stereo" I was instructed by producer Bill Marks to address the left mic first and slowly turn my head to the right mic, stretching out the word "s-t-e-r-e-o".  Listeners at home must have assumed I was on roller skates as I deftly moved from their AM radio to the FM receiver.

Fortunately, the series only lasted a few weeks.

Dick