Music: Floodlighting Sound

NBC's big Studio 8-H in Radio City was designed by engineers and cursed by music-lovers. Built to stifle reverberation, it was acoustically satisfactory for variety shows, bad for symphony concerts. (The best auditoriums allow tones to bound about and scatter until they attain depth, warmth.) Toscanini accepted 8-H uncomplainingly, but admitted it was "too sec." Musicritics complained about the studio's woolliness. Last fall, when Leopold Stokowski took over the NBC Symphony, he balked at playing in Studio 8-H, induced NBC to accept an inconvenient, expensive substitute: moving the orchestra to Manhattan's Cosmopolitan...

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