"During two-channel stereo recording, two microphones are placed in strategically chosen locations relative to the sound source, with both recording simultaneously. The two recorded channels will be similar, but each will have distinct time-of-arrival and sound-pressure-level information. During playback, the listener's brain uses those subtle differences in timing and sound level to triangulate the positions of the recorded objects."

The goal of stereo sound is to reproduce the differences in audio between your left ear and your right ear that allow you to sense location. This way, even if the audio is still coming from just one or two locations, your brain will be tricked into thinking that the sound is all around you. When you listen to music on headphones, you don't perceive it as coming from the headphones and being blasted into your ears. It sounds like you're inside of the music, and it's taking up your whole room. And that's because your headphones are sending slightly different sound waves to both of your ears, replicating the differences in sound waves you would hear if you were actually in the room with the instruments.

But here's the thing. It's very easy to send different sounds to each ear when you have headphones pointed into your ears. Play one sound in the left ear, play a slightly different sound in the right, done. But it is much harder to control what your ears hear when the device isn't right up against your ears. There are lots of alarm clocks that support stereo sound. They have two speakers! But the speakers are right next to each other, in basically the same location in the room. So rather than your left ear hearing the left speaker and your right ear hearing the right speaker, both ears hear both speakers. There's still a difference between when the sound waves reach one ear and reach the other. But that difference is because of where the clock is in the room, not because of how the left and right audio channels are separated in the actual audio. (By the time they reach your ears, they're basically no longer separated at all.) So you perceive the sound as coming from a little tiny object in a specific spot in the room, same as if the clock just had one speaker.

So what's the solution? The solution is to move the two speakers apart. If the left speaker is actually on the left of the room, and the right speaker is actually on the right of the room, it's more likely that you will hear the left sounds in your left ear, and the right sounds in your right ear. Then, when there is a difference between those sounds that comes from the audio itself, you are more likely to perceive that difference properly, which makes you feel as though the music is coming from all around your room (not just from two speakers).

There are many stereo (and surround) sound systems that have multiple speakers you can place around your room. That way, left audio comes from the left, and right audio comes from the right, resulting in an immersive experience without headphones. But this multi-part device design is a lot more rare on alarm clocks.

But it's not unheard of! Today, I want to show you four alarm clocks with separate speakers that you can position for optimal stereo sound. This is quite the rabbit hole we're about to go down, and we'll kick it off by looking at the...

Sangean WR-50P

Sangean is a Taiwanese manufacturer of radios, and somehow, despite all odds, they very much still exist. In fact, they are a little bit beloved, and this model, the WR-50P, retails for about $215 and is a top pick of Wirecutter.

This machine is a radio first, alarm clock second. It's quite a robust radio, with a giant extending antenna for FM reception, connections for an external AM antenna, digital tuning with presets and a "seek" feature, support for RDS (a feature that shows song names and other info for FM radio), a remote control, optional outputs to headphones or a subwoofer, and obscure radio-related settings beyond the scope of this post. And it also has Bluetooth and an aux-in jack if you want your own music instead of radio!

On top of that, for something that isn't an alarm clock first, the WR-50P is a surprisingly robust alarm clock! Sangean equipped this machine with a date display, programmable snooze duration, dual alarms that can go off once / daily / on weekdays only / on weekends only, and the ability to choose the alarm volume and radio station independently per alarm. That's a lot!

But the reason we're discussing this machine is its two-piece design. You can actually buy just the main unit (shown on the left in the photo above), the WR-50, and get all the features but with just a single speaker. Or you can buy the combined set, the WR-50P, which includes the extra speaker shown on the right (model SP-40) for stereo sound. The secondary speaker pulls power and audio from the main unit using a 6-foot cable, which is not as long as one might hope, but is long enough to get some distance between these two machines so you can point that left speaker at your left ear, and that right speaker at your right ear.

The photo below shows all the rear connections of these machines, including the red jack that allows you to connect the main unit and the extra speaker.

Sangean says on their website, "Though some may say the radio is a thing of the past, we believe that it remains a timeless medium that plays a part in every scenario. The beauty amplified in sound waves holds no prejudice towards age or group and can be produced effortlessly by our products." That's a lovely sentiment.

You know what does hold prejudice toward a particular group? The choice to label this machine's secondary speaker as the "Slave Speaker." Literally. Look at the photo above and read the back.

Wikipedia explains that master/slave terms are often used in technology to describe situations where one device controls another. AND THOSE TERMS SHOULDN'T BE USED, FOR OBVIOUS REASONS.

Don't worry though, y'all. I'm sure Sangean didn't mean anything by this, because they are a Good Company with Corporate Social Responsibility Programs:

Look! They have "office vegetation management." That absolves all their sins.

Anyway. Rant over. I do want to say one thing about the WR-50P before we proceed. If you're using this as a radio first and alarm clock second, finding space for both speakers isn't terribly hard. You could put them on a table or your bookshelves. But if you're using this as an alarm clock first and radio second, this setup might be harder to position. You could put both speakers on your nightstand, but then they're both pointing at the same side of your head, which hurts the stereo separation.

You could put the main unit on your nightstand and the secondary speaker on a nightstand on the other side of your bed. But the 6-foot cord isn't long enough to traverse a king-size bed (which Google says is 6 1/3' wide). Plus, does your partner really want a giant speaker that doesn't do anything else taking up half their nightstand? They already have to make room for their own alarm clock and all their other tchotchkes. Double-plus, you probably want the main unit on your side of the bed, but Sangean has the units factory-programmed so that the main unit is always the left channel, and the secondary speaker is always the right channel. You're out of luck if you're on the right side of the bed.

Another option is to put both speakers across the room, past the foot of your bed, as if you were finding space for a TV. You could control the system with the remote control, but checking the time from bed would require a lot of craning your neck. I don't know that the WR-50P is designed to provide both the stereo experience and the alarm clock experience at the same time. Clearly, we need a better option.

Sony ICF-IR7

And we have one! Meet the Sony ICF-IR7. Introduced circa 1991, the ICF-IR7 has huge, one-and-a-half-foot tall speakers. They’re huge for good reason. Each speaker unit contains two actual speakers: a regular one, and a woofer, which is a speaker that produces bass sounds. So you get stereo separation and improved bass. My back-of-the-napkin math suggests the inflation-adjusted cost of this system is somewhere between $400 and $700, but at least you were getting your money’s worth.

Because the speakers are huge, you probably wouldn’t want them on your nightstand. Indeed, Sony designed this system so you could place the speakers across the room from you, in both corners of your space. You can see this arrangement in the diagram above. But like I discussed with the Sangean system, putting your alarm clock across the room creates problems. The only way to control it is with a remote control, and who wants to hold a remote in the air every time you need to change a setting? And changing settings or checking the time would get really frustrating if the screen was all the way over there.

But unlike Sangean, Sony thought of this. Meet the "remote commander."

The remote commander is the third piece of the ICF-IR7's puzzle. For the record, "remote commander" isn't a term Sony invented for the ICF-IR7. They used to use that term all the time to describe their remote controls. (What can I say? Sony is weird. Exhibit A: the Rolly.) But unlike your typical remote control, the ICF-IR7's remote commander looks like a typical alarm clock.

Sony's solution for moving the speakers away from your nightstand is to deconstruct the alarm clock. The remote commander includes all of the system's controls (except the Mega Bass dial), and it also includes the clock display. And it lives on your nightstand, so that the controls and display are accessible even if the two speaker units are far away.

In deconstructing the typical alarm clock, Sony had to do a lot of weird stuff, and most of the weirdness owes to connectivity. You see, the two speaker units of the ICF-IR7 connect with wires, which isn't too weird. Below are the rear panels of both speaker units. The left speaker plugs into a wall outlet, and two wires connect the left speaker to the right speaker, which draws its power from the left speaker (so it doesn't need a separate outlet).

But it's one thing to run wires across the back of your bedroom between both speakers. You might be able to hide them behind a console or table. It's another thing to run wires across the side of your bedroom, to connect the speakers to the remote commander. So Sony doesn't do that. Instead, the remote commander runs on batteries (though you can plug it into an outlet with an optional AC adapter), and it sends commands to the left speaker unit wirelessly, via infrared. This is where things get really weird.

Most wireless devices in our home use Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or another radio-based wireless protocol. These protocols are super-handy. They can send a ton of data in two directions quickly. They rely on radio waves that can pass through walls and objects, so the Wi-Fi doesn't go out when someone walks between the computer and the router. And they're digital, which means signals rarely get distorted, and communication streams don't interfere with one another.

But in 1991, Wi-Fi would not be introduced for 6 more years, and Bluetooth for 7. There were home devices that used radio-frequency-based ("RF") wireless communication. But they were analog, which meant interference was common. (If you and your neighbor both had a cordless phone, and your phones were communicating with their base stations on the same wireless channel, it was possible for you to hear your neighbor's conversation over your cordless handset. Yikes.)

Sony smartly decided to avoid the mess of early-90s RF communication and use infrared instead. But using infrared introduces its own cornucopia of complexities. Infrared is digital, but it can't send nearly as much information as fast. And because infrared waves work similarly to light waves (they're even produced by tiny almost-lightbulbs), they can be blocked by walls or objects. (If you've ever used a remote that you had to point at whatever you were controlling, that's a telltale sign the remote used infrared.)

Because an infrared signal can be easily blocked by an object and therefore missed or interrupted, infrared is best used for communications that don't last that long and can be repeated if necessary. When we listen to music with a Bluetooth speaker, our phone has the music and transmits it to the Bluetooth speaker. But imagine the remote commander trying to transmit AM/FM radio to the speakers over infrared. I genuinely don't think it would be possible to transmit that much data that fast over infrared. And if someone walked between the speakers and the remote commander, the radio would go out. And this design would run down the remote commander's batteries absurdly fast.

So Sony does something you might not expect. Even though they pulled the clock display and controls into the remote commander, the radio receiver itself lives in the left speaker unit. In the picture above of the backs of the speaker units, you can see a little wrapped-up wire poking out to the left of the left speaker. That's the FM radio antenna. And in the first photo of the ICF-IR7, you can see a display on the front of the left speaker. That shows the radio frequency. The left speaker even has a battery compartment for a battery backup, even though the left speaker has no clock, because the radio presets are stored in the left speaker, and this was an era when affordable memory chips needed electricity to store info. So the battery backup is just to retain radio presets in the event of a power outage!

The ICF-IR7 tries to limit the amount of infrared transmission between the left speaker unit and the remote commander, to avoid wasted batteries and missed signals. So the left speaker unit doesn't transmit the radio frequency back to the remote commander. This means that you can tune the radio or switch through presets from your nightstand, but if you want to check the exact radio frequency, you have to go read the tiny screen across the room. (Alas.) Also, rather than the left speaker transmitting the current time to the remote commander, or the remote commander transmitting alarm settings to the left speaker, the timekeeping circuitry and alarm times both live inside the remote commander. At the alarm time, the remote commander just sends a signal to the speakers to cut them on. (This means you can't have any objects between the remote commander and the left speaker unit when you go to sleep. But Sony was smart and included multiple infrared transmitters in the remote commander, pointing several directions, so it doesn't matter how you have the remote commander rotated. One of the transmitters is always pointed at the speaker.)

There's one more thing I have to mention! The ICF-IR7 does not have a built-in CD player. Which honestly seems like a huge omission for something that cost this much and was already this complicated! But Sony hadn't forgotten about CD fans. If you scroll back up and look at the back of the left speaker unit, you'll see white and red jacks, which are commonly used on older electronics for analog audio input or output. Sony designed the ICF-IR7 so you could connect one of Sony's Discman portable CD players. You use a cable that plugs into the Discman on one end, and plugs into the white-and-red jacks on the other end, and now you can hear your CDs through the speakers!

But Sony went even further. Discman players were often designed to support a remote. Not a wireless infrared remote or anything like that. This was a wired remote, sort of like the kind on wired earbuds nowadays that has buttons for volume and track. In the photo above, you can see a jack on the left speaker unit called "DISCMAN REMOTE." If you connect this to the remote jack on the Discman, the ICF-IR7 can send wired signals to the Discman to control it, such as by changing the track. (I've seen many clocks with auxiliary audio input jacks, and almost none can actually control the audio device like this!)

So what this means is that you could press the previous/next track buttons on the remote commander. And the remote commander would send an infrared signal to the left speaker unit. Which would in turn send a signal out the "DISCMAN REMOTE" jack through a wire to the Discman. Which would cause the Discman to change the track, and then it would send the track audio back out through a wire to the red-and-white audio input jacks on the left speaker. Which would then play the left-channel audio, and send the right-channel audio through the gray-and-red wires to the right speaker, which would play it. That's at least four different connections happening to play one song. I cannot imagine anything more Rube Goldberg-ian, and yet, it works!

Panasonic RC-CD600 Twin Dreamer

Phew. Okay. I promise nothing else we're going to discuss in this post is as complicated as the Sony ICF-IR7.

In fact, look at this Panasonic system from 2001. Even at a glance, it's way simpler. Ignoring the regular-looking remote control, it has just two pieces, rather than three. (And the device on the left doesn't look too complicated. Though that's a tiny bit deceiving.)

We've established that the ICF-IR7 is so complicated because it needs a way to bring the controls and clock display to your nightstand, even though the speakers are across the room. But this system, the Panasonic RC-CD600, doesn't need to do that because the whole system lives on your nightstand.

See? The main unit resides on one nightstand, and the "sub unit" (as Panasonic calls it) resides on the other nightstand. This still results in great stereo separation, because the left unit produces sounds you hear from your left, and the right unit produces sounds you hear from your right. The main unit, which features tons of buttons and two different displays, plugs into a wall outlet, and a hardwired cable from the sub unit plugs into the back of the main unit to draw electricity and data. You can hide this cable behind your bed for a seamless-ish installation!

But imagine you share your bed with someone else. Wouldn't it be a hard sell to convince your partner to put a speaker on their nightstand too? They already have to find nightstand space for their alarm clock, after all.

Oh, but Panasonic thought of that.

The RC-CD600 is designed to take the place of two alarm clocks. It has two alarms that can be set for different times, which is not in and of itself unusual. What is unusual is that one alarm can sound through the speaker on one side of the bed, and then the other alarm can sound through the speaker on the other side of the bed. The diagram above shows this quite elegantly. You can see the speaker on the husband's side of the bed waking him up at 6 so he can go off to work, and then the speaker on the wife's side of the bed waking her up at 8, a little later. (How deeply heteronormative!)

Let's dive a little deeper into how this system works. First, let's look at the main unit.

The main unit is the brains of this system. It includes one speaker, two displays (one for the clock and one for the audio system), tons of buttons, the infrared receiver for the remote, the radio receiver, and the CD compartment. (Unlike Sony's system, this system has CD playback built-in.) The main unit has a pretty robust feature set, including CD playback modes, a radio with digital tuning and presets, equalizer presets, a headphone jack, and an alarm that (I think) has a programmable CD track or radio station, plus a programmable volume level.

Next, let's look at the sub unit.

The sub unit also has one speaker. (This unit is a regular speaker, not a subwoofer, despite the name "sub.") It has a hardwired cable that plugs into the main unit, and thoughtfully hides in a compartment on the back where you can store excess length of cable. And, crucially, the sub unit includes two buttons: a snooze doze button, and a button to stop the alarm.

If you go back up to the main unit, you'll notice the side of that unit has a button called "Speaker Mode." This button is the magic of the entire system. It toggles between three playback modes: dual, main, and sub.

In dual mode, audio plays through both the main and sub units, with proper stereo separation. (You can actually put either unit on either side of the bed, then slide a switch on the back of the main unit to choose which unit is on the left, and which is on the right!)

But in main mode, audio plays through the main unit only. And in sub mode, audio plays through the sub unit only.

You can set the speaker mode in advance for each alarm. So let's say you and a partner share the bed, and the main unit is on your side, and the sub unit is on their side. You can set your alarm to main mode, and the alarm will sound only on your side of the bed, reducing (though obviously not eliminating) the chance that it will wake up your partner too. And you can shut the alarm off using the buttons on top of the main unit.

Then you can set your partner's alarm to sub mode, and the alarm will sound only on their side of the bed. And this is what's really cool: because the sub unit also has snooze and alarm stop buttons, your partner can snooze or stop their alarm from their side of the bed, as if they had their own alarm clock. They don't need to go to your side of the bed or use the remote. All the controls they need are right there!

You'd think it wouldn't get any cooler, and yet, it does! The speaker mode doesn't just apply to the alarms, it also applies to regular playback. You can listen in dual mode and enjoy full stereo sound from both units. Or, if you want to fall asleep to music without disrupting your partner, you can listen in main or sub mode, and the sound will only play on your side of the bed, not your partner's.

Isn't this awesome??? You get stereo sound with amazing separation, and it takes up less space in your room and is less complicated than the Sony ICF-IR7. And because the speakers are on your nightstands, Panasonic offers features that Sony can't match, like alarms and playback on just one side of your bed, to take the place of two separate alarm clocks.

There's just one little problem. The sub unit has a speaker, and it has controls for the alarm. But it has no clock display. So whoever is on the side of the bed with the sub unit has to crane their neck to read the time off the main unit. That makes the system a little worse to use than two separate alarm clocks on either side of the bed.

When I had posted about the RC-CD600 back in March (now archived on Google Drive), I thought this was the end of the story.

But it's not. I found an alarm clock that works like the RC-CD600, but with one huge improvement, despite being 13 years older.

Are you ready to see it?

Nakamichi TM-1 and TM-2

This is the Nakamichi TM-1. It's an an alarm clock radio from 1988, made by a now-defunct manufacturer of high-end audio equipment. And let me tell you, this thing is high-end.

The TM-1 features digital radio tuning with 8 presets, the ability to select the radio preset and volume for the alarms independent of what you were last listening to, buzzer and radio alarms that gradually get louder over 5 seconds so as not to scare you out of bed, a headphone jack, and a sensor that adjusts the display brightness automatically based on the room's brightness. This would be fancy now, so the idea that there was a clock with all these features in 1988 is unheard of.

And apparently this clock radio had excellent sound quality. There are still folks talking about this device online: on online forums, on Reddit, on personal websites (replete with Nakamichi's marketing materials for this clock), and in the YouTube video below.

Let's take a brief tour of the TM-1.

The front of the TM-1 has the radio controls. The top has the snooze button, alarm controls, and a few extra buttons like the radio on/off button (which also stops the alarm). The right has four big, chunky dials for volume, treble and bass (fancy), and stereo balance (foreshadowing...). The back has a mysterious port (again, foreshadowing...), a headphone jack, antenna connections, and switches for the FM mode and the alarm volume. (The alarm volume only having 3 settings is a point of contention, as one person notes here how even the lowest setting is way too loud. Alas. Weirdly, I think the alarm volume switch applies to the radio alarm too, so you can't fine-tune the radio alarm volume like you can the radio playback volume.)

Now, these features are all well and good. But you might be wondering, where is the stereo sound? The TM-1 actually only has one speaker, so it can't produce stereo sound on its own. But look again:

OK, so we're looking at the same thing...wait. Where did the buttons on the front go?

Y'all, this is not the same device. We've been looking at the TM-1. This is the TM-2. The TM-2 Stereo Companion, to be exact.

Take a closer look:

Nakamichi did almost exactly the same thing that Panasonic did with the RC-CD600, except 13 years earlier. The TM-2 is an additional speaker that plugs into the TM-1 and sits on the nightstand on the other side of your bed. That way, you get stereo sound with good separation between both channels!

Like the sub unit in the Panasonic RC-CD600, the Nakamichi TM-2 has just two buttons: one to snooze, and one to stop the alarm (doubling as radio on/off).

But the Nakamichi has one leg up over the Panasonic:

Both units have clock displays!!!!!

This solves my biggest complaint about the Panasonic system. With the Nakamichi system, one person can have the main unit, and one person can have the TM-2 Stereo Companion. And the latter person has a speaker, controls to snooze or stop the alarm, and a time display to check in the night, making this a truly suitable alternative for a separate alarm clock.

Nakamichi even went to the trouble of including a second brightness sensor for the second clock display on the TM-2. They also include a switch on the TM-2's rear panel to disable the display, which could be handy if you don't have a partner and bought the TM-2 just for stereo sound.

The extra clock display isn't the only difference between the Nakamichi and Panasonic systems. The sub unit is included in the Panasonic system, but the Nakamichi TM-2 is sold separately from the TM-1, so some folks just have the TM-1 with no stereo sound. The Panasonic's sub unit draws power from the main unit, but the Nakamichi TM-2 has a second power cord that needs to be plugged in. The Panasonic's sub unit has four wires that plug into the main unit, but the Nakamichi TM-2 has a single multi-pin connector that plugs into the aforementioned mysterious port on the back of the TM-1. Panasonic includes a compartment to store the extra cable length of the sub unit if you don't need it, but with the Nakamichi TM-2, all that extra length just hangs out and creates a big tangling mess, as you can see in the photo up above.

Most importantly, the Nakamichi system doesn't allow you to set the speaker mode in exactly the same way as the Panasonic system. When you listen or wake up to radio, it is always played through both units in stereo. (Unfortunately, Nakamichi doesn't let you choose which unit plays the left or right channel. According to the YouTube video I embedded above, the main unit plays the left channel, which would mean it has to go on the left side of the bed.)

On the other hand, when you wake up to the buzzer alarm, alarm 1 plays through the TM-1 main unit only, and alarm 2 plays through the TM-2 Stereo Companion only, so that you and your partner can wake up separately. Neat! (When the TM-2 is not connected, both alarms sound through the TM-1.)

Nakamichi produced another set of alarm clocks, the Clock Radio 1 and Stereo Companion 1, that work similarly, but I can't find an instruction manual to draw information from, and they appear to be almost identical in functionality to the TM-1 and TM-2 anyway.

TL;DR

Stereo sound is more immersive when the left speaker is closer to your left ear, and the right speaker is closer to your right ear!

At least four alarm clocks have separate speaker units to facilitate exactly this!

The Sony ICF-IR7 jumps through wild hoops in order to connect its "remote commander" and its speaker units via infrared.

The Panasonic RC-CD600 and Nakamichi TM-1 / TM-2 let you put the speakers on nightstands on either side of your bed, allowing the systems to provide stereo sound and take the place of two different alarm clocks!

That's all!

I realize this was a very technical and very dense post, so if you made it this far, thank you for sticking with me and allowing me to introduce you to these truly one-of-a-kind clocks.

And remember, if I explained anything poorly, you can review the instruction manuals for these clocks by clicking the "Instruction Manuals" link at the top of my blog. I get all this info from the manuals anyway, so feel free to check those out!

See you soon!

Image credits:

Sangean WR-50P: Wirecutter, Sangean

Sangean website: Sangean

Sony ICF-IR7: eBay, eBay, Sony

Panasonic RC-CD600: ManualsLib, eBay, eBay, Craigslist