I had an HMV stereogram when I was 16 and I thought it was the bees' knees. It had a BSR autochanger which played 78s and 45s as well as LPs,and an FM radio which could pick up taxis and ambulances as well as the ,to me, wonderful stereo Radio3.

Then about six years later I went to work in a hi-fi shop and learnt that massive teak cabinets weren't the acme of modern sound reproduction. Mine eventually suffered a Gotterdammerung immolaton a few years ago on the family bonfire, to make room for the family PC workstation. .

please don't put ideas into my head...

A friend of mine  once said she couldn't decide whether the  remark on  peanut packets , ' young children can choke on peanuts ',was a warning or a tip.

I'd guess that this might be an advertisement from a non-specialist publication, Mr Grew, and therefore aimed at the general masses at large: no doubt the copy for music-lovers' magazines would have been rather different. This is presumably from the late fifties or early sixties, an era when musical tastes were very different: these are what would now be termed 'light music' and I rather think came from the American Capitol label. To achieve big sales, companies had to interest as wide a range of listeners as possible, and then persuade them that stereophonic sound would be a worthwhile investment; compared to some of the other early novelty offerings (a ping-pong game and steam locomotives thundering through one's lounge, for example) these were virtually legitimate. A cousin of mine, already lurching towards hippydom at this juncture, revelled in a stereo sampler by Manuel and his Music of the Mountains, of all unlikely purchases.

It was conveniently forgotten in those early days that the Grek word that the first half of the term derived from means 'solid'; most early demonstration discs relied heavily on everything being very far left or right, with precious little in the middle, but there was already some excellent work being done with true stereo capturing the sense of a solid sound stage; the Decca Peter Grimes (released in stereo in 1959) is an excellent and oft-cited example, but more staggering still is the recording of his Noyes' Fludde, issued a bare two years later by the tiny British company Argo, soon to be subsumed into the Decca fold. Recorded 'as live' in Orford church, it portrays an immense, palbably three-dimensional, sound stage with a huge amount of spatial information: I've used it regularly at hi-fi exhibitions and it's remained an important part of my armoury when I consult for high-end maufacturers.

Of course, you meant considerably shorter ?

Hah.  Indeed.  For those of us who did not go to the trouble of checking out the source of our comments (ho ho ho), I had accidentally enclosed "considerably" in between image tags instead of italics tags.