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Funny how companies work. RCA, who pioneered the CED Videodisc, had a working prototype with a half-hour capacity per side of each disc in 1973, but didn't feel confident enough in the product (among other reasons) to pursue it further. Yet they wen't whole-hog into Quad!

And let's not get started on how the original designs for the Compact Disc featured a four-channel mode!

Have you ever seen the picture quality those original prototype CED players produced? It wasn't until 1976 that RCA could show barely acceptable quality B/W video and even when they got to color, the discs could only play around 10 minutes (despite having a claimed 30 min play time) before they had deteriorated so badly that any further play was not possible - and the sapphire styli broke after only a few plays, permanently damaging the disc. It wasn't until they abandoned the multi-layered plastic/copper/styrene/oil lubricant disc structure for the carbon-loaded PVC to make the disc conductive and then added a thin, spray on silicon lubricant, that acceptable replicas became possible - of course, in the final consumer disc the resolution was only 230 lines of luma with 25 lines of color resolution - in reality, RCA didn't consider those to be drawbacks - they actually felt that consumers would be so infatuated with the novelty of a videodisc that they would gladly tolerate massive disc defects! Plus, process improvements with time would give RCA something "new" to cause consumers to upgrade their discs and players! It's such a typical RCA attitude of the time.

JVC's wonderful VHD format had picture quality (and real field-sequential 3D with LCD shutter glasses) that looked much better better due to the 6 and 12-line digital comb-filter techniques in disc mastering to 'dig out' a trough in the luma to carry the hetrodyned chroma. And they employed a custom noise reduction system for the audio from the very beginning, so VHD discs audio was dead silent. I have 2 VHD players, one of them 3D and many 3D discs (like Jaws 3D, etc...) and I love the VHD format. The 10-inch disc size meant it was cheaper to make than a Laserdisc or CED and while it didn't have the video/audio specs of LD (VHD's specs were 270 lines of luma, 50-60 lines of chroma and full-bandwidth stereo audio), - since the VHD stylus was flat and broad, covering 10-times more disc surface area than the CED stylus, and there were no grooves to wear out, it's lifetime was over 5000 hours and the discs required considerable abuse to wear them out too - they didn't even use a lubricant like CED - all that combined means, to me, that VHD would have been a good seller had JVC and the VHD consortium not pulled out of the American market at the last minute - they even had over 300 titles already pressed for the American market at the VHD plant in Los Angeles (I have the introductory player and title catalogs). The VHD plant was converted to LP and CD manufacturing in 1984, while all pressed VHD discs were destroyed.

Further improvements to RCA's disc came from abandoning the electron-beam and photo-resist mastering and instead using the 'brute-force' method of half-speed piezo-electric cutting on a copper substrate, which allowed them to make high-quality disc masters of sellable quality. The electron-beam mastered discs had such poor picture quality, with so many defects (and a mastering time that was 250 times slower than real time!) that it could never be sold as a consumer product.

At the same time, MCA/Universal demonstrated an actual pressed, replica disc, with full NTSC color bandwidth and stereo sound, to the press in 1972, played back on a self-contained machine (i.e. no 'hidden' electronics). A few weeks later, Philips showed their optical disc - it was from a glass master - they hadn't worked out how to make replicas, and the player was a strung together monstrosity. They had to stop the demo every few minutes when the laser began to mistrack. It took Zenith and their idea of using a speaker voicecoil holding a lens to create an automatic laser focusing system. MCA used an air-bearing that needed a small vacuum pump - and it didn't work too well, although the air-bearing design WAS used in their DRAW disc mastering system. Since MCA didn't have any experience with consumer electronics, they were courting Kodak to make the players - it soon became apparent that advanced laser optical disc players were somewhat beyond Kodak's manufacturing experience of making slide carousel projectors! That's when MCA decided to team up with Philips - it helped that both companies had relatively similar designs - the main differences being that Philips wanted a rigid disc and MCA wanted a flexible disc (10 mils thick). I have one of the flexible discs and it requires another regular LD to be placed on top of it to play properly. It's about as thick as 3 to 5 sheets of printer paper and contains a 10 minute demo of the Polaroid Land Camera as well as a tour of the MCA DiscoVision mastering and pressing operation. I have several single-sided test pressings too (the double-sided disc wasn't created until 1977, delaying the consumer market intro by a year).

I wish I could find some of the MCA/Pioneer PCM disc pressings - they were using the Jordan code for encoding, with decoding electronics contained in an external adapter that connected to the MCA DiscoVision PR-7820 and PR-7800 industrial players via the parallel port. Before they switched to PCM encoding, Philips experimented with time-division multiplexed FM audio for their "ALP" (Audio Long Play) version of the videodisc. They were claiming one hour of 8 discrete channels per disc side - or two hours of quadraphonic. The standard NTSC and PAL vertical/horizontal sync were used so that consumer players could play the discs with only an outboard adapter being needed.
 
Hello everyone,

Thanks for your feedback and interesting stories. It's always a great read from such a great inspirational time
where lots of great music was born. Keep it up. Best regards, Journstyx.
 
I would like to jump in here too to ask Disclord and all of those who have insights into the actual days of quad development and execution to continue posting because it is all very fascinating to us quad nuts.

Please don't ever think you might be posting too much or posting information which might not be interesting to the rest of us because, believe me, you aren't.

Thanks,
Doug
 
I second that and Disclord I'm happy to hear you are writing an article about Dolby and SQ history. I look forward to reading it.
 
I second Doug & Jefe's comments. Since joining QQ earlier this month, I am in awe of the technical knowledge of Disclord and so many others here. I thought I knew a lot about quad & multichannel. Perhaps I should call myself Linda Schultz, because I feel I know NOTHING compared to many of you. Keep those technical posts coming.

Linda
Queen of Quadriphony
I would like to jump in here too to ask Disclord and all of those who have insights into the actual days of quad development and execution to continue posting because it is all very fascinating to us quad nuts.

Please don't ever think you might be posting too much or posting information which might not be interesting to the rest of us because, believe me, you aren't.

Thanks,
Doug
 
"We know nothing! NOTHING!"

(The above indicates how old we all are!)
 
I second Doug & Jefe's comments. Since joining QQ earlier this month, I am in awe of the technical knowledge of Disclord and so many others here. I thought I knew a lot about quad & multichannel. Perhaps I should call myself Linda Schultz, because I feel I know NOTHING compared to many of you. Keep those technical posts coming.

Linda
Queen of Quadriphony

Thank you all for the compliments - they make me blush because I feel that I'm only a talented amateur in what I know. I wish I was an E.E. so I could understand schematics and the actual 'nitty gritty' operation of stuff like VCA's much better - I frustrated Martin Willcocks to no end in having him help me get up to speed on vector spaces and matrix algebra - which I still don't understand at all - I understand 'just enough' to 'figure out' what's going on inside a decoder, etc... And I'm dyslexic when it comes to numbers so that can frustrate me to no end - all though high school I never understood why simple math was such a struggle for me and it wasn't until I was in my mid-20's that I was diagnosed as being dyslexic - but only with numbers. Letters are no problem - but even dialing a phone can cause me problems. So I have to read and re-read anything I write that has numbers in it.

I know as much as I do about quad simply because I have time on my hands - when I was 17 a drunk lawyer rear-ended my car, seriously damaging my back - I had many surgeries over the years and all that 'down time' gave me 'study time' to figure out quad stuff. And I had to 'live it' as it happened in the 70's - what I mean is, I knew nothing about quad in the late 70's/early 80's. Then, a mail-order firm we bought LaserDisc's from, Starship Audio Industries, was selling off Fosgate's remaining stock of the Fosgate Tate II 101A's for $249, so my dad bought me one. I didn't know what "logic steering" was, or what "SQ" or even the "Tate DES" was; I just wanted surround sound for my LaserDisc's like they had in the movies. So, I had the Fosgate and was really happy with it when, about a year or so later, the first Dolby-branded surround decoder, the Surround Sound Incorporated SSI-360 made its appearance on the scene. Since I didn't know about logic, I had no idea that the SSI unit was a simple non-logic device - it had the Dolby MP Matrix logo on the front and that's all that mattered - it was an 'official' licensed Dolby decoder, just like the theaters used! (or so I thought!) So I lusted after that, but it was over $400 at the time so I couldn't buy it. Then Sanyo came out with a stand-alone Dolby Surround decoder that not only had that all-important "Dolby Surround" logo, it also had a built-in amp for the rear channels and a cool looking green and red visual display that 'grew' as the front or back channels predominated. And all the articles in Video, Video Review and Stereo Review stated that the 20 millisecond time delay in 'official' Dolby Surround decoders was mandatory for best performance, so when the Sanyo went on sale for $179 at Silo Electronics in Albuquerque, I jumped and bought it. Almost from the start I realized something was 'different' between the Fosgate 101A and the Sanyo - when a sound appeared in Left Front it also seemed to appear at full level from both surround channels - so I kept lowering the level of the surrounds (which had never been a problem with the Fosgate!)

Then, one weekend my dad and I went down to the library's main branch in downtown Albuquerque - Parking was free on Saturdays, so that's when we went. I discovered that the library had Radio Electronics, Stereo Review and High-Fidelity magazine on microfiche going back to the 1950's - somehow, I stumbled across an article called "Matrix Quad - How Good Is It?" - it talked about SQ and QS as well as CD-4 and Peter Scheiber's initial demonstrations. Going through the library's LP collection I found a LOT of quadraphonic records, mostly in the CBS SQ format - so I had to have an SQ decoder (yes, I'm an idiot - I didn't realize that the "SQ" position on the Fosgate 101A was the same "SQ" system as the records or the articles were talking about). So, I scoured second-hand shops and the Goodwill U-Fix It Corral and I bought (for 5 bucks) a Radio Shack SQ decoder - it even had the SQ logo on the front. Got it home, played some SQ records through it and was totally disappointed. Back to the library to read more - I discovered I needed an SQ decoder with "Front-Back Logic" - well, what do you know, the Goodwill U-Fix It Corral had a Pioneer receiver with Front-Back Logic SQ. More disappointment again! Hey, maybe this SQ format really sucked and that's why it's not around any longer??? Back to the library where I found an article by Len Feldman about the QS Vario-Matrix - and what do you know, the Audio Clinic, a local electronics repair shop that sells off equipment that people don't pick up or refuse to pay repairs on - they had a Sansui QRX-6500 - and it was a Vario-Matrix decoder - the first Vario-Matrix decoder on the market in fact. I didn't know it was only a "Type B" decoder - but it did have a front-back Vario-Matrix position for SQ called "Phase Matrix" - and I was shocked at how well it decoded SQ as compared to the Pioneer receiver's Front-Back SQ Logic. The Sansui totally kept Center Front vocalists out of the rear channels. QS decoding performance wasn't so hot though - although I could hear that there were 4 channels being decoded from the few QS records I had borrowed from the library, there just didn't seem to be enough separation between each channel, other than CF to CB and vise-versa. Again, the library's Microfiche came to the rescue with an article (again by Len Feldman) about SQ Logic and it talked about "Wave-Matching" logic being combined with the Front-Back Logic to create what was called a "Full Logic" SQ decoder. There was a picture of the Sony SQD-2020 decoder (but with an awesome looking wooden case around it like my Sansui receiver had - was that wood-wrapped Sony SQD-2020 ever sold that way here in America?) - and what do you know, The Audio Clinic had a Sony SQD-2020 for $50 - they had replaced all the caps and resistors with high-quality versions and even retrofitted the SQ phase-shifters with 1% precision components (the measurement sheet that came with it showed that the phase shifters went from a tolerance of 10 degrees to only 2-3 degrees over most of the bandwidth) - that's when I also found out that the SQE-2000 was originally planned to be sold as a 'companion piece' to the 2020 decoder, but that CBS had talked Sony out of doing that and letting them (CBS) market the encoder directly to radio stations instead. The technician at The Audio Clinic had the letter to dealers outlining the change in marketing in his files and gave me copies - which, I've sadly since lost!. The other changes made to the unit were to take off the (CBS recommended) blend resistors between the front L/R and Back L/R channels - in their place they put variable resistors that lead to pots protruding from the back where they had drilled two holes. Another pot was added that worked somewhat like a "dimension" control - as you turn it down the 2020 goes from full logic decoding to basic-matrix, but it keeps Front-Back Logic at full force at all times. Apparently, the mod's were done for some rabid quad fan who had died and his wife told them to keep the unit. They had had it sitting on the shelf for so long the price just kept going down - until I came along and gladly took it off their hands. They threw in the original instruction manual and the full service manual for it too.

So, anyway, there I was, happy with my turbo-charged SQD-2020 - especially the awesome VU meters - when I find another article at the library about SQ logic, this time it was introducing the CBS Vari-Blend to be used in place of the front-back gain-riding logic circuit. And what do you know, The Audio Clinic has an Lafayette SQ-W for $75 bucks. It turned out to be defective - apparently the parts had aged causing the logic action to lose calibration, but since The Audio Clinic gave all their used gear a 30 day warranty, they replaced the leaky caps and stuff and re-calibrated the decoder. I was blown away by the SQ-W - with the SQD-2020 I could often hear vocals quickly move to the rear as a rear source predominated, then snap back to center front. It was quite annoying, especially with records that were worn or had sibilance. They seemed to cause the 2020 real problems keeping Center Front out of Center Back. The SQ-W had no such problems - once in a while I could hear the rear channels blend to mono and then 'un-blend' back to stereo, but it wasn't nearly as annoying as the sibilance.

FINALLY, I came across a 1983 review, in Stereo Review, of the Fosgate Tate II 101A - and it "clicked" for me that this Fosgate that I'd had all along, was the absolute ultimate for SQ decoding. Since I had the Sansui QRX-6500, everything tapped into it nicely for all my quad listening. I got a Panasonic SE-405 CD-4 decoder, but never had a good enough stylus to get decent separation between front and back. Later I was given the Technics SH-400 by QQ Forum member R. Scott Varner, and he gave me the 7-inch CD-4 set-up record for it too, but again, I've never had a good enough stylus to take advantage of it. (it's also thanks to R. Scott Varner that I have the pristine CD-4 copies of "Earthquake", "Jaws" and "Poseidon Adventure", plus the instructions for the prototype CBS Paramatrix decoder and the instruction manual for the Sony SQE-2000 Encoder - oh, and the service manual for the Technics SH-400 that included a letter from Panasonic to the demodulators owner about bypassing the RIAA stage of the Quadracast Systems CD-4 IC. They said it couldn't really be done)

While I was doing all of the above, I was also going down to the University of New Mexico because they had a patent depository there - I'd spend hours there copying quadraphonic related patents - at $1 per page! The library only charged 25 cents per page for their magazine copies!

So, as you can see, I 're-lived" the whole quad era in a compressed time frame - from non-logic to F/B, to wave-matching to Vario-Matrix, to Wave-Matching with Vari-Blend and finally back around to the Tate DES... with CD-4 thrown in for good measure. My parents thought I was insane, and I think they got tired of hearing "this will be the final decoder I'm going to buy since it is the ultimate in decoding SQ."

In 1987 I got a Fosgate DSM-3606 (if the 101A was good, well then the later Fosgate's, designed specifically for movies, and co-designed by Peter Scheiber, the inventor of matrixing himself, should have been flat-out an amazing sounding decoders for movies. Boy, was I wrong and disappointed. The DSM-3606 simply was not a good decoder - it didn't use any signal cancellation between the L & R front channels and the surround channels and the front soundstage expanded and contracted like a crazy accordion whenever dialog and stereo music or effects were present at the same time. And because high quality four-quadrant analog multipliers are expensive - the number of multipliers or VCA's a crosstalk cancelling decoder needs is the product of the number of primary directions to be sensed and the number of crosstalk bearing channels for every signal to be cancelled, so a typical, and simple, four channel quadraphonic decoder needs at least 8 multipliers or VCA's. Both the National Semiconductor "Tate-I", and Exar Systems "Tate-II", DES integrated circuits used 16, high-precision, four-quadrant analog multipliers: 8 in the 'front' matrix multiplier chip and 8 in the 'rear' matrix multiplier chip, both of which were fed from the Tate directional detector chip and the custom designed Direction Control Interface & in the Tate II design, the Automatic Dimension Control (which were the part of the original Tate IC's that National screwed up during design and manufacture) - the FET's Fosgate was using for the VCA circuitry were low cost and quite noisy, plus they distorted and overloaded easily - depending on the program it could sound as if someone was whistling behind the main soundtrack. The widescreen LaserDisc release of 'The Hindenburg' gave it absolute fits to decode correctly. The background noise level could be so high as the logic action panned sounds across the front soundstage that sounded like the movie had been recorded on a micro-cassette recorder with no form of noise reduction - while other Fosgate decoders might have performed much better - and I have to believe that because of the number of people who love their Fosgates, my experience has been overwhelmingly negative. I always wanted to audition the mis-named "six-axis" decoder in my own system - it was the only Fosgate decoder to have an encoder built in so that AC-3 and DTS titles could have all 6 channels down mixed to 2 channels - apparently, the encoding matrix wasn't too far off from Pro-Logic II, Circle Surround or Lexicon's Logic-7, which is understandable considering all of them use 'real' coefficients and don't use phase encoding. There's not to many ways to make a matrix encoder if phase encoding isn't used. I think the differences mainly lie in the amount of left or right bias applied to the out-of-phase surround signal to encode the L or R surround.

I still think the surround world would be a better place if we went back to encoders and decoders that used complex coefficents - i.e. phase encoding and decoding.

I must apologize for a reply that's much, much longer than the nice notes that preceded it.
 
My SQD-2020 didn't come with a wood case. I did have an STR-7065A stereo Sony receiver from that era. That came with a wood case which was removable. I vaguely recall a wood case being available as an option for SQD-2020. I believe it also fit the matching 2-ch power amp and 2-ch preamp.

OK, some trivia:
1-Ivan Dixon from Hogan's Heroes was a client of mine. A nice, softspoken guy who didn't relish the limelight.

2-Disclord mentioned an article by Len Feldman. When CD's were new, I was invited to a seminar with Len. When he discussed video, he asked, "who knows what NTSC stands for?" I raised my hand and replied "Never The Same Color!" That woke everyone up.

Linda
Video Vixen
 
My SQD-2020 didn't come with a wood case. I did have an STR-7065A stereo Sony receiver from that era. That came with a wood case which was removable. I vaguely recall a wood case being available as an option for SQD-2020. I believe it also fit the matching 2-ch power amp and 2-ch preamp.

OK, some trivia:
1-Ivan Dixon from Hogan's Heroes was a client of mine. A nice, softspoken guy who didn't relish the limelight.

2-Disclord mentioned an article by Len Feldman. When CD's were new, I was invited to a seminar with Len. When he discussed video, he asked, "who knows what NTSC stands for?" I raised my hand and replied "Never The Same Color!" That woke everyone up.

Linda
Video Vixen

And SECAM stands for "Something Essentially Contrary to the American Method,:) while PAL stands for "Peace At Last" since the BBC was trying out so many different versions of color encoding - including NTSC on their old 405-line system. Can you imagine if we had gotten stuck with CBS Field-Sequential color system? While it would have moved to an all-electronic system eventually, it had such low resolution that CBS was proposing horizontal interlacing in a desperate attempt to squeeze out more resolution - it used a 4-field sequence just like the Japanese MUSE Hi-Vision system - except since there was no low-cost field storage back in the 50's, all viewers would be treated to the smearing, blinking and twittering of the horizontal and vertical interlacing interacting and beating against each other and individual pixels in the image! But CBS (well, the brilliant Peter Goldmark) DID invent video "Crispening", which Yves Faroudja adapted to his Super NTSC system and Faroudja DCDI IC's. (for those who don't know about it, Video Crispening sharpens an image without creating over/undershoots, so images look like they have a much higher bandwidth and don't have the white/black outlines of typical 'sharpness' controls)

I wish I could have met Len Feldman - he seems like a cool guy from all that I've read about and by him.

It used to drive me crazy to read magazines like The Pefect Vision and have them bash NTSC, holding up PAL and sometimes SECAM as if they were 'better' in any way. The fact is, except for the higher 625 line count, PAL and SECAM were inferior to NTSC because NTSC can be decoded pretty much perfectly with full bandwidth chroma resolution (and NTSC has more motion detail resolution) while PAL needs extensive pre-processing of the signal to get it into a form that can be decoded with fewer artifacts - NTSC requires no such pre-processing. The only sad part about NTSC is that the vast majority of sets don't decode the full chroma signal - they only decode the 40 line RGB signal and completely ignore the higher resolution Orange-Cyan color detail. I have a Sony XBR that decodes full chroma bandwidth - and on the I/Q axes too! And the comb-filters in my DVD-RAM recorder and Super VHS unit also decode full chroma bandwidth too - interestingly, the 3-line comb filter built into my LaserDisc player is only a 40 line decoder! I can't imagine why Pioneer did that.

Anyway, NTSC delivers the most chroma and luma detail while using the least bandwidth of any color broadcast system. SECAM was a lost cause - heck, a simple fade to black couldn't be done in the SECAM domain due to the silly FM chroma. And it needs all kinds of tweaking to ensure that massive carrier crawl isn't visible on both color AND B/W sets. No LaserDisc's were even made using SECAM - they were all PAL and transcoded to SECAM in the player. And to decode PAL correctly, with a delay-line decoder, destroys 1/2 the vertical chroma resolution - correctly decoded NTSC has a full 480 lines of chroma, even in NTSC decoders that use a notch filter.

During NTSC color systems development, the NTSC experimented with both line-rate and field-rate color phase reversal - but edge-flicker showed up on the edges of objects during high-brightness scenes because they had to rely on human vision to integrate the two phases of the chroma subcarrier (since no long delay lines were available). So, they ended up dropping the phase alternation (only to have PAL adopt it) and switched to Wideband Orange-Cyan/Narrowband Green-Purple color encoding on the so-called I/Q axis.

NTSC was simply a brilliant 'data compression' system for its time and the fact that both SECAM and PAL adopted most of its main principles lock, stock & barrel proves it.

I'm glad I still have my LaserDisc's since they were the only form of prerecorded media ever offered to consumers that delivered full luma and chroma bandwidth - and the discs in the final few years of LD's life, especially those made by Kuraray, used Faroudja's SuperNTSC encoding system to produce even better quality video. Some of the last discs have over 2 MHz of chroma bandwidth and have adaptive diagonal pre-filtering done during NTSC encoding to eliminate color/luma crosstalk on diagonal transitions - i.e. the end of green-purple rainbows in high-detail areas. If anyone is interested in reading it I have Faroudja's SMPTE paper on the SuperNTSC system - most of which was adopted by the networks and LaserDisc plants and used in the Faroudja DCDI IC's in DVD players and digital televisions.

BTW, for those who haven't seen it, here's a pic of the Sony SQD-2020 with the wooden case:
Sony SQD-2020 Wood Panels.jpg
 
Once again, Disclord, your technical savvy amazes me! Len Feldman was a very nice, knowledgeable, entertaining guy.

Actually, that picture is of an SQD-2000, the predecessor to the SQD-2020. The 2020 has upgraded logic and does away with the two rotary switches in favor of 5 push button switches: 2ch, 2-4, SQ, RM & discrete. There is also a stereo/mono switch on the 2020 and a 3-position knife switch replaces the 2 monitor switches. The headphone jacks are also absent on the 2020. Sorry, Disclord, I'm busting your chops again. I'm not being a bitch, just trying to set the record (SQ, of course) straight. SQD-2000 may have come with the wooden case as standard equipment.
Linda
SQueaky Wheel
 
Once again, Disclord, your technical savvy amazes me! Len Feldman was a very nice, knowledgeable, entertaining guy.

Actually, that picture is of an SQD-2000, the predecessor to the SQD-2020. The 2020 has upgraded logic and does away with the two rotary switches in favor of 5 push button switches: 2ch, 2-4, SQ, RM & discrete. There is also a stereo/mono switch on the 2020 and a 3-position knife switch replaces the 2 monitor switches. The headphone jacks are also absent on the 2020. Sorry, Disclord, I'm busting your chops again. I'm not being a bitch, just trying to set the record (SQ, of course) straight. SQD-2000 may have come with the wooden case as standard equipment.
Linda
SQueaky Wheel

You are absolutely right - and right for correcting me - when I made that post this morning I just did a quick Google search for "SQD-2020" hoping to find a pic of it with the wooden side panels - the pic I have is from a bad microfiche copy and not really scannable. I should have noticed instantly that it didn't have the row of push-buttons across the top like mine does - shit, it's sitting not 10 feet away from me right now and I didn't even notice!!! Not that it's an excuse, but it was early and I hadn't had enough caffeine yet. BTW, did you know Sony patented a crosstalk cancellation decoder for both SQ and QS - but I've never been able to discover if they made it to market in Japan or not. The patent uses wave-matching logic for directional detection and then a cancellation system somewhat like the Vario-Matrix to improve channel separation. Martin Willcocks told me that they used Sony's phase shifters for the SQ matrix portion of the Tate prototypes because Sony's phase shifters were so good - better than CBS's own designs and Sony's 5 pole designs used in the discrete circuit decoders like the SQD-2020 and SQE-2000 encoder are accurate to just a few degrees of error over a bandwidth of 30 Hz to 20 kHz, unlike the cheesy three pole Motorola SQ chips with 20 degrees of phase error.

Anyway, keep busting my chops when I'm wrong - I don't want someone to get some wrong idea because of something I was clearly wrong about, you know?

Didn't Len Feldman have some hand in re-engineering the EV Stereo-4 matrix to make it compatible with SQ? The original EV Stereo-4 was an amplitude/polarity matrix only while the re-engineered version used phase shifts and it was done to make it and SQ mutually compatible - for some reason, I have it in my head that he helped with the re-engineering. Or am I totally wrong about his involvement?

Did you ever own an Elcaset? That's a format I would have loved to own (but I was around 10 years old when it was introduced) - and it would have worked great as a quad format too, if they had engineered it that way, since it was basically open-reel in a cassette. I only got into LaserDisc as a kid because my dad and I flew down to Atlanta the day before the format's US launch - we got in line at 4am that next morning and were interviewed by some Atlanta newspaper and we bought us one of the first players at Macdonalds House Of Magnavox (they were given only 5 players by Magnavox - 50 in all were sent to Atlanta for the launch) along with about 30 discs and we flew back to New Mexico that same day (my mom was SO mad dad did that - I think she got a ring or coat or something out of it). I have the full-page ad that Rich's department store took out the day before the launch, for the Magnavox model 8000 player and MCA DiscoVision discs, in the main Atlanta newspaper - the Atlanta Constitution, I think maybe it was called? As we walked to our rental car with our player and discs, we were offered $2000 cash for our player from an RCA representative. My dad said no and I would have cried if he'd accepted - I mean, I'd picked out The Bionic Woman, The Hardy Boys and Battlestar Galactica - oh, and Earthquake, for myself and couldn't wait to get home to watch them! Since the discs were all hand-tested for the launch, all our initial discs were good, but the player only worked about a week before it overheated and ground to a halt. After we had it repaired (the power supply was under-spec'd and burned out) it spent about a week out of every month in the shop undergoing 'modifications' or repairs. When Pioneer finally came out with the VP-1000 it was like heaven - a player that worked all the time and could track damn near any disc you played on it! I still have that first Magnavox Magnavision 8000 player - it no longer works though - it was made in Holland then shipped as a "parts kit" to Knoxville and hand-assembled by employees there. I later found out that the laser and optical section of each player cost over $350 and the actual manufacturing cost to Philips Magnavox was $1270 PER PLAYER - yet they sold them for $685 originally, then upped the price to $750 about six months later! Only 3000 players were sold in the first 2.5 years on the market - if Pioneer hadn't come out with the VP-1000 when they did, Philips was going to pull the plug because they were tired of shouldering the player burden alone.

Sorry for that trip down memory lane - the Elcaset question got me thinking about it...
 
I will try to not get too wordy here \:^) but everything I ever read by Len Feldman was wonderful. He is a brilliant man.

My little old SQD-2050 has the same styling as those bigger units but much skinnier. It works pretty good though.

Doug
 
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I will try to not get too wordy here \:^) but everything I ever read by Len Feldman was wonderful. He is a brilliant man.

My little old SQD-2050 has the same styling as those bigger units but much skinnier. It works pretty good though.

Doug

The 2050 had Sony's typically excellent phase shifters, which is so important for SQ because SQ has correct decoding only over the bandwidth and accuracy of its phase shifting. Something that the magazines never measured or pointed out in equipment reviews. And none of the equipment back then had channel input balance controls to align the decoding to the stylus or record - they treated the input signals as if all sources were the same! Sony was one of the rare companies to provide input level controls on the 2 channel input so you didn't overdrive the SQ decoder and VCA stages... I don't think input balance/level controls really became standard until the Audionics Composer and the Fosgate Tate 101A.

The drawback to the 2050 was that it was a front-back logic only unit - 'half-logic' as CBS called it - so CF-CB separation is no more than 6-9db or so, and only 3-db Lf-Lb/Rf-Rb separation - I can't remember what the fixed blend and resulting separation across the back channels was, but only 10% blend was used on the front channels giving it 20-db Lf-Rf separation, which is all that is needed for maximum stereo imaging.

I've never heard the 2050 - is it a 'slow' unit that you can hear working - shifting the power from front to back? Or is it 'fast' and the logic basically inaudible? With the vast majority of sources I find the 2020's full logic to be basically inaudible - the 'size' of the room sometimes shrinks, but it's a fast design and I don't hear breathing or any volume modulation/pumping as the logic transfers power - the 2020's service manual specs call for a logic attack time of only 3 to 5 milliseconds, which is almost as good as the Fosgate Tate, which is 1-3 ms. Dolby Pro-Logic is 25 milliseconds in its 'fast' mode. PL-II is supposedly faster, but it sounds much, much slower to me - I can constantly hear it working as sounds shift in relation to other sounds becoming dominant.

Does the 2050 have an "SQ Only" mode that bypasses the front-back logic? Or is Logic always engaged when in SQ mode?
 
I want a high-falootin' SQ decoder (Tate?) and perhaps a dedicated QS decoder, as well. Although I was in the business when Tate was introduced, Quad product was not in our marketing plan, whatsoever. In the late 70's, Quad was a pariah. Don't shoot me for blaspheming. If my paycheck depended on Quad, there would literally be no paycheck. Customers never asked for Quad anymore. It was an affluent neighborhood and the #2 volume hi-fi store in the US. We had a soundroom with mono power amps, stereo 10 1/2" reels and turntables with no tonearms. No Quad, it was over. I still loved it, but those Angel titles with a circle around the logo and CBS Masterworks were about it for new SQ software.

At home, there was a great stereo separates system that I won in a contest. Free hifi! I rarely listened to Quad, because the fidelity of my Quad stuff was inferior to my 500W 2-ch system w/MC cartridge. In 2000, I began to build a modern surround sound system that blew my old stereo separates away. I connected some of my old Quad gear and bought an SQD-2020. I was back in the Quad business with a quantum leap in fidelity.

I mentioned Elcaset in a post two weeks ago. Never sold or owned one. I recall several hardware manufacturers making them. We had all the lines. No one cared about Elcaset. It was a fantastic idea that came about 15 years too late. Other than CES, I hadn't seen one. Fast forward to the '80's. One of our service technicians had a Sony Elcaset deck and he kept it at our store for a long time. I tried to buy it off him, but no way. They were long discontinued at that point. BTW: We had many female managers, salespeople and cashiers. Our male salespeople would relish announcing "cervix, line 4" on the store intercom. The ladies were less than thrilled over those pages.

Ah, the good old days when I was a workaholic. I worked six, sometimes seven days a week and loved every minute of it. Only work and parties. No time for a relationship. How foolish!

Linda
Strolling down Memory Lane,
Strewn with Quad gear
 
The SQD-2050 is very smooth and I almost never hear any pumping or other artifacts. It also has wonderful sonics.

I am now listening to Santana's third album and it sounds fabulous! (One of my all-time favorite bands too).

It sure sounds like there is more separation than you indicated above and I believe Sony claimed more than that. I have the specs somewhere. I'll have to look for them. But I can be off-center and still hear the correct things coming from the correct speakers. You know what I mean.

Anyway, I am completely satisfied with it and, although I would love to hear a Tate, I don't really feel I am missing much.

Linda, it sounds like you had a blast in the audio business. I envy you because my experience in retail audio was short lived in the mid eighties as the store (Mountain Electronics) I worked at went under three months after I started there (no wise cracks, please. It was in a poor location). We did have good stuff, though. Carver, Infinity, JBL, Denon, those really good Nakamichi casstte decks, etc. I never liked the look of the Denon tables though with the flying saucers around the platters. \:^)

I guess we have completely sabotaged this thread huh?

Doug
 
The SQD-2050 is very smooth and I almost never hear any pumping or other artifacts. It also has wonderful sonics.

I am now listening to Santana's third album and it sounds fabulous! (One of my all-time favorite bands too).

It sure sounds like there is more separation than you indicated above and I believe Sony claimed more than that. I have the specs somewhere. I'll have to look for them. But I can be off-center and still hear the correct things coming from the correct speakers. You know what I mean.

Anyway, I am completely satisfied with it and, although I would love to hear a Tate, I don't really feel I am missing much.

Linda, it sounds like you had a blast in the audio business. I envy you because my experience in retail audio was short lived in the mid eighties as the store (Mountain Electronics) I worked at went under three months after I started there (no wise cracks, please. It was in a poor location). We did have good stuff, though. Carver, Infinity, JBL, Denon, those really good Nakamichi casstte decks, etc. I never liked the look of the Denon tables though with the flying saucers around the platters. \:^)

I guess we have completely sabotaged this thread huh?

Doug

I found the spec's for the SQD-2050 from its instruction manual. I was surprised to see that it uses the same 10/20 blend on the basic SQ matrix, before the application of Logic, as the SQD-2020 - most front-back logic decoders kept the same 10/40 blend as the non-logic decoders. So Sony was producing a better half-logic decoder than other companies - the Pioneer I had with front-back logic used 10/40 blend and had only 8db Lb-Rb separation.

The 2050's specs are listed as:

*-Left Front to Right Front = 20db (same as the SQD-2020 which means it has 10% blend across the front channels)
*-Left Back to Right Back = 14db (same as the SQD-2020 which means it has 20% blend across the back channels)
*-Center Front to Center Back = 10db (the 10/20 blend increases separation of Cf/Cb from 0-db both ways, in an asymmetrical manner, to 1.8db Cb-Cf and 3.5db Cf-Cb, meaning the front-back logic doesn't have to vary the front-back volume levels as much to achieve the 10db separation since the matrix is already producing 3.5 db of channel separation between CF and CB, so the logic only has to vary the levels by a maximum 6.5db - producing much less audible logic action)

The 2050 spec's don't list the Left Front to Left Back 'corner' separations because no logic enhancement is applied to the corners in that decoder, so it's the basic SQ matrix's 3db separation and would look kinda terrible when listed next to the other directions. That's why, as you probably know, Wave-Matching Logic (or Wave Comparator Logic, as Sony called it) was developed, so that the corner/front to corner/back separation could be enhanced (unlike Sansui's QS, the SQ Matrix doesn't need side-to-side logic enhancement since it's 'built-in' to the basic matrix - that's why basic non-logic decoded SQ has almost no front to back separation; it was sacrificed to provide infinite side-to-side separation in both the front and rear pairs of channels, making SQ an asymmetrical matrix, something CBS was criticized strongly for by people like Michael Gerzon and John Mosley. QS, which is completely symmetrical, has 3db separation all around in the basic matrix without logic - but, again, QS needs both front-to-back AND side-to-side logic; since we're most sensitive to side-to-side image imparements, SQ wisely placed all the logic action in the front to back axis that we are the least sensitive to, which I think was a good design choice. The BBC discovered the same thing in their tests on SQ and QS and their own numerous matrix designs. They engineered their Matrix H system to be unsymmetrical and have more side-to-side separation than front-to-back so that all logic action would be less audible. In the BBC's initial tests on SQ and QS, they noticed the QS Vario-Matrix shifting the sound image from side-to-side and listeners found it very annoying. Of course, they found the super slow Full-Logic CBS SQ decoders even more annoying - the first professional CBS logic decoders - the model 2400, was truly a terrible design)

Anyway, Wave-Matching logic can't sense CF or CB positions, so Wave-Matching has to be combined with the Front-Back Logic - that's why decoders with both Wave-Matching and Front-Back Logic were called "Full Logic" units.

Even though 3db is barely any separation, if the phase shifters in the SQ decoder are accurate (and in Sony's stand-alone decoders, they were - I don't know how the SQ performed in the very low cost all-in-one-close-n-play type units Sony also made), you can "learn" to hear through the low amounts of separation and assign the sounds to their proper speakers. I think that's why designers of the original matrix systems thought they worked so well at first - they had 'learned' to hear correct directionality through the low separation. It can make the size of the room seem smaller though. To those who haven't 'learned' it, SQ with no logic enhancement sounds like double stereo with no front-back separation at all - - that's why CBS made the 10/40 blend pretty much mandatory for non-logic SQ decoders (10% blend across the front reduces the 'infinite' Lf-Rf separation to 20db and 40% blend across the back reduces the 'infinite' Lb-Rb separation to 8db). CBS introduced Front-Back Logic to the public first - they were getting complaints that there was no 'surround' effect from this new "surround sound" system, so CBS sacrificed some of the side-to-side separation that seemed so important to them at first - after a short time, they introduced the simple F/B logic to keep vocals up front, thus giving much more of a surround sound effect. Every time CBS announced a new form of SQ or Logic they basically said "This is it, the SQ system is now totally perfected and nothing more need ever be done" - only to announce a few months later...

Since you've learned to place images accurately with your 2050 decoder, a Tate decoder will sound like razor sharp discrete sound the first time you hear it. In fact, some people think the Fosgate Tate II 101A is TOO discrete and prefer the slightly reduced separation of the original Tate, the Audionics Composer. The "Alternate" switch was added to the Fosgate 101A's design to 'slow down' the attack and decay times and reduce the channel separation somewhat. Martin Willcocks said Peter Scheiber preferred a slightly slower, more 'open' sound that the slowed down design produced. Sheiber's own 360 Spatial Decoder for SQ, from his company Scheiber Sonics, had variable attack and decay times in the logic, with none being faster than about 15 milliseconds. Unlike almost all other advanced decoders, it used both crosstalk cancellation and full gain riding for its logic. And instead of Wave-Matching (like CBS SQ) or inverted envelope comparison (like the Tate DES), the 360 Spatial Decoder used wide-band axis-crossing directional detectors - in other words, phase detection. Also different from the Tate, it didn't use matrix multiplication for signal cancellation but more of a channel blending, kind of like the Vario-Matrix - and relied on gain riding to an equal extent as the signal cancellation. I think it was one of the most expensive decoders ever offered - something like $3,500 if I'm remembering correctly - Peter Scheiber didn't sell many of them - I think he only made 300 or so - it was supposed to be sold under the Deltek name too, but I don't think that ever happened. I have an article written by Peter Scheiber about the 360 Spatial Decoder if you're interested in reading it:
360 Space In Two Channels
 
I can't believe no one mentioned the soundtrack album of "Tommy", released in QS on Polydor, albeit with no markings on the cover about it. I had a Sansui quad receiver back then, and the album sounded amazing in QS. That they never mentioned that the album was in QS probably had something to do with not having to pay royalties to Sansui for use
of the QS logo. ABC did the same thing.
 
I can't believe no one mentioned the soundtrack album of "Tommy", released in QS on Polydor, albeit with no markings on the cover about it. I had a Sansui quad receiver back then, and the album sounded amazing in QS. That they never mentioned that the album was in QS probably had something to do with not having to pay royalties to Sansui for use
of the QS logo. ABC did the same thing.

Sansui never charged a royalty for the use of QS or the QS logo - like Sony with SDDS, any company could use the QS system and logo as long as rules on logo size, placement, etc... were adhered to. Sansui even provided artwork for free that included the blurb about Vario-Matrix playback. Contrast that with CBS who, in addition to charging an outrageous royalty, never provided any kind of statement companies could use on LP's about using a full-logic decoder for best results. The Quadraphonic Gala sampler album I have does have a statement that says "For best results play with a Full Logic or Paramatrix SQ decoder" which is kind of silly considering by that time (1975) CBS had abandoned further development and licensing of the Paramatrix decoder and was putting substantial money into development of the Tate DES chips. (yet CBS gave absolutely no money towards Shadow Vector development)

Throughout the years I've been told by many different (and reliable) people that the original LP of the Star Wars soundtrack is unmarked Regular Matrix. Apparently, it was prepared in RM quad for the Japanese market and somehow the RM master got used for the American release.
 
Tommy the movie was the first use of a center channel. I had no idea the Tommy movie soundtrack was QS. Does anyone know if the CD is QS encoded? My CD is from Japan. I guess I need to audition it.

ABC's markings were very subtle. Lots of titles, especially on Impulse.

Yes, Jay, Santana III is a wonder.

Linda

Disclord, you never cease to amaze me. I used to think I was techy.
was
I can't believe no one mentioned the soundtrack album of "Tommy", released in QS on Polydor, albeit with no markings on the cover about it. I had a Sansui quad receiver back then, and the album sounded amazing in QS. That they never mentioned that the album was in QS probably had something to do with not having to pay royalties to Sansui for use
of the QS logo. ABC did the same thing.
 
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