Telarc Surround Sound CDs

I remember the "Surround Sound" Stereo CDs from Telarc in the pre-SACD and DVD-A days. Good music and a lot of entertaining Special Effects by Telarc's Chief Recording Engineer Michael Bishop.
The Surround Sound CDs were made with a processor called the Spatializer. In fact, I may still have a couple of these Telarc Spatializer Surround Sound CDs in my collection. Hmm, could be fun via the Surround Master.

And speaking of the Desper Spatializer, there are 2 for sale right now on eBay. They are from Eddie Van Halen's Recording Studio! Guess Eddie isn't doing Surround anymore.....:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/DESPER-Spat...l_Processors_Rack_Effects&hash=item27d309265e
http://www.ebay.com/itm/DESPER-Spat...l_Processors_Rack_Effects&hash=item2a2e639fed

The Telarcs Surround Sound CDs are encoded with a number of different systems including Shure, Circle Surround, Dolby Surround, Roland and Spatializer.

I've been experimenting with the Surround Master/SQ Edition this week and some of the Telarc Surround CDs.
So far, the Telarc Surround CDs encoded with Roland (Steve Reid's Bamboo Forest Mysteries) and Spatializer (Best of Erich Kunzel) are giving the best results.

If you have some of the Telarc Surround CDs and the Surround Master, I'd suggest pulling them out and giving them a listen.
A lot of fun !

Very interesting - I'll have to run some Spacialized cd's thru my Surround Master today. This makes we wonder how stereo might sound if you inserted a Spacializer unit in the signal chain immediately upstream from the SM decoder. Have you tried that? Guess I'll be doing that today also. Sounds like fun to me.

John R

jsrstereo said:

Very interesting - I'll have to run some Spacialized cd's thru my Surround Master today. This makes we wonder how stereo might sound if you inserted a Spacializer unit in the signal chain immediately upstream from the SM decoder. Have you tried that? Guess I'll be doing that today also. Sounds like fun to me.
John R

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The key is that the encoding from the Spatializer creates a wider Stereo image that the Surround Master can use for the surround channels. I don't have a Spatializer here, so I can't try that. But it works well enough on the Telarc Surround CDs with Spatializer that it's worth pulling those out from your CD collection and listening to the Surround Master. Very nice.

Only very very recently discovered these Telarc "Surround Sound" CDs - and I'm totally hooked on these discs!

I've bought 14 in the last fortnight (12 of them on the Telarc label) with more in the mail and more on my shopping list!

They're cheap and readily available, they give a nice sense of surround thru PLII and most important of all they're grrreat music!

Fidelity is almost universally excellent and most of them pan out very nicely in PLII Music.

I can only begin to imagine how good they are through the Surround Master( I do plan on getting one down the line)..

...meantime I'm very much enjoying these in PLII Music, all through a happy accident picking up Holst's Planets (Telarc CD-80466) when I nipped uptown to get the new Elton album (its a bit of a mindless ritual, I have to physically buy his new album the day it comes out from a store and the nearest place was HMV Oxford St.).

The Maria Muldaur "Surround Sound" albums "Fanning The Flames" (Telarc CD-83394) and "Southland Of The Heart" (Telarc CD-83423) are particularly good.

fredblue said:

Only very very recently discovered these Telarc "Surround Sound" CDs - and I'm totally hooked on these discs!

I've bought 14 in the last fortnight (12 of them on the Telarc label) with more in the mail and more on my shopping list!

They're cheap and readily available, they give a nice sense of surround thru PLII and most important of all they're grrreat music!

Fidelity is almost universally excellent and most of them pan out very nicely in PLII Music.

I can only begin to imagine how good they are through the Surround Master( I do plan on getting one down the line)..

...meantime I'm very much enjoying these in PLII Music, all through a happy accident picking up Holst's Planets (Telarc CD-80466) when I nipped uptown to get the new Elton album (its a bit of a mindless ritual, I have to physically buy his new album the day it comes out from a store and the nearest place was HMV Oxford St.).

The Maria Muldaur "Surround Sound" albums "Fanning The Flames" (Telarc CD-83394) and "Southland Of The Heart" (Telarc CD-83423) are particularly good.

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Yes, great music plus the sound effects by Michael Bishop.

Maria Muldaur - she was a Quad Pioneer in the '70s with her Waitress in a Donut Shop album on Quad Reel, CD-4 and Q8.
Still at it.

I have done that using the Surround Master
TSS stereo then into the QSD1
It can give very good surround effects
stronger than just the Surround Master or QSD1 on there own
But sometimes you have to turn down the rear channels

bmoura said:

Yes, great music plus the sound effects by Michael Bishop.

Maria Muldaur - she was a Quad Pioneer in the '70s with her Waitress in a Donut Shop album on Quad Reel, CD-4 and Q8.
Still at it.

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what's Michael Bishop doing now, bmoura? I hope he's still doing surround somewhere/somehow?

I recall you saying that Michael Bishop was behind all those fabulous Telarc Surround SACDs in the 2000's.. but of course those are no longer being produced sadly.

What a great artist Maria Muldaur is! Incredible vocals, such heart and soul. I'm gonna hunt down that Donut Waitress Quad! Thank you so much for the neat info

fredblue said:

what's Michael Bishop doing now, bmoura? I hope he's still doing surround somewhere/somehow?

I recall you saying that Michael Bishop was behind all those fabulous Telarc Surround SACDs in the 2000's.. but of course those are no longer being produced sadly.

What a great artist Maria Muldaur is! Incredible vocals, such heart and soul. I'm gonna hunt down that Donut Waitress Quad! Thank you so much for the neat info

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Michael Bishop and the Telarc Engineers formed their own company 5/4 Productions. They are the folks behind the recent "Quad DSD" (DSD256) recording of Boston Baroque.
Still very much in the Surround Sound and SACD/DSD world.

bmoura said:

Michael Bishop and the Telarc Engineers formed their own company 5/4 Productions. They are the folks behind the recent "Quad DSD" (DSD256) recording of Boston Baroque.
Still very much in the Surround Sound and SACD/DSD world.

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great! thanks!

I shall have to seek it all out! are there 5/4 productions on SACD disc or just in DSD download form?

fredblue said:

great! thanks!

I shall have to seek it all out! are there 5/4 productions on SACD disc or just in DSD download form?

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To date they are in SACD and CD form as far as I know.

bmoura said:

To date they are in SACD and CD form as far as I know.

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I've just found a number of Boston Baroque Telarc label SACDs (eight of them) are these all 5/4 Productions?

http://www.sa-cd.net/search/Boston+baroque

fredblue said:

I've just found a number of Boston Baroque Telarc label SACDs (eight of them) are these all 5/4 Productions?

http://www.sa-cd.net/search/Boston+baroque

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The Telarc SACDs are done by the 5/4 team when they still worked at Telarc.
The newer 5/4 Productions SACDs are on the Linn Records label. See http://www.linnrecords.com/artist-boston-baroque.aspx

bmoura said:

The Telarc SACDs are done by the 5/4 team when they still worked at Telarc.
The newer 5/4 Productions SACDs are on the Linn Records label. See http://www.linnrecords.com/artist-boston-baroque.aspx

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great stuff! thanks once again. these may turn out to be the first Linn Multichannel SACDs I've heard that have a true sense of discrete surround! @:

(Steve Reid's Bamboo Forest Mysteries

I had not played that CD in a long time
it does give a very real surround effect
I also have a RSS CD demo and some of the effects
with the Surround Master are as close to Quad as you can get
without encoding

Does any one know of other RSS CDs

Also Robin Hood (Prince of Thieves) is in Q Sound


Ron

man I love these little cuties..!!

Fred, you're on a roll. I'll have to check out some more of these Telarc Surround Sound CDs.

Any favorites among the group yet?

this is all thru PLII Music so yours and others' MMV as they say.. but in a surround sense they all have their high spots with the "Spies" disc having a particularly impressive bit of speaker gymnastics during track 4; "Doundounba/Mordenamba (the very short interlude) where vocals are superbly steered to the rears, it's as good as discrete SACD I was gobsmacked!

musically they're such a varied bunch, it's been a real eye-opener (ear opener?) with lots of great new music and artists I'd never heard of to explore.

particularly enjoying the two Maria Muldaur's (different albums in feel & tone but that extraordinary voice is writ large right through them both like a stick of rock!) so those two and the Spies, Junior Wells, Memphis Horns, Lady Bianca and Steve Reid are very very much the archetypal trademark Telarc contemporary/non-Classical production (presentation/sound, call it what you will?) their Jazz and RnB SACDs all have a sort of "house sound" which I've really gotten into and these Surround Sound CDs do too.

you know, these discs are kind of like Telarc Surround SACD-Lite!

they're great musically, they're cheap and they really do a great little job of wrapping the whole thing around you, with little elements periodically piping up in the rears or standing out more.

its a shame I'm nearly done with them there's only a couple more (incl. a Boston Baroque 3CD set) still to get cos I'm really enjoying them!

Telarc leads in MC offerings. years ago I found a cd of Hiromi with both DTS and DD video. The album is Spiral,have it on sacd also.

leevitalone1 said:

Telarc leads in MC offerings. years ago I found a cd of Hiromi with both DTS and DD video. The album is Spiral,have it on sacd also.

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I've 3 of the "Hiromi" SACDs and they are all superb in surround. Telarc really led the way back in the day, these Surround Sound CDs even in the early days of surround on shiny disc were excellent, I commend them to QQ members looking to expand their surround horizons