[YouTube] Australian TV Program: The CD Debut (1982) mentions Quad!

Just cruising through Youtube, I happened upon this 8-minute program:

https://youtu.be/_Tx6TYnPat8

Interestingly, near the end, the female presenter mentions Quadraphonic sound and how it quickly died out due to lack of releases from the major record companies.

Just an interesting little tidbit. I thought it unusual that a program from 1982 would even bother to mention Quad.

Thanks for sharing that!

Extremely well done. Most of it still stands today showing they'd done their research quite well.

So after seeing this, how many of you will want to pick-up their players whilst a disc is spinning in them and shake them like the feller did? Am I the only one who cringed at 8:14 when you see the finger marks on the CD?

I had never seen those two CD players before so it was pretty neat.

1982 isn't as far removed from quad as it may seem.

RCA Records kept more than half of their quad catalog in print as late as 1980 (both classical and popular) and even released a few new quad tapes in '79/'80 through its mail order service. That's where the Walter Murphy 'A Fifth Of Beethoven' comes from - RCA was trying to restart its Q8 business around the turn of the decade for the automotive market but I think the fact that CD was on the horizon killed it yet again.

It's also worth noting that the redbook CD spec has a 4 channel flag, which was basically the CD version of how they got quad on 8-track tapes: double the channels and half the running time. Unfortunately with quad dead by the time CD finally hit the consumer market I don't think a player or disc ever emerged that took advantage of CD's 4 channel capabilities.

steelydave said:

It's also worth noting that the redbook CD spec has a 4 channel flag, which was basically the CD version of how they got quad on 8-track tapes: double the channels and half the running time. Unfortunately with quad dead by the time CD finally hit the consumer market I don't think a player or disc ever emerged that took advantage of CD's 4 channel capabilities.

Click to expand...

Not exactly. There wasn't a double speed capability yet.
It's a long long while since i found out the info from the redbook (+- 20 years!), but basically it was cutting corners two way:
1) reduce sampling rate at 30k (15k f/r)
2) reduce bit depth at 12 bit
Combined togheter that made for a payload close enough than the one for 22050x2x16.