OK I think I'm done with Tribbys education about quad ejackulation from an earlier post about ELO. Since there is so much here to answer his question about the Surround Master why should I bother?Pardon my adolescent naiveté but, what the hell does a SM(v3) do in a nutshell?
Can I play my Led Zep CDs and mad-jack-ally get quadraphonic ejaculation?
Er, uhm, how does it do it, baby?
Lazy. Make the effort. Clear explaining here.
in a nutshell, it does what earlier surround processors do with music and movies, i.e., provide a plausible surround sound environment using just two original channels via extraction and logic steering/processing of matrixed or random out-of-phase elements inherent in most existing stereo recordings. IOW it extracts said stereo surround/difference signal and sends it to 2 or more rear speakers, plus it derives via extraction of L+R and some logic steering, a center channel between the left and right stereo speakers [useful for filling in the hole in the middle if you have them wider than the recommended 60-80 degrees apart] as well as supply a filtered 120 cycle subwoofer output. it by all accounts does these tasks better than dolby pro logic IIx and Neo: 6 as well as earlier generations of matrix-based surround decoders. and it does this with the universe of existing stereo recordings out there. granted, it is not the same as dolby digital or other true digital surround formats that give you discrete channels from the git-go, but it supplies a plausible imitation of that result just the same, with any stereo record you got. a while ago they were selling scratch-and-dent models for a hundred bucks cheaper. watch out for those rare sales. i know i will eventually go into debt to get one of these babies just as soon as they become available again [artificial scarcity going on here?].
Just make sure you have everything else you need as well, before going into debt for the S.M. They don't have an HDMI out, so you will need a receiver with analog inputs and 4 identical/similar speakers. If you don't have the receiver you will need 2 identical stereo amps and 4 speakers minimum and will need to manually adjust the level on the S.M. since it doesn't have remote control.
My only biased addition to your comments is that audiences either cannot pick the difference or have a slight preference to Involve encode/ decode when instant A/ B compared to discrete Dolby. Issue is aside from Suzanne Ciani Quad album there are no Involve encode sources around!
Working on the HDMI thing right now
But I always liked it!
Sounds like Surround Master v4 is coming someday. Since I use it in my family room system with an Exasound 7.1 channel DAC, and a Coleman 7.1sw switcher, I do not require HDMI though. But surely a good many can probably use HDMI. Will it be both HDMI in and out?
Nup, it will be a separate 8 channel in to HDMI box
That sounds like a really great product!
The real trick is to bypass paying $20K per annum fees
I'm hoping you guys win a $20k lottery ticket. Umm.. maybe $40k more?!
Sounds like I will be doing a fair amount of business with you, when that and the SM are available. And I won’t have to build one myself.
Build what yourself???
A quad to HDMI encoder. I did a bit of research a couple of years back and found A-D chips that output IIC and an HDMI chip that took that input, so it’s doable, but I still have so many projects in my house that I tell people I live in the projects.
How do you get the chips without the license?
I never got that far in my research, alas. Actually, I didn’t know about the need for a license at the time,
