My recent (re) love affair with multi-channel audio...

[laughingmood]

Hey pals. It's good to be back around again. I hope everyone has been well. I'm not really a new member so I wasn't sure if this should go in the new member thread. I posted here in a scattered fashion back in late 2006, 2007. Surely not enough for anyone to remember me but I always remembered the folks here being quite nice and helpful when I was first introducing myself to the wonders of multi-channel audio and had questions. I got into it huge around that time but due to various life events, I packed up a lot of my equipment but in the last month or so, I pulled out the old DVD-A/SACD player and....well, I'm back into it in a way I never was before.

This is a long story of quad love, burning brightly for one beautiful instant...and then dwindling to an amber, only to be rekindled anew stronger than ever. Bare with a brother.

My first experience with surround sound audio was the Flaming Lips Zaireeka album. Me and my friends got together and with four different stereos, stopwatches and bong hits....we freaked out. I think we got it right on the third try. Wonderful.

Cut to a few years later and I guess I just started reading about DVD-A and SACD and 5.1 mixes...but did nothing about it. Don't know why. And really don't know what made me finally pay attention but one day...it hit my radar hard. I had always had a surround sound setup for movies and knew enough about that to know DTS was better than Dolby etc. I had a capable receiver for hi res 6 channel, all of it. So it was easy enough to pick up a good DVD-A/SACD capable DVD player and get going. And it was glorious. I'm sure you all remember your first experiences with mult-channel. It's insane. I think my first purchase was Yoshimi (holy eff, still the standard for me) I scoured the stores and online for what was left. By the time I was getting into DVD-A and SACD, they were both waning. But I lucked out in that a local record store in my town had a rack of DVD-As and they were selling them cheap because they knew they were on the way out. I got some great titles there....Tommy, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, American Beauty and Workingman's Dead, Sea Change, and others. I tried to find as much as I could but I felt my selection was limited. I quickly hit a wall of things to buy. It seemed to me that a large portion of what was available if you wanted music to surround you was classic rock (something I now know to not be true....but bare with me, I'm getting there. Now, I love me some classic rock, but I also love variety. I love obscure sixties soft pop. I love deep Philly Soul. I love mod/freakbeat/psych pop. I love the Byrds and Gene Clark and the Dillards and lots of different things. And I love new music. As far as new, indie-ish bands...there was very little. There were the Lips releases of course, Beck, the Bonnie Prince Billy album, that amazing Super Furry Animals SACD, Polyphonic Spree, etc. But still...I kind of hit that wall I mentioned earlier and it became a matter of....if I wanted to listed to surround sound audio...I had to want to listen to only those albums and I had worn them all out because I love them all so much. There were some later releases that interested me. Love, of course. (Amazing). David Crosby, Jackson Browne. I dug all those. Never went in for the Doors box. Mainly because I already have the prior box with the album packaging and to be honest...don't really listen to that much. The Genesis stuff was cool but I'm not a big fan. And I didn't even know about the King Crimson releases until my recent re-interest in all things surround.

Then...life changed. I split with my wife. And almost immediately after that, I went on the road with my band for a long time, moved around for a bit, then went on tour again for a while, then moved to a new city, blah, blah... Point is, life became transitory and I just packed up the ol DVD-A/SACD player and didn't spend much time thinking about it. I still had my surround sound setup when I was living in a particular place long enough to bother and when I REALLY wanted some surround action, I'd put in a DVD-A into my MAC (which was hooked up with surround) and, GOD FORBID, just jam the DTS track off the DVD-V layer. I know....total bummer. But....better than nothing, right? But I couldn't play my SACDs. And, in particular, that Super Furry Animals disc had been staring at me for 2 and a half years begging to be played.

Bored one day last month, staring at that CD...I pulled out the DVD player and hooked it up (btw, I've had Blu Ray now for the last year and a half in the form of the PS3 and that's why the DVD-A player was collecting dust for so long), put in the SFA album....tried to remember the correct settings (dammit....Bitstream or PCM....I REMEMBER THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!) and got (re) blown away.

I went through all the old discs again. All that time that had passed (almost 3 years) was just what I needed. It was fresh and new to me again. But I knew that wall was staring me in the face. I jumped online to see what had been going on, what releases had been coming out. Came here, of course. Saw the Crimson threads....got stoked. Then saw some posts about the 35th Anniversary Remaster of the WYWH Q8. And pals.....let me tell you. It's has been nuts ever since.

So....way back in the day I heard about the Alan Parsons mix of DSOTM. I think I even managed to find it somewhere but a the time I couldn't figure out how to get my Mac to do DVD-A. And though I work in IT as a day job and with computers intensely all the time, I had no Windows machines at home so just kind of gave up and said eff it. I knew about Quad, but I never really investigated how to hear all those mixes in the modern era. Cut to now and I'm back into this stuff and reading about all this stuff....Q8 conversions, original fully discrete quad reels being lovingly converted and archived. And I'm freaking out. I can't take it. There is some amazing stuff out there. Truly amazing work. With this knowledge, that wall I had hit is completely smashed through. It's no longer a matter of "I want to listen to some surround sound discs...well, guess it's time for Dark Side or Flaming Lips again". Now, some of my FAVORITE albums I'm finding were released in the most amazing quad mixes. And pals, I have some odd tastes. First off all, I love the Free Design. And Enoch Light and Project 3. I have been collecting all of that (and truly loving it...not in a kitschy way) since 1997 or so and it never dawned on me that Enoch would have obviously been one of the first cats to take advantage of quad. And Hugo Montenegro? LOVE THAT SHIZ! I'm not sure what is exactly ok to say I have had the honor of hearing recently but the things I've had managed to hear...it's truly mindblowing work. The folks out there doing these conversions are artists. Pure and simple. I mentioned I play music but I also record, engineer and mix and I'm blown away by the sheer level of talent on display. There is some serious love being put into what I believe is an honestly worthwhile endeavor...the archiving of this amazing format. I personally love the super discrete, zany uses of the medium. Love what Light does with his Quad mixes. The sound from these reels is beyond stunning. There is zero need for additional quad mixes by the studios if they ever decided to release this stuff. The work is done for them. It's perfect. I'm a huge fan of A&M records from 66-75 or so and looking through all the Quad releases on the A&M and Project 3 pages here made me salivate. Seriously....Burt Bacharach's Reach Out? Carpenters' Song For You? Tony Mottola's Warm Wild and Wonderful (featuring the Free Design on vox)....this is stuff I listen to already regularly so to know it's out there in a format that I previously, and erroneously, thought to be somewhat limited in it's scope...well, it's kind of amazing.

And also, I kind of think I dig quad more than 5.1. There's just something about it that works better for me. Don't get me wrong. I dig a nice 5.1 mix. A nice measured, even spread is cool. But give me the Parsons quad mix of DSOTM over the 5.1 any day, yknow? Give me Montenegro's Baby Elephant's Walk/Moon River freaking me the eff out at 3 in the morning with it's zany awesomeness. Give me super discrete instrument panning that makes ZERO sense but rules so hard.

So...anyway, that's a really long winded way of saying...hey pals! It's been a while. I don't remember all the acronyms, but I'm catching up! There is some genuinely cool and worthwhile stuff being worked on and discussed here. I hope to post more often and be a bigger part of the dialogue.

 

[Disclord]

And also, I kind of think I dig quad more than 5.1. There's just something about it that works better for me. Don't get me wrong. I dig a nice 5.1 mix. A nice measured, even spread is cool. But give me the Parsons quad mix of DSOTM over the 5.1 any day, yknow? Give me Montenegro's Baby Elephant's Walk/Moon River freaking me the eff out at 3 in the morning with it's zany awesomeness. Give me super discrete instrument panning that makes ZERO sense but rules so hard.

I know what you mean by that - the 'modern' super-wet and spread-out sounding multichannel mixing techniques, such as Guthrie's modern Dark Side... just doesn't excite me. I prefer the super-quaddy "multichannel mono" of the olden-quad-days - like Alan Parsons original Dark Side... It may be 'primitive' but it's NEVER boring to listen to like the new mix. And to top off the insult of new mixes, a super heavy dose or level normalizing is applied! Even the kids this music-destroying thing is used for are now becoming aware of it and realizing that it's absolutely NON-CORRECTABLE. A 'normalized' recording can never be de-normalized - yet, a recording with full dynamic range can easily be compressed as needed, to any desired degree, with compression built into the playback unit. Heck, Dolby worked long and hard to get the film/home video industry up to speed on implementing Dial Norm and the various AC-3 compression options available to consumers in all decoders.

Remember when dbx and other companies used to build expensive dynamic range expanders and impact restoration devices - plus sub-harmonic synthesizers! Back in the 70's, the consumer audio formats were so bad we needed aftermarket gear to get increased dynamic range and background silence - now, apparently though, equipment has become SO GOOD that we need to remove all shreds of dynamics and fidelity! UGH! David Blackmer, founder of dbx and inventor of very high quality VCA's, is probably weeping in heaven. Thankfully, the original VCA designs survive in the marketplace as THATS technology.

One thing I do like about 'modern' 5.1 surround is the Center channel. I've always been bothered by the audibility of the midrange notch caused by the Left and Right front speakers waveforms overlapping and causing destructive interference - and the audible effects it has on vocals and instruments. Giving the vocals and any desired insturments a real, hard, center speaker location removes this source of inaccuracy and lifts a veil off the recording. Even a wide-band, matrix multiplier derived, Center channel from a logic-based decoder has improved fidelity as compared to phantom center.

Thankfully, the THX-championed bi-polar "diffused" surround playback array is quickly disappearing from the scene - it's even being dropped as a matter worthy of discussion. Like the non-removable volume normalizing, diffusing the surrounds is something that should be done by the sound mixers or switchable in the equipment - and only a point-source-based speaker array can properly reproduce all forms of surround mixing/playback. The work done by the National Quadraphonic Radio Committee back in the mid 70's proved that bi-polar surround arrays only inhibit the localization that may or may not be inherent in any specific mix.

Of course, we can't localize phantom center-side images, such as Center Left (between Lf and Lb) when facing forward - no one can. If we could, we wouldn't be human beings! We need physical speakers there, either logic-steering derived or from additional discrete channels. For side phantoms, logic-based channel derivation is probably fine - especially if a split-band digital system is used. DTS Neo:6 uses up to 18, individually steerable, bands, which creates incredibly discrete-sounding decoding, but without the image-shifting artifacts of a broadband design.

Dinners almost ready - I'll have to come back and finish this (already novel length) post later.

 

[JonUrban]

Wow! "Welcome Back!"

Cool thread

 

[Almen]

Welcome back, laughingmood (though I don't remember you from before)!

Just wanted to share my preference of 4.0 as well, at least for acoustic music. With good recordings (also for 2.0) I get a beautifully spread homogeneous sound field between (and for 4.0 extending all around) the speakers. Also, for a smaller amount of extraordinary recordings, when I move sideways in the sofa I get the impression that I am changing seats in the concert hall, sort of a 3D holographic experience.

 

[wappinghigh]

Hey laughingmood. I was inthralled by your post. What is needed is a Quad convention. Headed by all the great guys on this thread. Put all the heads together. All these recordings need to be collected together. The problem is access to the material. All this needs to be made available to the next generation, on one website and re-released in 4.0, or 5.1 format. Probably Flac 4.0 or Flac 5.1. It doesn't matter. What matters is that the next generation of dudes know where to go on the internet to buy all this shit. With internet streamers coming out that play 5.1 Flac tracks..like the new Oppo's (I think), suddenly the next generation has a way of accessing this material again. The movement can start again my friends! It WILL succeed. The Internet is the way forward... you guys have the passion to do it!! Hold the convention. Ask a couple of lead acts to get involved. I'd go with Radiohead. And Black Eye Peas. They attract different ages/audiences/cultures, but WTF, these two acts ARE the current wave...Both these acts would sound TOTALLY INSANE in surround. Just take a listen to Radiohead "Sixteen steps", and BEP's latest track, "Just can't get enough"...I mean these tracks would be UNREAL in surround. Fcuk the music industry...The quad movement needs some new acts. This is the future my friends. Go for it guys !!!!!!! Fcuk'n get too it and make it happen.... You older guys with all that knowhow and experience need to pass it onto the next generation before the "knowledge" dies with you we all sink in a cesspool of 2.0 mp3. You've got to get of your arses and make it happen dudes...now where was that last lude....

 

[laughingmood]

in a cesspool of 2.0 mp3.

Haha! The horror! Thanks for all the replies pals. I can see myself spending a lot of time here. Lately I have been jamming the Santana's Abraxas Quad mix and it's been blowing my mind. Their layering of percussion really makes for a dynamic quad listening experience. And I've never really given the album itself much time other than the standards cuts so it's all fairly new to me.

 

[tlake6659]

Laughingmood, I highly recommend you check out some of the Porcupine Tree DVD-Audio's. I think you will dig the music and the surround mixes are great.

 

[laughingmood]

Thanks! I have seen their name mentioned around here and on the polls quite frequently so I will have to give them a listen.

 

[jefe1]

I also highly reccomend the Porcupine Tree DVD Audios too. For a similar but lower tier Tree experience you can also check out Katatonias DVD audio. They are a Swedish heavy metal group with a similar sound.

 

[wappinghigh]

You know Quad will NEVER die. NEVER. I've just put together a great sounding system with a few pieces of heavily discounted new gear. The move to HMDI 1.4 (and all those stupid 3D TV's and glasses) is throwing up some complete BARGAINS in quality surround gear. All those ridiculous home theatre buffs, who MUST have the latest Dolby HD blu ray format, 3G projectors and 9.2 receivers don't know s&^%&^t. For well under 2K, I have just purchased a brand new NAD M55 SACD/DVD-A transport and a brand new NAD 747 receiver..running analog bypass. No stupid digital correction or anything.... Deep Purple, and Roxy Music never sounded so good. Sure the SACD's both cost $100 each. But who gives a f%&$&k