Certainly over the years there has been misinformation and misunderstanding about many things. In college, for research I spent a few evenings going over archives of old stereo review magazines from the time period. From what I gathered and from what I remember, it seems at the time there was much focus on decoders that would synthesize quad from stereo sources, and just about everyone had their own version of such a decoder. I think that may be how QS started out, I believe the first QS decoder was designed strictly for synthesizing quad from stereo. Is that really a QS decoder? Or is it just a box that Sansui built before developing QS as an encoding/decoding format? Does it decode QS? I don’t know.
But, one thing I remember reading much of, was commentary about what Sony was up to. When they were developing SQ, there was commentary of the confusion with all of these different formats, which some suggested were compatible with one another, and now Sony was going to come along and release this completely new format, that is completely incompatible with all of these other formats. What really struck me, was this mentality that all these different formats were supposedly interchangeable or compatible. Of course, if they’re different, it’s logical to question how compatible they really are, but certainly there was a mentality that existed at the time. And it was probably based on trying to sell people on the idea. There was so much confusion, how could one not just throw up their hands, and say, I give up. So….sell them the line that, you can totally play that on your quad system, don’t worry about the details, and hope the public keep buying recordings and maybe upgrade their system later.
Now, many years have passed, many details are forgotten. Some years ago, I reached out to some contact email with Electro-Voice, asking if they had any details about the EV-4 system. They had none. The companies that developed these technologies at this point have moved on, and you’re more likely to hear “quadra-what?” from them, than any answers or information about what was what. So that leaves us with the task to sort these things out and figure these things out, if we want to know the nitty gritty details.
Some of us are happy just listening to the music and grooving out. Some of us are sticklers for details. If someone says something that’s 100%, or any percent, wrong, it’s certainly not with any malicious thought or intent. And if someone says something that’s fact, and is dismissed by someone else, well…we’ve all been fed different lines over the years, and it’s difficult to sort out who’s telling the truth, and who’s repeating a bit of misinformation. It would be foolish to take any one individual’s writings as 100 percent fact without any verification, who knows, we probably have all very well spoken some misinformation without realizing it over the years. At the moment, I can think of some posts on this forum I hope stay buried because they’re factually incorrect, but I don’t want to draw attention to them by posting in them. I once called the Ozark Mountain Daredevil’s Q8 fake quad, only later to discover, it’s definitely a different mix, and definitely quad, just a bit subtle. I once said a part was swirling around the sound field in a quad mix after listening to the SQ version of it a bit, only to on further analysis find that, nope, it was stationary, the movement was in my head. Some of the things I’ve said in this very post may be misinformation. I don’t know.
I’d love to see everyone in both of these sites be able to freely discuss these things. It’s only through open discussion and having respect for each other that we will ever sort out the years of misinformation from the facts.
As far as the shoot-out goes, I don’t think any discussion blurs anything. It’s a straight blind comparison. Listen, compare to discreet, state what you like better and why. All the discussion of formulas and compatibilities doesn’t change the bottom line, what you hear, and what you like.
As far as facts, I don’t know much of these formats or the formulas involved. But when exchanging emails with a friend, his response to the question of compatibility between EV-4 and QS was to suggest he doesn’t see how they would be compatible, and included this picture:
Not sure if this is fact or more misinformation. But, whether or not they should be compatible, this is about finding out what the bottom line is when playing things certain ways.