AEL Matrix Decoder

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Soundfield

1K Club - QQ Shooting Star
Joined
Dec 29, 2011
Messages
1,821
Location
Essex, UK
As a follow up to the posts on rare decoders earlier this year ( https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/fo...dro-power-amplifier-decoder.26028/post-411107 ) and in a brief moment of welcome respite away from the family over these long days of the Christmas holiday (!) I was idly flipping through my copy of the famous HiFi News & Record Review seminal quad tome of March 1975:
HFNRR_Mar75.JPG

when I noticed an advert for another one of those obscure matrix decoders from specialist manufacturers that popped up every so often, but no one ever seemed to own:

AEL SQSD1.JPG


Acoustico Enterprises Ltd was a small UK manufacturer that has long since disappeared. Their SQSD1 decoder was a dual format SQ / QS decoder, but I can find absolutely no information on it at all. Did it ever even make it to market? I have the impression that a lot of these decoders were advertised rather speculatively by small manufactures in order to judge the market interest, if any, before going into full scale production. At a huge price tag of £165 (ex VAT) in 1975 (about £1,400 today!) I suspect few people were willing to take a risk on such a thing from a less than well known company. Would like to see inside one though!
 
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IIRC, the article in that issue about the QS Matrix system calls QS "discrete",
I'm surprised the other Quad format proponents (UD-4, SQ, CD-4) didn't
call them out for that statement.


Kirk Bayne
 
I saw the title of this thread and held my breath until I discovered that this was not the product of my first post college employer, that long defunct manufacturer of mediocre Cable TV, FM transmitter and other hardware, American Electronic Labs!
 
So what you're saying is it probably wasn't all they say it was. That would explain why I have never heard of it. If it was all that, it would have had it's own thread in QQ. Nice looking piece though.


I saw the title of this thread and held my breath until I discovered that this was not the product of my first post college employer, that long defunct manufacturer of mediocre Cable TV, FM transmitter and other hardware, American Electronic Labs!
 
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