- Joined
- Apr 9, 2012
- Messages
- 2,704
All true!Some points here: CD's could have handled surround in a linear fashion (not DTS, for example), but playing time would have been cut in half. That would have, essentially, gone against what Akio Morita wanted for the system, as it would have taken two discs to do what can be done with one in stereo, support Beethoven's 9th Symphony.
CD-4 had a lot of quirks, and broadcasting those discs in a discrete format was definitely one of them, since the Dorren discrete quad system hadn't been approved until quad was all but dormant. Slip-cueing would have definitely been a problem, since no CD-4 capable cartridge I know of could have been used for that. Also, bandwidth was a problem for anyone using the format, since the top end of the audio spectrum that could be reproduced topped at about 15 kHz, to avoid interfering with the carriers. Many radio stations that broadcast in quad had encoders for either QS or SQ (more for QS, as I remember reading), and did the transfers themselves. One local station in my area, WSHE, pushed quad all the time. They were encoding in QS, and were happy to tell anyone who asked how to properly decode their broadcasts. They sounded great in stereo, too.
Quad cassettes could have happened, but Philips put the kibosh on that. They claimed they designed the cassette to be mutually compatible for stereo and mono. To add quad to that, they would have had to go with 8 tracks. That tape was narrow enough with stereo; quad would have been problematic for a number of reasons. Some matrixed quad cassettes were released, but head alignment was sometimes a bugaboo that threw things off... way off!
Chucky, you nailed the "NIMLRYD" factor. ("Not in MY living room, you don't!"... suddenly it's HER living room!) Stereo was bad enough, but QUAD? FOUR big boxes??? And she'd never let you turn it up above a whisper!
Yes cassettes could have gone discrete but the head would need even more density and it would have worsened the already dodgy s/n ratio and frequency response.
Re wife's, its got better for me. I had real issues justifying 4 speakers in my house, this complicated with the fact that my wife changes the "perfect" arrangement every year or 2. This invariably means rerouting the cables under my house. Now I am a big fella and I realy do not fit very well under the house or to many other places. My wife is 5 feet 4 and around 100 lbs dripping wet, I have now trained her to do the cable running under the house!!!!!!!! I win.