Are Binaural and Holophonic recordings stereo or mono? Will they decode properly?

[doity]

A couple years back I came across a local fellow who had inherited the estate of a man who ran a audio magazine and radio show for audiophiles for years. This man literally had a whole house and garage full of rare and priceless recordings, though I was mainly interested in the Audiophile cassette tapes at the time. He had stuff that I had only heard about and also stuff that I had been seeking for years. I took what I wanted but was not greedy. Well I had to pay but it was not a lot and I helped him sort the stuff out and let him know what stuff was worth to the best of my ability.

Anyway, he had a whole lot of obscure Binaural cassettes, mostly stuff put out by labels but some home recorded stuff. I had of course heard of the format but hadn’t really crossed paths with it. I got quite a bit of these and most are real-time copies on high end tape stock. My question is do you think that these would decode well using a Surround processor, or is there even any point? I know that these were made for headphone listening and I do have a good pair of Quad phones (Koss Phase 2+2).

A lot of the music (well most of it) is classical stuff but I do like that format and find it relaxing. Just wondering if I will have some kind of ‘out of this world’ experience or would I just be wasting my time? I did upload to YouTube one of the cassettes awhile back but it is more of a demonstration thing and is pretty bizarre with the main gist of it is that a robot experiences the sounds of everyday life. Or something like that. It is from the 1980’s and I suspect that cocaine was involved

 

[Mark Anderson]

Stereo. Will decode more often better than a standard stereo recording. Intended for headphone playback though

 

[doity]

Thanks Mark will give it a try. I also found a “Ambisonic” title in there as well but don’t know how to decode that. At least it says Ambisonic on the cover.