QuadBob said:
Hey Steve!!
Welcome and great to see you here!
I'm sure we all have a ton of questions for you..... I've got your initials inside my own S&IC from when you did the upgrade to it!
First off.......can you tell us how many S&IC's were actually produced and sold?
And, any historical information that you can provide on the time between the production of the S&IC and transition to the Tetrasound/TATE II 101A.
Thanks in advance...........and hope we see you here often!
One thing I could comment on would be the relative historical timeline of events surrounding the Tate development effort, the Audionics Space & Image Composer and the Fosgate 101 units. To the best of my recollection (don't hold me to EVERY detail, it's been 20+ years!):
Martin Wilcox (the engineer) and Wesley Ruggles Jr. were the developers of the Tate Separation Enhancement System in the early '70s. By 1974, they were showing a hand-built one-off prototype of Martin's design and it was getting rave reviews (I have a photocopy of a 1974 column in Stereo Review magazine that raves about the unit and mentions that a standard SQ decoder was used as the "front-end" to the Tate system).
Sometime in mid-70's, Tate Audio approached National Semiconductor about making the Tate chip set and Martin Wilcox worked on refining the design for chip manufacturing. Unbeknownst to anyone at the time, National screwed up one of the chips and it didn't work correctly. They didn't take responsibility for the error and wouldn't fix the chip, but they did make the chips with some key interface points coming out to pins on the chip. This would allow the potential for external circuits to be designed that might help restore operation to the chips.
About this time (about 1976 or so), Martin Wilcox and Wes Ruggles had a falling out and I believe Tate was having financial difficulties brought about by the National chipset not working properly. Tate was on the hook to pay for the chip development but couldn't sell any chipsets because they didn't work. Tate Audio sued National Semiconductor but that just tied things up in court. This is where Audionics comes into the picture.
Audionics had enlisted Lynn Olson to develop what became the "Shadow Vector" SQ Decoder & enhancement system and it really did work. However, Audionics didn't have the cash to fund an I.C. development of its own and the Shadow Vector system (like the Tate System) was the size of a small suitcase if built with discrete components! A decision was made to jump on board Tate's bandwagon and help finish the development of a "band-aid" interface for the chipset to overcome its' problems.
The development partnership went on for about 2 years or so, on and off. We were getting credible performance but it wasn't yet good enough for Wes Ruggles, Jr. to approve release of the system (he was a notorious perfectionist). I spent many hours with Wes doing listening tests and "tweaking" prototypes. We got to a point where we (Audionics) were approved to show a prototype system at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 1979.
Fosgate was a hot name in automobile audio systems at the time and had a big presence at the show. Someone from Fosgate's crew heard a Space & Image Composer prototype demo (before it even had that name, the S&IC name was created on the way back home from the show while driving in the middle of the Mojave desert, but that's another story!). Our demo literally blew him away, and he ran back to the Fosgate booth and dragged Jim Fosgate back to the Audionics booth to hear it for himself.
Jim Fosgate was so enamoured of the concept he almost exploded with enthusiasm and good ideas right off the bat and signed up to be the second Tate developer on the spot. In a true spirit of cooperation, Audionics shared the interface work it had completed and special parts it had made so far and Jim Fosgate shared some of his ideas and concepts on how to improve system performance. Jim first designed a car-version of the Tate system... I believe he called it the Tetrasound (originally he wasn't going to compete with Audionics in the home market) and then ultimately switched gears to develop his own home decoder... the original model 101.
After a short period with both companies contributing to the effort, we had an interface design that Wes Ruggles had to approve of and production commenced.
About this time, Ray Dolby had purchased a production Audionics Space & Image Composer and installed it in his home in what could be considered to be one of the first home media/theater rooms. He was so impressed with the performance that he contacted Tate Audio (through Audionics) and became a Tate licensee. He immediately directed his engineers to see what they could do to develop a replacement for the QS-based surround system they had been using for the Dolby Surround sound systems used in movie theaters (the kind in use when Star Wars was released in 1977).
Now, with Dolby, Audionics and Fosgate all using the Tate chipsets, there was enough "weight" behind the project to get the Exar company to take a look at the National Tate chips (since National wouldn't or couldn't due to the Tate lawsuit) and try to determine what could be done to fix the design. From a detailed chip inspection under a high-powered microscopes and comparisons to the original schematics, they determined that National had not only messed up one section of circuitry, they had also left off a large chunk of circuitry from the schematic! No wonder it didn't work as-is!
Because of all the effort we expended developing an external interface that worked, it was decided that Exar would simply laser-"prune" away the bad circuitry and bring fresh new interface points out of the chip that would continue to use our external interface circuit. This became the Tate II chipset, and worked much smoother because the defective circuitry wasn't impeding our ability to make the chips work properly. The cancer was trimmed away and the chips were much happier!
The new Exar chipset was substituted for the National chipset in production immediately after we optimized the interface circuit for these chips. Fosgate and Dolby did the same... Fosgate's updated unit was the 101A model. Audionics developed a retrofit kit and quite a few of the original Space & Image Composers were upgraded to II status.
On an S&IC, you can tell the difference (inside) by locating the twin rows of Green film caps behind the balance controls near the center of the circuit board. If there is a chip mounted directly on the board in the middle of these caps, it will have a National logo and the LM1852N part number. If instead you find a "daughter-card" mounted on the long leads of a wire-wrap socket mounted on the card (above the caps altogether), then the chip on that card will have an Exar logo and the XR402 part number.
Sometime around late 1981 or early 1982, there was some problem between Exar and Tate and the supply of Tate chips dried up and disappeared. The licensees could only buy the chips from Tate Audio, and Tate Audio was the only entity who could buy the chipsets directly from Exar (all according to contracts, of course). Audionics never built another surround system and Fosgate went on to manufacture several generations of brilliantly-designed high-end surround decoders that used his own separation enhancement system that did not rely on the Tate Audio technology or chips.
So, there in a nutshell is a basic Tate System history inside of a decade. The dissappearing supply of Tate Chips at the time explains why there are so few available now as spare parts!
Steve