Now if someone could just get a hold of the last working RCA Quadulator.
Greg Bogantz has most of it. So I was right, then. dbx WAS originally intended for CD-4 so there's no reason it couldn't be used for the new version which I have dubbed DM-4 for Discrete to Metal-4 (channel).
Lou Dorren's new Demodulator would need to have in's and out's that would allow the user to add two dbx-II NR units, bypassing the built-in ANRS. (you'd need 2 stereo dbx-II NR units - one for the carriers and one for the baseband.
Too bad it's already in production. Oh well. There's always a Mark II.
...best sound...superior ...including the gold DCC CD...super quiet vinyl...dbx will reduce any of the PCM artifacts. (dbx-II with 14- or 16-bit PCM is a great combo and used to be used a lot by recordists)..
I do the same thing and have for a long time. Which is how I heard about it: direct to F-1 PCM recording but through a dbx encoder first at Grateful Dead and etc shows my uncles used to go to and tape from.
...sounds exactly like the LP. Can you tell I'm a fan of dbx noise reduction? It was also used by MCA for Sensurround Mod II and Mod III when MCA was trying to compete with Dolby for the high-fidelity theater sound market.
I worked as a projectionist in college, we had a lot of that kind of equipment in the sound rack, hell, we had an old QSD 1 we set up in the HALL mode to play the Non-Sync (intermission music) back through the surrounds when it had them.
(As far as quadraphonic cassettes go) Philips wouldn't allow quad Compact Cassettes on the market and cracked down hard on companies that tried it - like JVC. Philips would only allow Matrix encoded Compact Cassettes, which didn't work too well considering the tape/head azimuth was so totally off on the vast majority of decks.
And not everybody wanted or could afford a Nakamichi.
...Teac 4-track semi-pro recorders/mixers...
Even tho they ultimately lost not only the format exclusivity but also the track configuration. Units like a Tascam 424 use the same equidistant track configuration as that used in talking books for the blind, whereas conventional cassettes used two stereo tracks that occupied the same space as an old monaural track, a large guardband in the center, and then repeated on the other side.
...And some high-end companies came out with CC decks that ran the tape at double speed with dbx for better sound .
Yep. Been there, done that. You ruin across all kinds of crazy stuff in the Legacy Media Restoration world.
...I think Mobile Fidelity even issued some tapes in the double-speed format.
No actual releases though, just dealer demos and test ``pressings'' of which I have a couple like the 25-RPM and real-time mastered CD-4 from Japan that never came out either.
I got a Mo-Fi-branded Marantz two-speed stereo cassette deck for FREE including the box, all peripherals and the matching Mo-Fi branded dbx unit no less as yet another leftover of a guy that died or got a divorce and lost all his gear to the wife who knew zilch about it, bears witness that at least for a year or two these were out. Of course half the problem of marketing was:
A) they needed to use chrome tape because the cobalt or ferrous tape wouldn't give you that good of a dbx tracking and chrome tape was expensive then
B) they needed to use 16-micron 60 minute tape vs the 12-micron 90 min thickness,
So since you could get away with a 68 minutes of tape in a cassette with 16-micron tape , then that gave you enough for 17 minutes of an LP side which usually meant that either one song per side had to go, like 2-track stereo reels of the 50's vs their 4-track counterparts in the 60's, or else they'd take a chance and use 12-micron C-90 tape and just load 92 minutes of tape in to give you the necessary 23 minute album sides and just live with the thinner tape.
MoFi also issued VHS and Beta digital tapes made to be played with Sony's PCM-F1 digital recorder that used video recorders..
That were used a lot by remote-recording engineers if all they had to do was record in Stereo. Or by little high-school kids that wanted to spend a whole school year recording programs for Lock-In Prom Weekend on 6-hour VHS tapes. We had an airline production VHS deck leftover from who knows where and was able to use the PCM tracks for one 6-hour program, the VHS Hi-Fi tracks for a second program and the linear-audio tracks for either a third stereo program or a third and fourth mono program just like the airlines did.
For those though, we recorded in advance onto one-hour 2-track reel-to-reels, and then just lined up three (or four) reel to reels for the final encoding pass onto the VHS, one reel deck going through the PCM, one deck going to the VHS Hi Fi and one or two decks going to the linear stereo low-fi tracks. Since each of the hour-long reels would be over at the same time, we could pause the VHS while we changed reels on the 3 decks and then resume for the next hour alllll niiiight lonnnnggggg for a week before prom.
I remember seeing Dark Side Of The Moon as a VHS PCM tape from them - I was told by Brad Miller that they were all ran off, one at a time, as orders came in - so in effect, each was really a master tape since the data was an exact duplicate of the original U-Matric PCM-F1 master.
As all VHS tapes must be as there wasn't (and still isn't) a way to duplicate videotape at high speed. Which is why the first VHS movies were 89.99 a pop or more.
But, back to talking about cassettes.
That, and the Tascam tapes were recorded at 3-3/4 instead of the normal 1-7/8 or the talking book's 15/16, at least that was all derivative of the same 30-IPS mastering speed. For the department store uses of the same technology, true they used the equidistant track format, but they used a derivative of 22-1/2 IPS instead of 30, so the department store reel to reels ran at 5-5/8 instead of 7-1/2, their cartridges all ran at 2-13/16 instead of 3-3/4 and their cassettes ran at 1-29/32.
And then they all ran backwards besides, meaning if you tried to play them on a normal stereo player, the tracks that would have ordinarily been where Side 1 was located was still there, it was just recorded right to left like a microcassette instead of left to right. For a VERY short period of time backwards carts were also produced that looked just like a mirror image of a normal 4 track (or broadcast) cart with the hole for the roller on the left instead of the right and wound from the right to the left instead of left to right.
So if you wondered why you could never play the department store tapes on anything but a 4-track 4-channel quadraphonic tape player (with the exception of the reverse cart versions you had to unwind onto a reel beforehand and then play them ``backwards'' on the reel to reel), now you know.
So I don't know if there's better PC SQ decoded sources out there that correctly decode signals in-between the speakers. My downloads might be old from non-perfected SQ PC decoding, I don't know..
Best way to find that out is to see if you can get the raw undecoded SQ-encoded file somewhere and then go onto this board's SQ Decoding in Adobe Audition 3.0 thread and after finding a copy of Adobe Audition 3.0, try it how they tell you to on there and see what happens. Or go back to your Tate II and compare with the AA 3.0.
No Center Back (SQ decoding) is possible.
Not without either a real or digitally reconstructed Ben Bauer London Box anyway. That's why so many tests involved trying to overlay SQ on EV (mirror images of each other) with the rear phase variances from Dynaquad laid over that and then the London Box signal laid over all THAT. Which is exactly how they tried to make 12-channel or 14-channel matrix in the late 60's and never could come up with a way because of how terrible the steering circuitry was at the time.
So I'm gonna need two more Circle Surround decoders and two more speakers...
Or, being an engineer yourself, just re-design something from scratch that can retrieve SQ laid over EV with the rears from Dynaquad laid over all that and a London Box signal laid over all THAT all at the same time. And then throw in a QS Regular Matrix and Vario Matrix just to make people happy.
/me singing The New Christy Minstrels under the following for ambiance...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kgaD8LFSfg middle track).
I do apologize - I tend to write too much and 'wander' onto subjects that are only vaguely related to the subject at hand - I don't mean to derail threads like that, it just kinda happens - and I don't start a new thread because it doesn't seem like enough info to do so.
Welcome to Engineering.
It always seemed that I was writing some chapter due to the length of my posts.
Or a book like I've been accused of repeatedly. My response? People need to understand engineers.
Grammy award winning record mastering engineer Bernie Grundman once said to a young inspiring engineer: ``Engineers are either 0.53% or 0.56% of the population depending on which story you believe. If you believe the theory that 1 out of every 187 people have the intelligence, ability, and expertise of an engineer, then that's 0.53%, and for each one of those three that you have intact, take the square root of that 0.53%.
So if you have the intelligence and the ability, it's 0.2809% and if you have all three, you are 0.7890481% of the population. Which incidentally according to one Hollywood legend was Mr Grundman's phone number at one time (long since disconnected) and if you believe the other theory, that you are 0.56% of the population, that leaves 99.44 percent of the population who will have zero understanding of ideas you're trying to convey.
WHICH EITHER MEANS that the world is 99.44 percent pure and it's the world's impurities (engineers) that give the world it's flavors and textures and/or that being one or more of the above is still nothing to commit homicide or suicide over. (187 is police code for that), then either way it's nothing to get all worked up over.
So, now,...I can't bring myself to delete it because I've spent all that time writing it, you know? I like to talk and argue and learn new stuff that others know and I don't. And I like to pass on what I know to others. So I'm always torn.
Welcome to Being a Guy 101. See above under 0.56% or 0.53% courtesy of Bernie Grundman. And I'm the same. If ONE PERSON wants to know I'll tell them, if not, then it's an excuse to write more blogs in my spare time, from which I can then edit to come up with a book.
Please, tell me if it's an irritant and I'll refrain from posting about anything other than the direct subject being discussed. Short, direct to the point and nothing more. I want to be a good "Quad Neighbor" on the QQ Forums, you know?
Nope, good to have a sparring partner in a fellow engineer.
(LOL) We sound like a buncha guys yakking it up at four in the morning during setups for the electronics and record swapmeets held periodically in the parking lots at the jr. colleges that's been going on since the Dawn of Man. Nobody else but them and their disciples ever cares about what they're yakking about either.
Me, anytime I got bored I'd just make the rounds of electronics, records, tapes and broadcasting and recording guys, most of whom in those days were mutually intolerant of each other.
Your turn Disclord. (LOL)
Now back to your regularly scheduled program about CD-4 Demodulator.
I still wish Lou would consider adding the original dbx-II back into the design as an option besides the ANRS plus all the extra ports mentioned above on the original Quadulator in case we get a new version and patrons to fund the development research.
I am sure when Lou has more information about it, he will be therecoming forthwith..
..forthcoming therewith? withworth corthfoming? It's late I need food and sleep.