S
sqdave1975
Guest
Hi there, (sorry for the length) I am from the United Kingdom, where Quad seems to have pretty much entirely died the death. I have pretty much everything I need to start transfering my SQ LP's to DTS (purely as a hobby, not a business!) but my weakest link is my SQ decoder. Yep, I am stuck with a good old Sony SQ-D2020. (had multiple dry joints, now working beautifully) Whilst being in good working condition, it's performance is shall we say, somewhat lacklustre. From the numerous posts and reviews on the web, it appears that the coverted Tate II 101A is the one to have, and rather than waste money on the various U.K. Sony outboard decoders (and the odd overpriced Marantz receiver) that come up for sale there is little chance of getting one, or it's equivalents. Did the Tate or Tate-equipped variants ever reach the Britsh shores or was it a US-only product? Certainly I've never seen one in the flesh and as much as I'd love to own one $1000 (Ebay) is out of my price range.
There are various conflicting reports that the Fosgate 360* Space Matrix 3601 decoders do/don't have a variant of the Tate chipset - can anyone deny/confirm this ?
A list of all the I.C. part numbers in a 101A for comparision would be handy to have (I know they are unobtainable now)
They seems to be plenty of them around and I was going to try and gut one to see if the circuitry can be modified to allow SQ decoding. I have had some (limited) success by stripping out all the un-necessary Dolby components in a Canon D-300 dolby pro-logic decoder, leaving just the Adaptive Matrix chip remaining. It decodes a lot of SQ material with quite good precision, the Analogue Devices SSM-2126 Matrix decoder chip is supposed to be good for 25db seperation across all channels. For example, in Simon and Garfunkels' Bridge Over Troubled Waters album, the track "Baby Driver" features racing cars and engines revving. Right at the end of the track the car takes off up the road, and the sound is panned right across all four channels. My "gutted" Canon seems to cope with this very well, with good four channel seperation. Also the "Chase" trumpet test seems to work very well too, again with near-perfect seperation. Using the discrete inputs and VU meters on the 2020 to do an "instant" comparsion reveals little difference except of course for the better steering - Certainly leagues ahead of the Sony which seems to bleed through/pump somewhat on all the channels. Not good.
Incidentally, on the Canon the audio outputs are taken straight from the matrix decoder, so Left becomes Left Front, Right becomes Right Front, Centre becomes Left Rear and Surround becomes Right Rear. Hope that makes sense!!
I am going to buy a Space Matrix 3601 to play with, but if anyone has knowledge of these units, i'd be grateful to hear from you.
Also if anyone knows if someone is selling a Tate II 101A or similar, that would make my day. I've been trying for more than a year, but most people have never heard of it here in the UK!!!
Thanks
Dave.
There are various conflicting reports that the Fosgate 360* Space Matrix 3601 decoders do/don't have a variant of the Tate chipset - can anyone deny/confirm this ?
A list of all the I.C. part numbers in a 101A for comparision would be handy to have (I know they are unobtainable now)
They seems to be plenty of them around and I was going to try and gut one to see if the circuitry can be modified to allow SQ decoding. I have had some (limited) success by stripping out all the un-necessary Dolby components in a Canon D-300 dolby pro-logic decoder, leaving just the Adaptive Matrix chip remaining. It decodes a lot of SQ material with quite good precision, the Analogue Devices SSM-2126 Matrix decoder chip is supposed to be good for 25db seperation across all channels. For example, in Simon and Garfunkels' Bridge Over Troubled Waters album, the track "Baby Driver" features racing cars and engines revving. Right at the end of the track the car takes off up the road, and the sound is panned right across all four channels. My "gutted" Canon seems to cope with this very well, with good four channel seperation. Also the "Chase" trumpet test seems to work very well too, again with near-perfect seperation. Using the discrete inputs and VU meters on the 2020 to do an "instant" comparsion reveals little difference except of course for the better steering - Certainly leagues ahead of the Sony which seems to bleed through/pump somewhat on all the channels. Not good.
Incidentally, on the Canon the audio outputs are taken straight from the matrix decoder, so Left becomes Left Front, Right becomes Right Front, Centre becomes Left Rear and Surround becomes Right Rear. Hope that makes sense!!
I am going to buy a Space Matrix 3601 to play with, but if anyone has knowledge of these units, i'd be grateful to hear from you.
Also if anyone knows if someone is selling a Tate II 101A or similar, that would make my day. I've been trying for more than a year, but most people have never heard of it here in the UK!!!
Thanks
Dave.
