WHEN DID EVERYONE GET INVOLVED WITH QUAD , ANY FORMAT AND EQUIPMENT (THIS INCLUDES MODS)

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Before I was thinking about it, I had a Rotel amp in the 70s that had a Haffler type circuit for rear speakers that was pleasant enough but unremarkable in its effect. It got me mildly interested ‘til a friend mentioned ambisonics, so a search around the hi-fi press uncovered a review of the Minim AD10 ambi processor so contacted the maker and saved up for one. I’ve had an ambisonic proc ever since about 1983 (UHJ, B-format and stereo enhance/superstereo).

Apart from Dolby 5.1/7.1 etc, which is close to quad in a broad sense, I have stayed with ambisonic.
 
My earliest memories of Quad were the 8 tracks I played in my 1970 Cyclone GT 429 4 speed. If you are gonna have 4 on the floor, ya gotta have 4 channel sound too! My cousin always says to me, remember when we were cruisin in your car, and you played Smoke on the Water?

So, it must have been summer of 1972 when I had quad 8 tracks in my car. After that I had a Sanyo RD 8200 quad 8 track player in my dorm room at college, and Nilsson Schmillson was the big Q8 I remember from Fall of 72. The guy next door had the same tape in quad too.
So, we had OctaSchmillson going on. I never had a real standalone hi fi system with high end components until I went active duty following college in 1976-77. Then as I traveled around the world with the U.S. Army I picked up a lot of quad tapes and high end components in pawn shops and PX's around Army Bases. I got a TEAC A-3340 at Yakota Air Base in Japan, I picked up a Sansui 8001 Receiver in Killeen at Ft. Hood Texas, I also picked up a JVC 4 ch equalizer, and a Technics RS 858 US 8 track player recorder, and a Technics SL-1210MK2 turntable and a SH-400 CD-4 demodulator there. I have always had Pickering XUV 4500 Shibata stylus's for that turntable. I began acccumulating CD-4, QS, and SQ LP's and Q4's in the 77 timeframe when I added the reel to reel and turntable to my components. I left the Army in 1981 after 4 years active duty. During the mid and late 70's and early 80's I collected quad avidly. My collection was stored since the mid 80's as I focused on my career and moved all over the place until the last few years. Now its out of storage, somewhat more organized and I'm enjoying it again.

Looking through my folder on Quad, I still have some of the old Quad Incorporated catalogs, by Larry Clifton, Quadro out of Germany, by Dietrich Rasch, MCS Review, again Larry Clifton, Evolution edited by Jay Frank with a host of contributing writers, some of whom I am sure are on this site, The Multi Channel Sound Shop with its Quad Exchange, again I think by Larry Clifton, and of course all my old address and contact lists from 45 years ago.

My Sansui 8001 was overhauled in 2001 in Chicago, and the CD-4 Demodulator was declared kaput. So, I've found good use for the standalone SH-400 CD-4 demodulator I had picked up. Maybe one of these days, I'll send the 8001 into the Sansui Restore guys and see what they think they can do for it. I really don't lack many items in my older analog collection (that I want) except those I posted on my want list a week or two ago, but I am contemplating a new digital adventure now, getting into the world of AVR, Oppos, DACs, and 5.1 and some form of wifi cast whether its HEOS, Musiccast, or Sonos, so I can beam my multichannel into other rooms in the house. Then I will be revisiting some of the same things I already have in analog quad with Blu rays, SACDs, and DVD's. Hopefully the big record labels will keep opening their vaults, and producing new stuff like Fleetwood Mac, the Beatles, and others that never were quad or multichannel until now. I see the same chaos of competing, vastly incompatible, diverse, complicated, proprietary technologies playing our with Digital sources of multi-channel that killed Quad the first time.

I'm hoping someday that there will be an accepted, well recognized more standard technology that everyone will adapt and make source material and hardware for. Until then its sort of the wild wild west again I guess. Four on the Floor, 4 Channels in the Air, the only way to ride!
 
This is sort of a deja vu thread, so I'll just give a brief response. About 1971 I was given a Sears consolette that included a Garrard record changer with a ceramic cartridge, units that were very common at the time. Shortly after that I built a pair of bass reflex speakers from a magazine article. I had started buying records from The Record Club of Canada, early in 1972 I purchased a Quad adaptor (Dyna Quad clone) from them as well. I then used the new home built speakers for the fronts and moved the original Sears speakers to the back.

I never ever looked back, even that crude setup was such a big improvement over regular stereo!

I purchased my first quad record (SQ Janis Joplin "Pearl") while on a school trip to southern Ontario from a record store in Chatham Ontario in 1974.
 
Wow ...reading all these posts on everyone's quad historic discoveries , makes me nostalgic for those quad years .

When I put my first quad system together ,in 73.... Matrix EV-4 supplied by a cheap sounding BSR Metrotec decoder/amplifier , I never really looked back at having a plain stereo system. Even my favourite stereo LP'S sounded better in quad .
And much improved listening with stereo and quad matrix lps with later editions of better decoders ,
Sony SQA 2030 , Sansui QSD 2 , and finally in the early 80's my Fosgate 101a TATE II .
 
Got myself the full Morse Electrophonic 487 based system, adding a top load cassette deck and JVC belt drive turntable with Shure cartridge. First Quad album was the SQ release on This Van Let's "introspection II."
il_794xN.2195204916_6h30.jpg
 
I think the "...I never looked back..." comments are telling. I knew I would never again be satisfied with 2 channel stereo after the first time I heard quad and I bet almost all of us on this forum were/are the same.

Doug

I must confess that I did look back for a few years. I got frustrated with the lack of quad releases during the mid '70's along with the middling fidelity of many Columbia SQ albums. Then in 1978, Acoustic Research came out with the AR9 and I wanted a pair...badly. So I sold my other four speakers and an amp to help pay for the big ARs. I did go back to multichannel sound in 1989 when I got a Lexicon CP-1. Then, there was no looking back.
 
These are all awesome original quad stories. Just a decade ago, I didn't even know there was a such thing as surround sound outside of the movies/theater. When my thrift store Pioneer SX-680 started acting up a few years ago, I looked online for another one, saw receivers with 4 vu meters and was immediately sucked in. I haven't been the same person since. :)
 
I must confess that I did look back for a few years. I got frustrated with the lack of quad releases during the mid '70's along with the middling fidelity of many Columbia SQ albums. Then in 1978, Acoustic Research came out with the AR9 and I wanted a pair...badly. So I sold my other four speakers and an amp to help pay for the big ARs. I did go back to multichannel sound in 1989 when I got a Lexicon CP-1. Then, there was no looking back.
I had a pair of AR93s which cost me a months Salary, loved them, then used them for years as the fronts, but eventually they went to a good home.
 
I got my start in a very similar way to @MidiMagic . In 1970 Pop Tronics there was an article none other than J. Gordon Holt. It was titled Hafler vs Scheiber: 4 channels on Disc. It showed the Hafler diamond & Scheiber corner speaker layouts. What was cool about it was it didn't even need high tech stuff to work, just speakers hooked up a certain way. So the only spare speaker laying around was a 12" full way naked speaker my friend liberated from where he worked, Pizza Hut. I hooked it up like a Hafler rear speaker & put on stereo Switched on Bach. Like others here, I was blown away. It seemed like magic to hear that music from, sort of, all around. Had I listened to something more mellow I probably wouldn't have been near as impressed.

That 3rd speaker didn't stay hooked up to long it was just a proof of concept test I guess. But a few years later I was able to move out of my parents house & had acquired a few more pieces of gear. The 1st real piece of quad gear I had was also one of Sansui's 1st, a QS-1:

Sansui-QS-1- 2.jpg


It was beautiful unit for that time & had meters & the controls for balance the way I like best even today. But it wasn't Variomatrix at all. In fact Sansui called it the Quadphonic Synthesizer. This was so early Sansui was working on QS as we know it & saw the main purpose of the QS-1 for playing back stereo. It had an odd mode option to "rotate" outputs 90 or 180 deg, not phase, but position.

At that point, summer '74, I had a Phillips 212 TT (bye bye Garrard), a Kenwood KA-2000 40 WPC integrated amp that handled phono pre-amp & rear ch amplification. For front chs I had a Dynaco stereo 120 that did not have tone controls so I added a RS 5 band equalizer. Don't look at me like that. Maybe you did too.

Empire Jupiter speakers for the front. The ones that looked like giant
salt 'N pepper shakers. KLH 8" 2 way speaks for the rear.

I added a stand alone small Sony SQ decoder I think it just had 10/40 blend. Then I got a Sansui CD-4 decoder & it was getting more complicated to switch & balance things properly. So I got a good trade in at Hi Fi Fo Fum on all except the TT & acquired a Kenwood 9940. It really solved a lot of problems & was totally reliable but eventually I figured out that done right, seperate components was a much more attractive way to go for me.

So the 9940 & all that stuff is long gone. Oh except for my first hi-fi purchase ever, the little Kenwood KA-2000. But since that time I have always had a quad/surround sound set up. What trip it's been & when I read stuff in this thread I know I am in good company.
 
My first foray into quad was in the early 70's. My younger brother had won a trip to Europe from the U.N. and had enough money to pick up some Peerless speakers to bring home. We built our own case and used them and a Phllips amp my Dad financed plus some old speakers to hook them up hot to hot al'a David Hafler. I remember that Simon and Garfunkel's The Boxer and Baby Driver gave great effects.I got my first job a year or so later and got a posting with the Canadian Government in the high Arctic(Sachs Harbour, N.W.T). I was able to up grade to a Sansui QA7000, Panasonic se-405 Cd decoder and Heathkit AA1506 and a Dual 701 turntable. I still own all this equipment and just had theAA-1506 recapped.
 
Got myself the full Morse Electrophonic 487 based system, adding a top load cassette deck and JVC belt drive turntable with Shure cartridge. First Quad album was the SQ release on This Van Let's "introspection II."View attachment 68223


I was going to ask you what was the "year" you got into quad ,,....but going by the release of
Van Leer's Introspection II that would have been 1977 . (or soon after)
 
I bought one of these Zenith F947P Allegro Quad Consoles new in the early 1970s while I was in high school. I think I was only making $2.10/hour as a typist in a law firm at night and during the weekends, so I took out my first loan through my mother's credit union for under $700 to pay for it. I had it in my mother's living room in two houses until I finished college and got my own place.

Zenith F947P Allegro Quad Console-1.jpg


It is still in my garage with two pairs of rear external speakers, one pair is the original pair that came with the console, the other pair I was able to find on ebay (albeit badly refinished but speakers were good).

Don't remember what my first quad album and Q8 were but the Columbia An Introduction To The World Of SQ Quadraphonic Sound, QX 31403 and the Shaft Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Q8 Enterprise ENS-2-5002 were some of the first I owned.

After I added a BIC and then later Technics SL-650 Direct-Drive Turntable, TEAC A3440S 4-Channel Reel to Reel and JVC KD3030 Cassette Deck did the audio quality that came out of the Zenith was surprisingly excellent and sounded so much better than component quad systems in the same price range.
 
I got my start in a very similar way to @MidiMagic . In 1970 Pop Tronics there was an article none other than J. Gordon Holt. It was titled Hafler vs Scheiber: 4 channels on Disc. It showed the Hafler diamond & Scheiber corner speaker layouts. What was cool about it was it didn't even need high tech stuff to work, just speakers hooked up a certain way. So the only spare speaker laying around was a 12" full way naked speaker my friend liberated from where he worked, Pizza Hut. I hooked it up like a Hafler rear speaker & put on stereo Switched on Bach. Like others here, I was blown away. It seemed like magic to hear that music from, sort of, all around. Had I listened to something more mellow I probably wouldn't have been near as impressed.

That 3rd speaker didn't stay hooked up to long it was just a proof of concept test I guess. But a few years later I was able to move out of my parents house & had acquired a few more pieces of gear. The 1st real piece of quad gear I had was also one of Sansui's 1st, a QS-1:

View attachment 68240

It was beautiful unit for that time & had meters & the controls for balance the way I like best even today. But it wasn't Variomatrix at all. In fact Sansui called it the Quadphonic Synthesizer. This was so early Sansui was working on QS as we know it & saw the main purpose of the QS-1 for playing back stereo. It had an odd mode option to "rotate" outputs 90 or 180 deg, not phase, but position.

At that point, summer '74, I had a Phillips 212 TT (bye bye Garrard), a Kenwood KA-2000 40 WPC integrated amp that handled phono pre-amp & rear ch amplification. For front chs I had a Dynaco stereo 120 that did not have tone controls so I added a RS 5 band equalizer. Don't look at me like that. Maybe you did too.

Empire Jupiter speakers for the front. The ones that looked like giant
salt 'N pepper shakers. KLH 8" 2 way speaks for the rear.

I added a stand alone small Sony SQ decoder I think it just had 10/40 blend. Then I got a Sansui CD-4 decoder & it was getting more complicated to switch & balance things properly. So I got a good trade in at Hi Fi Fo Fum on all except the TT & acquired a Kenwood 9940. It really solved a lot of problems & was totally reliable but eventually I figured out that done right, seperate components was a much more attractive way to go for me.

So the 9940 & all that stuff is long gone. Oh except for my first hi-fi purchase ever, the little Kenwood KA-2000. But since that time I have always had a quad/surround sound set up. What trip it's been & when I read stuff in this thread I know I am in good company.
The QS-1 was and is a beautiful unit, and you had one back in the day! I'm impressed. I remember drooling over the articles describing the phase modulation process, I thought that it was a great idea to synthesize quad from stereo. I even dreamed up of ways that it might be accomplished. Nothing ever turned into a project or proto type though. In more recent years I did find an eBay bargain and I had it hooked up in the bedroom for awhile, It sounds nice with closely spaced speakers and it worked great with movies too. Hooked up in my main system though it does very little, I guess that if the speakers are too far apart you can't really discern the subtle phase changes. The same decoder was used in various Sansui receivers. I always thought that the speaker rotation control was kind of cool. It would be great if your speakers were placed in a square around the room and you wanted to change your seating position!

Ugh SQ with 10/40 blend, I never ever used blend that destroyed the benefit of the SQ system. Vari-blend worked OK though.
 
I bought one of these Zenith F947P Allegro Quad Consoles new in the early 1970s while I was in high school. I think I was only making $2.10/hour as a typist in a law firm at night and during the weekends, so I took out my first loan through my mother's credit union for under $700 to pay for it. I had it in my mother's living room in two houses until I finished college and got my own place.

View attachment 68253

It is still in my garage with two pairs of rear external speakers, one pair is the original pair that came with the console, the other pair I was able to find on ebay (albeit badly refinished but speakers were good).

Don't remember what my first quad album and Q8 were but the Columbia An Introduction To The World Of SQ Quadraphonic Sound, QX 31403 and the Shaft Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Q8 Enterprise ENS-2-5002 were some of the first I owned.

After I added a BIC and then later Technics SL-650 Direct-Drive Turntable, TEAC A3440S 4-Channel Reel to Reel and JVC KD3030 Cassette Deck did the audio quality that came out of the Zenith was surprisingly excellent and sounded so much better than component quad systems in the same price range.
The HiFi used to be part of the living room decor. The switch to components while promising better sound would of had a negative effect on wife acceptance. Just like jukeboxes old consoles look great in a rec room even if not really practical soundwise.
 
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Oddly I got involved with the software WAY before the hardware. I bought vinyl copies of DSOTM and WYWH by Pink Floyd - probably in 1983, but possibly earlier. My first stereo music album was Tubular Bells around 1974, so there was quite a gap before quad.

Early on I was just listening to the mix differences in stereo - no quad reproduction. Neither my finances nor my domiciles were suited to quad reproduction. Other early favorite quad to stereo mixes were Aqualung & Can't Buy A Thrill.

I bought an SQ decoder and a rear channel amp in 1984, but never quite got it together go make it work. Now I know that SQ was not the Full Monty anyway.

At some point after that I bought quad reel dubs of all three Pink Floyd quad 8 tracks so I could at least listen to the discrete channels, even if only as stereo pairs. Even that was a revelation! I continued to collect quad vinyl and 8 tracks, but still had no way to listen to a proper setup.

It was not until I moved into my current house that I finally had the space and the money to make it happen. I set out to build a surround system and started buying digital surround media - just before the crash of the surround resurgence. Actually I did end up getting some good fire sale prices on some great media based on that timing.

We bought the house in July of 2009. My first surround session here was 2/12/2010. I think Private Universe probably played me some legit surround before that date, but it was all around them. Now - thousands of dollars of media and hardware later - here I am!

Nice thread!
 
The HiFi used to be part of the living room decor. The switch to components while promising better sound would of had a negative effect on wife acceptance. Just like jukeboxes old consoles look great in a rec room even if not really practical soundwise.

Ken ,
I guess the wifey has a big say in what her house should look and sound like . That's not much difference with many other marriages .
FWIW My wife liked some of my records , not all , so I made sure I played a lot of her favourites .
LP'S from Eric Clapton , Roxy Music( and Bryan Ferry) and a few others got regular rotation in my house.

Like they say it's always good in a relationship to "give and take" and find compromise , or face the flying dinner ware /rolling pin .

😤
 
Ugh SQ with 10/40 blend, I never ever used blend that destroyed the benefit of the SQ system. Vari-blend worked OK though.

I prefer SQ blend over the straight SQ, because I like listening for hall ambiance, which with straight SQ is only 3 dB down from the music.
 
Somewhere around 1975 I got a deal on a Marantz 2440 quad adapter, I have no idea any more where. and added it to my 2270, Pickup up a couple speakers for it that I can't remember either expect that they did have some Jensen electrostatic tweeters in them. The amps looked so sweet together in their beautiful walnut cabinets. ;) The 2440 had the SQ board in it and also did some type of matrixing. Whole system sounded amazing for the late 70s. Ended up losing it all in a divorce a few years later. :mad:
Here a pic of me eating a Whopper and the amps in the background next to a AR XB table with a Stanton 681 cartridge IIRC.
Had multich gear ever since, been on a binge recently, constantly upgrading the system over the last decade, with a complete system overhaul around 3 times. I think I'm done now, at least for a while. LOL
Marantz1976.jpg
 
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