Sony SL-2700 Betamax

[gregz]

Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com> wrote:

On Wed, 29 May 2013 15:28:34 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
presence@MUNGEpanix.com> wrote:

If fuses blew on the amp, I'd not be in a hurry to start replacing them.
I'd probably disable channels in the surround decoder.

Chuckle. I have an old Heathkit AA-2010 quad channel amplifier.
http://www.audioasylumtrader.com/ca/ca.html?ca=23000
I'm down to one channel now, as the other three have blown up over the
years. When the last channel dies, I'll probably fix it and start
over.

My ears are somewhat screwed up, so quad sound never did anything for
me. In the early 1970's, I attened an AES (Audio Engineering Society)
convention, where the hot topic was quadraphonic everything. I tried
on quad earphones and heard nothing interesting. I listened to a
serious discussion between "experts" over whether the listener wants
concert hall realism, which meant sitting in front of the orchestra in
stereo, or whether he wants to be "immersed" in the sound, which meant
sitting in the middle of the orchestra in quad. Meanwhile, the movie
theaters were having a bit of a problem with quad sound, which tended
to produce dead spots.

That allied tuner reminded me of a cheap receiver I once had. Same look.

I got a Hughes SRS unit when they started selling it. I used to use it for
tv. Had some issue about volume changes on sports when I didn't need extra
sound effects. Almost forgot about it. Hopefully I'll get my work room
finished where I can see everything I got
..

Greg

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

William Sommerwerck wrote:

I never did a side by side comparison between VHS and Beta,
so I can't really be sure that Beta is really better. As I recall,
I didn't see much difference.

I hope the following doesn't sound unduly ad hominem. However, the differences
are plain.

1 Betamax has more-stable tape motion. Without TBC, VHS has enough jitter to
produce a sometime-ragged-looking picture.

2 Betamax appears to have slightly better luminance /and/ chroma bandwidth.

3 Sony's refusal to license its polarity-inversion chrominance-recording
system forced JVC to use a quadrature system, which badly degraded color
fidelity.

If you want conclusive proof, look for an article in one of the video mags
(sorry, I don't remember which or when) where a source was repeatedly dubbed.
Betamax held up for three or four dubs. VHS fell apart very quickly.

Betamax represents a "reasonable" compromise for a consumer product. I
consider myself a critical viewer, but I could watch Beta tapes without
getting unduly upset. VHS was another matter.

You do know that Ampex started the development of VHS before they
sold out to a consortium of japanese companies to raise much needed
funds for their financial survival? Ampex wanted to make a cheap,
scaled down version of their existing 1% 2" tape systems, to sell at an
affordable price for consumers but ran into cash flow problems.

Sears and a couple others attempted to develop and market
Cartrivision, another failed system. The cartridge was huge, and rental
tapes couldn't be rewound. They had to be put in a separate machine at
the video store to be rewound before being rented again. That made them
so unwieldy that no one want ed to handle them. Only blanks could be
recorded, & played, after being rewound on a home machine. Avco was the
company doing the development, at the site of a former W.W.II Crosley
plant on Glendale-Milford Road in Cincinnati, Ohio. The testbeds were
still sitting in the warehouse when it became the original location for
Cincinnati Electronics.

The Betamax machines I worked on treated the tape a lot worse than
VHS. Some had the tape sliding against itself to simplify they loading
and unloading.

Having seen both in use in a broadcast station, the cheap VHS was
much better than any beta, other than the overpriced ENG version that
only got 20 minutes per tape. All Sony machines needed a TBC to meet
FCC requirements, but I could feed a $79 VHS tape into our Vital
Industries Squeezezoom and get a picture that was stable enough to
broadcast.

We had a complete three deck 1" sony video editing suite, each with a
TBC. The LaCarte video automation system had 12 sony U-matic players
and a 'Striper' to record programs and read the time codes for the
automation. That system had another TBC. We used a framestore to
synchronize live video from the studio, rather than depend on not losing
the feed over the 7 GHz STL. At times we used a second framestore to be
able to crossfade between live feeds from two studios, in different
cities.

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

jurb6006@gmail.com wrote:

Maybe I'm an old fuddy duddy. I see an RJ45 on an amplifier and I say to myself "Why ?".

You've never seen a 'RJ45' on any amplifier, since that is a
telephone company standard for an application for the 8P8C connector.


"RJ45 is the common name for an 8P8C modular connector using 8
conductors that was also used for both RJ48 and RJ61 registered jacks.
The "RJ45" physical connector is standardized as the IEC 60603-7 8P8C
modular connector with different "categories" of performance, with all
eight conductors present. A similar standard jack once used for
modem/data connections, the RJ45S, used a "keyed" variety of the 8P8C
body with an extra tab that prevents it mating with other connectors;
the visual difference compared to the more common 8P8C is subtle, but it
is a different connector. The original RJ45S keyed 8P2C modular
connector had pins 5 and 4 wired for tip and ring of a single telephone
line and pins 7 and 8 shorting a programming resistor, but is obsolete
today.

Electronics catalogs commonly advertise 8P8C modular connectors as
"RJ45". An installer can wire the jack to any pin-out or use it as part
of a generic structured cabling system such as ISO/IEC 15018 or ISO/IEC
11801 using 8P8C patch panels for both phone and data. Virtually all
electronic equipment which uses an 8P8C connector (or possibly any 8P
connector at all) will document it as an "RJ45" connector."



The same plug is used for the RJ31X for alarm systems, but uses a
special 'shorting' 8P8C connector to allow a dial-up 'communicator' to
seize the phone line and call the central station of the monitoring
service.

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

jurb6006@gmail.com wrote:

"All Sony machines needed a TBC to meet
FCC requirements, but I could feed a $79 VHS tape into our Vital
Industries Squeezezoom and get a picture that was stable enough to
broadcast.
"

I find that extremely hard to believe. I do believe it about the Sonys because of tape drag, but I find it hard to believe they let you broadcast right out of a VHS. You sure there might not have been another TBC downsteam ?

Some Sony pro equipment just incorporated the TBC, did someone turn it off or something ?

Believe whatever you want to. We all know that you think you know
everything about everthing, and you've bragged about being the best in
your field. The TBC were all external to the Sony 1" VTRs & third party
equipment. The Squeeze Zoom was fed directly to the Vital Industries
master video mixer & 3M video router. There was no TBC in that path. I
know this because I was one of the two engineers who maintained that
control room, and the million dollars plus worth of equipment. The
three Sony 1" machines & TBCs were bought from Coors Brewing, and the
RCA TK46A cameras came from the Nautilus Eliptical studio in Ocala, when
it was closed. From the way you post, it would appear that you know
more about Coors, than TV studios.

 

"All Sony machines needed a TBC to meet
FCC requirements, but I could feed a $79 VHS tape into our Vital

Industries Squeezezoom and get a picture that was stable enough to
broadcast.
"

I find that extremely hard to believe. I do believe it about the Sonys because of tape drag, but I find it hard to believe they let you broadcast right out of a VHS. You sure there might not have been another TBC downsteam ?

Some Sony pro equipment just incorporated the TBC, did someone turn it off or something ?

 

:We all know that you think you know
everything about eveyrthing, and you've bragged about being the best in

your field."

I do come off as a pompous ass huh. This best in the field, someone else said that. And it only applies to this state.

Your field is not my field. I am also not what I once was. My ield actully narrowed, it was lucrative for a time, but no more.

Yeah, twenty years ago I was the HNIC. I knew now to get sit done, the best, the fastest. The owners of the company did what I told them to do. If you really have to have proof, /I can arrainge a meeting. They would testify to this in court.

Anyway, enough of this tweet twat.

What about this dude's SL-2700 ? You WANT this to work, know why ? It is not SuperBeta, and has no RMS detector ?which means COPYGUARD DOES NOT WORK. It just records it.

Now if you take that Beta tape and record it back to VHS, the copyguard is still there. It will fuck up the copy just like the original did.

But as the proud owner of the SL-2700 or some other nice Soy deck, HYOU can view the movie at any time. I won't be selling mine. (SL-HFR60 with the HFP100)

 

"This is called DynaQuad. It was first officially proposed by David Hafler..

OFFICIALLY. The same thing has been caled everything. Quad this and quad that. From Alphaquad to Omegaquad lol. And when that $65 Dolby chip is in simple surround, it simply just nulls part of the L+R signal. It does work a bit better than a resistor though, if that's what you want.

>"

 

[William Sommerwerck]

You do know that Ampex started the development of VHS before they
sold out to a consortium of japanese companies to raise much needed
funds for their financial survival? Ampex wanted to make a cheap,
scaled down version of their existing 1% 2" tape systems, to sell at
an affordable price for consumers but ran into cash flow problems.

That's new to me. I don't see why Japanese companies aren't capable of
designing poor-quality products on their own. (RCA had been working on a
consumer video recorder for years, but felt it wouldn't be marketable until it
hit the same price point as color TV -- $500.)

The Betamax machines I worked on treated the tape
a lot worse than VHS.

That's not altogether surprising. Beta pulled the tape into an elongated loop
around the drum, to isolate its motion -- which is why Beta has less line
jitter.

Some had the tape sliding against itself to simplify
the loading and unloading.

I'm not sure I understand.

Having seen both in use in a broadcast station, the cheap VHS
was much better than any Beta, other than the overpriced ENG
version that only got 20 minutes per tape. All Sony machines
needed a TBC to meet FCC requirements, but I could feed a $79
VHS tape into our Vital Industries Squeezezoom and get a picture
that was stable enough to broadcast.

You are one of the most-knowledgeable people (about anything) I've ever met,
but here I have to say "No way, José." VHS has serious time-base problems.

I first noticed this the early 80s when I was scanning a late-night show I'd
recorded * -- why was the picture visibly sharper than in normal play? I
looked closely and saw the reason -- severe line jitter. When scanning, there
was either less of it (for the same reason analog recorders have less flutter
at higher speeds), or the eye did a better job of averaging the errors.

Just as I judge audio equipment by what I hear, I judge video equipment by
what I see. When VHS recordings have obvious time-base problems -- what am I
supposed to conclude?

* The machine was a high-end RCA-branded Panasonic.

 

[William Sommerwerck]

"Bruce Esquibel" wrote in message news:ko7j9o$301$1@remote5bge0.ripco.com...
William Sommerwerck <grizzledgeezer@comcast.net> wrote:

I hope the following doesn't sound unduly ad hominem.
However, the differences are plain.

The problem with you "beta was better" guys is you never admit that during
the great VHS vs. Beta wars, 99% of the people who bought them had crap
televisions that probably couldn't produce 280 lines of resolution.

I owned an NAD MR-20A at one time, and my SuperBeta HiFi machine made
recordings that were //almost// indistinguishable from the broadcast.
Obviously, if they were played on modern displays, the loss of quality would
be more visible.

The simple fact of the matter was, most people simply could not tell the
difference from one to the other. People with trained eyes, possibly.

You don't need trained eyes to see the difference. It isn't at all subtle.

There was no day and night difference between them. There couldn't
have been because few people owned any kind of set to watch them
on, to notice the difference.

You're kidding, of course. One of the most-noticeable problems with VHS is the
lousy color. Not only are hues sometimes off, but the chrominance doesn't
always fill the luminance!

I can't speak for or against the quality of Beta transports. They were
more-complex than VHS, so, in principle, they should have been less reliable.
I never had trouble with my SL-HF900 deck. It still works.

 

[Bruce Esquibel]

William Sommerwerck <grizzledgeezer@comcast.net> wrote:

I hope the following doesn't sound unduly ad hominem. However, the differences
are plain.

The problem with you "beta was better" guys is you never admit that during
the great vhs vs. beta wars, 99% of the people who bought them had crap
televisions that probably couldn't produce 280 lines of resolution.

I'd bet most tv's in the late 70's when home video started to gain ground
still had some vacuum tubes.

It was a coax hookup, not line outs.

If there was a difference on paper, thats where the difference ended.

The simple fact of the matter was, most people simply could not tell the
difference from one to the other. People with trained eyes, possibly.

There was no day and night difference between them, there couldn't of been
because few people owned any kind of set to watch them on, to notice the
difference.

The only credit I give the beta format was when the copy protection shit
came out (copyguard), what worked on vhs, didn't on beta. So if you needed
to make an archival copy of something, doing it from beta worked better.

I'm with the other guys, mechanically, beta machines were built like shit
and didn't last long in normal use. Transport problems were difficult to
repair and usually didn't last. Being they were usually more expensive than
the vhs counterparts, they were just a poor value for the money.

-bruce
bje@ripco.com

 

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Wed, 29 May 2013 18:53:34 -0400, Smarty <nobody@nobody.com> wrote:

On 5/29/2013 12:59 PM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Wed, 29 May 2013 15:28:34 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
presence@MUNGEpanix.com> wrote:

If fuses blew on the amp, I'd not be in a hurry to start replacing them.
I'd probably disable channels in the surround decoder.
Chuckle. I have an old Heathkit AA-2010 quad channel amplifier.
http://www.audioasylumtrader.com/ca/ca.html?ca=23000
I'm down to one channel now, as the other three have blown up over the
years. When the last channel dies, I'll probably fix it and start
over.

My ears are somewhat screwed up, so quad sound never did anything for
me. In the early 1970's, I attened an AES (Audio Engineering Society)
convention, where the hot topic was quadraphonic everything. I tried
on quad earphones and heard nothing interesting. I listened to a
serious discussion between "experts" over whether the listener wants
concert hall realism, which meant sitting in front of the orchestra in
stereo, or whether he wants to be "immersed" in the sound, which meant
sitting in the middle of the orchestra in quad. Meanwhile, the movie
theaters were having a bit of a problem with quad sound, which tended
to produce dead spots.

Subsequent to the original release of quad headphones, in the late 60s,
considerable research was done on ear / brain localization and spatial
imaging, funded in part by the Air Force / DARPA (to facilitate heads up
display direction of arrival cues for pilots being fired upon from 360
degrees in azimuth). Some seminal work was done at the University of
Darmstadt, Germany, the prior art upon which Bob Carver's original
"sonic hologram' patent was granted.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Carver>

The technical significance of the findings was the intra-aural spacing
of the typical human and the resulting time difference of arrival from
the earlier to the later ear, combined with the comb filter created by
the external ear's ridge structure (pinnae) allowed the brain to build a
mental map of where things arrived from acoustically. A given angle of
arrival in azimuth and elevation at a given frequency would have a
learned interpretation of where it arose from. This was in addition to
the reverb decay times and spectra influencing / defining the enclosed
space in which the audio was captured / simulated.

The bottom line was that headset design could not inherently replicate
the intra-aural delays and especially the comb filter results accurately
for all individuals, since each of us has a unique set of parameters.
Partially successful alternatives such as binaural recording and
playback have overcome this to some extent but not fully.

Thanks. That explains why I didn't hear anything resembling
quadraphonic sound. My ears are bad, but not that bad.

There were others in the group that claimed the quad headset was
wonderful sounding but they would be fiddling with the controls, or
moving the headset around trying to "improve" the experience. I also
noticed a few puzzled looks as they were playing with the headset. I
few shows later, someone demonstrating an improved version of the
headset. Instead of wearing the headset over the ears, it was more
like a hat, with 4 speakers at the end of support rods spaced about 5
cm away from the ears. While obviously impractical, it was presented
as some kind of demonstration of how a quad headset should sound. I
didn't try it.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

William Sommerwerck wrote:

You do know that Ampex started the development of VHS before they
sold out to a consortium of japanese companies to raise much needed
funds for their financial survival? Ampex wanted to make a cheap,
scaled down version of their existing 1% 2" tape systems, to sell at
an affordable price for consumers but ran into cash flow problems.

That's new to me. I don't see why Japanese companies aren't capable of
designing poor-quality products on their own. (RCA had been working on a
consumer video recorder for years, but felt it wouldn't be marketable until it
hit the same price point as color TV -- $500.)

The Betamax machines I worked on treated the tape
a lot worse than VHS.

That's not altogether surprising. Beta pulled the tape into an elongated loop
around the drum, to isolate its motion -- which is why Beta has less line
jitter.

Some had the tape sliding against itself to simplify
the loading and unloading.

I'm not sure I understand.

the tape was wrapped around the drum, then around a guidepost. The
back side of the film was dragged across the outside of the film on its
way back into the cartridge. VHS pulled the tape around the drum from
both sides, and didn't have some of the tape handling problems of the
Beta machines.

We offered U-matic for our public access channel at United Video
Cablevision in Cincinnati. One church paid to air their services but
insisted on beta. They supplied a huge, Sony beta deck. It, and the
video quality was crap. The chroma was unstable, and the sync levels
didn't meet FCC specs, so I had to let the dark, muddy video go out. It
was a minority church that had screamed racism, because 'Only a white
church can afford U-matic!!!'

Having seen both in use in a broadcast station, the cheap VHS
was much better than any Beta, other than the overpriced ENG
version that only got 20 minutes per tape. All Sony machines
needed a TBC to meet FCC requirements, but I could feed a $79
VHS tape into our Vital Industries Squeezezoom and get a picture
that was stable enough to broadcast.

You are one of the most-knowledgeable people (about anything) I've ever met,
but here I have to say "No way, José." VHS has serious time-base problems.

You don't understand what the SqueezeZoom was. It was the first
broadcast quality Digital Video Effects system on the market. It sold
for $250,000, and was made in Gainesville, Florida. It had two pages of
digitized video, and built one while displaying the other. Considering
that it used a Z80B processor and slower than dirt interleaved RAM, it
was an amazing piece of equipment. It filled a full relay rack, and the
+5 volt power supply was a linear three phase monster with a clean 1,000
amp output. It could take the output of a good VHS machine with no
problem, but I never saw a Beta that it liked.

You've likely seen one of it's best known uses at the end of the old
Sonny & Cher show, when they walked out in each set of costumes from
each skit, one after another. The images were combined into a video with
all of them with no obvious degrading of the image. It was the first
time it could be done in post production, with 2" video tape instead of
shooting film and sending it to and outside company for optical work.
Studios were begging for a chance to get one as fast as possible.

BTW: The custom video ADC was over $1400.

I first noticed this the early 80s when I was scanning a late-night show I'd
recorded * -- why was the picture visibly sharper than in normal play? I
looked closely and saw the reason -- severe line jitter. When scanning, there
was either less of it (for the same reason analog recorders have less flutter
at higher speeds), or the eye did a better job of averaging the errors.

Just as I judge audio equipment by what I hear, I judge video equipment by
what I see. When VHS recordings have obvious time-base problems -- what am I
supposed to conclude?

* The machine was a high-end RCA-branded Panasonic.

 

[Michael A. Terrell]

jurb6006@gmail.com wrote:

:We all know that you think you know
everything about eveyrthing, and you've bragged about being the best in
your field."

I do come off as a pompous ass huh. This best in the field, someone else said that. And it only applies to this state.

I hope that I'm never in your state. From what you post, it's really
screwed you over.

Your field is not my field. I am also not what I once was. My ield actully narrowed, it was lucrative for a time, but no more.

Yeah, twenty years ago I was the HNIC. I knew now to get sit done, the best, the fastest. The owners of the company did what I told them to do. If you really have to have proof, /I can arrainge a meeting. They would testify to this in court.

Yawn. Don't you ever get tired of beating off in public?

Anyway, enough of this tweet twat.

What about this dude's SL-2700 ? You WANT this to work, know why ? It is not SuperBeta, and has no RMS detector ?which means COPYGUARD DOES NOT WORK. It just records it.

yawn. $5 at a thrift store and you'll find the old strippers, if you
are a criminal. Do you have a good waveform monitor & Vectorscope?
Look at the output of that old junk and you'll cringe.

Now if you take that Beta tape and record it back to VHS, the copyguard is still there. It will fuck up the copy just like the original did.

Yawn....................

But as the proud owner of the SL-2700 or some other nice Soy deck, HYOU can view the movie at any time. I won't be selling mine. (SL-HFR60 with the HFP100)

I have absolutely no interest in your 1970s grade video junk. I have
no desire to make illegal copies of movies. I can buy literally
thousands of VHS movies for 25 cents each, but I rarely see a Beta
tape. I have a modest collection of DVDs and an internet ready Blu-Ray
player that lets me watch thousands of HD movies from websites like Hulu
or Crackle.

 

[William Sommerwerck]

"Cydrome Leader" wrote in message news:ko8369$j4h$1@reader1.panix.com...
William Sommerwerck <grizzledgeezer@comcast.net> wrote:

"Cydrome Leader" wrote in message news:ko56r2$i06$1@reader1.panix.com...

The movie folks do a really half-assed job with surround sound
is the short version of the story.

That might be true. But I've spent many years listening to orchestral
recordings enhanced with surround -- either from the recording itself,
or a hall synthesizer -- and the improvement is huge.

They probably do those recordings correctly, and the audience for such
recording will care.

Absolutely.

Then, of course, when people were being chased around in the woods and
murdered there was no surround sound. That would have been the perfect
time for such effects -- hearing some twigs snap over here or there.

Point well-taken. Movies often miss the opportunity to create a truly
immersive experience.

Circa 1980, I had a really high-quality quad system, with Lux electronics
and Infinity speakers. People -- including a hi-fi dealer -- said "I don't
like
quad, but I like your system".

How were those extra channels added and extracted from the regular two
channel recordings, other than with one of those boxes?

I had a variety of sources and processors. At the top was discrete open-reel
tape, which produced the most-spectacular consumer sound, until multi-ch SACD
came along. (I still have the tapes and an Otari quad deck.) It is unfortunate
that Sony has refused to reissue its huge library of Columbia surround
recordings on SACD.

For quad phonograph records, there was the Audionics Space & Image Composer,
an advanced SQ decoder that could wrap stereo recordings around you, often to
great effect. I also had an Ambisonic decoder for Ambisonic recordings. It
could do things similar to the Audionics, without requiring logic circuitry,
and did a superb job of ambience extraction.

For stereo recordings, I had an audio/pulse Model One, the first consumer
digital ambience device. It didn't generate high echo density, but used
tastefully, it could greatly enhance the sense of space. (I later replaced it
with the improved audio/pulse 1000.)

My current system includes the JVC XP-A1000 and Yamaha DSP-3000 hall
synthesizers. These are modeled on real halls (such as the Concertgebouw). You
can pick an appropriate hall (concert, recital, cathedral, opera, stadium),
then tweak the settings (if you wish) to fine-tune the sound to match the
recording's ambience. These devices are so natural-sounding, you cannot hear
them working until you shut them off.

I have a 6.1 system (no center speaker) with Apogee speakers and Curl
amplification.

There is no excuse to listen in two channels. Stereo is technically and
aesthetically obsolete.

 

[Cydrome Leader]

William Sommerwerck <grizzledgeezer@comcast.net> wrote:

"Cydrome Leader" wrote in message news:ko56r2$i06$1@reader1.panix.com...

The movie folks do a really half assed job with surround sound
is the short version of the story.

That might be true. But I've spent many years listening to orchestral
recordings enhanced with surround -- either from the recording itself, or a
hall synthesizer -- and the improvement is huge.

They probably do those recordings correctly, and the audience for such
recording will care.

I've seen pretty recent movies where the surround sound effects are
completely random and pointless. One movie has surround sound for a bird
flying around, and it had nothing to do with the scene at all. It's like
there was a budget for 30 seconds of surround sound and somebody played
some canned sound effects to meet a quota.

Then or couse when people were being chased around in the woods and
murdered there was no surround sound. That would have been the perfect
time for such effects- hearing some twigs snap over here or there.

Circa 1980, I had a really high-quality quad system, with Lux electronics and
Infinity speakers. People -- including a hi-fi dealer -- said "I don't like
quad, but I like your system".

How were those extra channels added and extracted from the regular two
channel recordings, other than with one of those boxes?

 

[Smarty]

On 5/30/2013 11:39 AM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

On Wed, 29 May 2013 18:53:34 -0400, Smarty <nobody@nobody.com> wrote:

On 5/29/2013 12:59 PM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Wed, 29 May 2013 15:28:34 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
presence@MUNGEpanix.com> wrote:

If fuses blew on the amp, I'd not be in a hurry to start replacing them.
I'd probably disable channels in the surround decoder.
Chuckle. I have an old Heathkit AA-2010 quad channel amplifier.
http://www.audioasylumtrader.com/ca/ca.html?ca=23000
I'm down to one channel now, as the other three have blown up over the
years. When the last channel dies, I'll probably fix it and start
over.

My ears are somewhat screwed up, so quad sound never did anything for
me. In the early 1970's, I attened an AES (Audio Engineering Society)
convention, where the hot topic was quadraphonic everything. I tried
on quad earphones and heard nothing interesting. I listened to a
serious discussion between "experts" over whether the listener wants
concert hall realism, which meant sitting in front of the orchestra in
stereo, or whether he wants to be "immersed" in the sound, which meant
sitting in the middle of the orchestra in quad. Meanwhile, the movie
theaters were having a bit of a problem with quad sound, which tended
to produce dead spots.
Subsequent to the original release of quad headphones, in the late 60s,
considerable research was done on ear / brain localization and spatial
imaging, funded in part by the Air Force / DARPA (to facilitate heads up
display direction of arrival cues for pilots being fired upon from 360
degrees in azimuth). Some seminal work was done at the University of
Darmstadt, Germany, the prior art upon which Bob Carver's original
"sonic hologram' patent was granted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Carver

The technical significance of the findings was the intra-aural spacing
of the typical human and the resulting time difference of arrival from
the earlier to the later ear, combined with the comb filter created by
the external ear's ridge structure (pinnae) allowed the brain to build a
mental map of where things arrived from acoustically. A given angle of
arrival in azimuth and elevation at a given frequency would have a
learned interpretation of where it arose from. This was in addition to
the reverb decay times and spectra influencing / defining the enclosed
space in which the audio was captured / simulated.

The bottom line was that headset design could not inherently replicate
the intra-aural delays and especially the comb filter results accurately
for all individuals, since each of us has a unique set of parameters.
Partially successful alternatives such as binaural recording and
playback have overcome this to some extent but not fully.
Thanks. That explains why I didn't hear anything resembling
quadraphonic sound. My ears are bad, but not that bad.

There were others in the group that claimed the quad headset was
wonderful sounding but they would be fiddling with the controls, or
moving the headset around trying to "improve" the experience. I also
noticed a few puzzled looks as they were playing with the headset. I
few shows later, someone demonstrating an improved version of the
headset. Instead of wearing the headset over the ears, it was more
like a hat, with 4 speakers at the end of support rods spaced about 5
cm away from the ears. While obviously impractical, it was presented
as some kind of demonstration of how a quad headset should sound. I
didn't try it.
The spacing of the drivers away from the ears did achieve a reasonable

degree of rear channel and front to back spatial imaging, since it could
exploit the outer ears and their frequency dependent filtering. It is
not a coincidence that "Mother Nature" chose the spacing of the ridges
of the outer ear to act as reflectors and attenuators precisely in the
acoustical wavelengths where we perceive high frequency audio in space.
Think of the outer ear as a Yagi, a beam former, or a synthesized
aperture and you begin to get the idea nature has provided foe eons not
just on humans.

The manikin heads designed for holding binaural recording mikes will
usually provide a generic version of these same folds. Kinda works for
everybody, but not very credibly compared to the real thing.

The work one of my groups did for Wright Patterson Air Force Base in the
early 80s used FFTs and convolvers to synthesize a transfer function
which would place a sound source anywhere in the azimuthal and elevation
planes so as to provide a rapid direction-of-arrival cue to warn against
incoming missiles. Unlike Carver's "sonic hologram" which needed and
used inter-aural cross-talk cancelling to make speakers appear much more
like headphones in terms of left to right discrimination, the approach
at SRL was intended to use pilot headphones and modify the perceived
spatial presentation with an early DSP solution. Today's chip sets would
have made the implementation a piece of cake, but 35 years ago the world
was Z80's, 6502s, 6800s, etc. It was user calibrated, however, and this
was the key to getting really accurate and repeatable directional cues.
And it all came down to the comb filter coefficients and how they
constructively and destructively combined the energy from a few hundred
HZ up.

 

[Smarty]

On 5/30/2013 3:26 PM, William Sommerwerck wrote:

"Cydrome Leader" wrote in message news:ko8369$j4h$1@reader1.panix.com...
William Sommerwerck <grizzledgeezer@comcast.net> wrote:
"Cydrome Leader" wrote in message
news:ko56r2$i06$1@reader1.panix.com...


The movie folks do a really half-assed job with surround sound
is the short version of the story.

That might be true. But I've spent many years listening to orchestral
recordings enhanced with surround -- either from the recording itself,
or a hall synthesizer -- and the improvement is huge.

They probably do those recordings correctly, and the audience for such
recording will care.

Absolutely.


Then, of course, when people were being chased around in the woods and
murdered there was no surround sound. That would have been the perfect
time for such effects -- hearing some twigs snap over here or there.

Point well-taken. Movies often miss the opportunity to create a truly
immersive experience.


Circa 1980, I had a really high-quality quad system, with Lux
electronics
and Infinity speakers. People -- including a hi-fi dealer -- said "I
don't like
quad, but I like your system".

How were those extra channels added and extracted from the regular two
channel recordings, other than with one of those boxes?

I had a variety of sources and processors. At the top was discrete
open-reel tape, which produced the most-spectacular consumer sound,
until multi-ch SACD came along. (I still have the tapes and an Otari
quad deck.) It is unfortunate that Sony has refused to reissue its
huge library of Columbia surround recordings on SACD.

Open reel was the best. JVC CD4 discrete disks were the worst......
Pre-recorded open reel tapes were few and expensive, but boy did they
sound wonderful.

For quad phonograph records, there was the Audionics Space & Image
Composer, an advanced SQ decoder that could wrap stereo recordings
around you, often to great effect. I also had an Ambisonic decoder for
Ambisonic recordings. It could do things similar to the Audionics,
without requiring logic circuitry, and did a superb job of ambience
extraction.

For stereo recordings, I had an audio/pulse Model One, the first
consumer digital ambience device. It didn't generate high echo
density, but used tastefully, it could greatly enhance the sense of
space. (I later replaced it with the improved audio/pulse 1000.)

My Audio Pulse hissed and made a lot of background noise. The pushbutton
switch array also got intolerably noisey. The Advent SoundSpace was a
huge improvement.

My current system includes the JVC XP-A1000 and Yamaha DSP-3000 hall
synthesizers. These are modeled on real halls (such as the
Concertgebouw). You can pick an appropriate hall (concert, recital,
cathedral, opera, stadium), then tweak the settings (if you wish) to
fine-tune the sound to match the recording's ambience. These devices
are so natural-sounding, you cannot hear them working until you shut
them off.

I have a 6.1 system (no center speaker) with Apogee speakers and Curl
amplification.

There is no excuse to listen in two channels. Stereo is technically
and aesthetically obsolete.

 

[Smarty]

On 5/30/2013 3:26 PM, William Sommerwerck wrote:

"Cydrome Leader" wrote in message news:ko8369$j4h$1@reader1.panix.com...
William Sommerwerck <grizzledgeezer@comcast.net> wrote:
"Cydrome Leader" wrote in message
news:ko56r2$i06$1@reader1.panix.com...


The movie folks do a really half-assed job with surround sound
is the short version of the story.

That might be true. But I've spent many years listening to orchestral
recordings enhanced with surround -- either from the recording itself,
or a hall synthesizer -- and the improvement is huge.

They probably do those recordings correctly, and the audience for such
recording will care.

Absolutely.


Then, of course, when people were being chased around in the woods and
murdered there was no surround sound. That would have been the perfect
time for such effects -- hearing some twigs snap over here or there.

Point well-taken. Movies often miss the opportunity to create a truly
immersive experience.


Circa 1980, I had a really high-quality quad system, with Lux
electronics
and Infinity speakers. People -- including a hi-fi dealer -- said "I
don't like
quad, but I like your system".

How were those extra channels added and extracted from the regular two
channel recordings, other than with one of those boxes?

I had a variety of sources and processors. At the top was discrete
open-reel tape, which produced the most-spectacular consumer sound,
until multi-ch SACD came along. (I still have the tapes and an Otari
quad deck.) It is unfortunate that Sony has refused to reissue its
huge library of Columbia surround recordings on SACD.

For quad phonograph records, there was the Audionics Space & Image
Composer, an advanced SQ decoder that could wrap stereo recordings
around you, often to great effect. I also had an Ambisonic decoder for
Ambisonic recordings. It could do things similar to the Audionics,
without requiring logic circuitry, and did a superb job of ambience
extraction.

For stereo recordings, I had an audio/pulse Model One, the first
consumer digital ambience device. It didn't generate high echo
density, but used tastefully, it could greatly enhance the sense of
space. (I later replaced it with the improved audio/pulse 1000.)

My current system includes the JVC XP-A1000 and Yamaha DSP-3000 hall
synthesizers. These are modeled on real halls (such as the
Concertgebouw). You can pick an appropriate hall (concert, recital,
cathedral, opera, stadium), then tweak the settings (if you wish) to
fine-tune the sound to match the recording's ambience. These devices
are so natural-sounding, you cannot hear them working until you shut
them off.

I have a 6.1 system (no center speaker) with Apogee speakers and Curl
amplification.

I had Dayton Wrights, some Quad ESLs, now totally Martin Logan except
for subs.

There is no excuse to listen in two channels. Stereo is technically
and aesthetically obsolete.

 

[William Sommerwerck]

I had Dayton Wrights...

I owned Dayton Wright //dynamic speakers// (trade name: Watson). Quite good.
Had unbelievable subwoofers that got 15Hz -- solid -- out of a tiny box filled
with SF6. (Sound familiar?) Why no one has "stolen" Wright's long-expired
patents is beyond me.

...some Quad ESLs, now totally Martin-Logan except for subs.

If ever I sell a screenplay, I will replace my belovéd Apogees with the big
Martin-Logans.

I don't know who you are, "Smarty", but its rare to meet an audiophile who
understands the significance of surround.

 

[William Sommerwerck]

"How were those extra channels added and extracted from
the regular two channel recordings, other than with one of
those boxes?"

SQ was a full-range system without any frequency discrimination. The encoding
and decoding were more-complex than simply adding and subtracting signals.