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I Agree with John Atkinson
I am old enough to remember quad in fact, I remember first hearing it as 4 channel stereo in the UK by AR using 2 stereo Reel to reels in sync playing back though AR4s, I think, I was 17 and walked out of that demo thinking hi fis got a great future
That was 1970, 43 years later and hi fi snobs are still banging on about stereo being three dimensional etc.
NO IT ISNT. I admit some recordings can sound pretty good but it’s still only two channel
It’s alright for someone who can afford a couple of PMC BD 5 studio monitors and a £100,000 worth of amp and sources , probably does sound 3 dimensional then ? But for most of us who are limited to the real world of a £10,000 often second hand used system,
NO IT Doesn’t!
Not to diverge but it’s the same agreement with CD 44.1 and DSD or 24/96 PCM
DTS CD is better than CD , SACD is better than DTS CD , DVDA is better than DTS CD and all of them are better than CD!
Why is there a debate over this? it’s like arguing in favour of a flat earth or creationism
Originally stereo was first conceived to be three channel , I have a load of 3 ch RCA Victor Living Stereo DSD SACDs and these are just bloody amazing even although the tapes are over 50 years old Reiner’s Scheherazade being one of them . the third channel makes all the difference both in resolution and imaging , of course it does the existing two speaker have less to do , so what they do have too they do better
However nobody would wear 3 speakers and it was probably not possible at the time to put 3 tracks on a vinyl disc, so we have been living with a half-finished product for 50 years anyway,
The fact is the human ear in a concert hall or rock concert picks up sounds both direct from the source and reflected from over the shop and it’s pretty obvious that stereo while an improvement on mono can’t do that , multichannel can and does
End of argument!!
They reason multichannel has failed is because everybody is an MP3 freak and it’s hard to put four channels on an IPod , about ½ % care about quality of sound , it’s just market forces and practicality .
If those figures were the other way around nobody would be supporting CD or Stereo