I posted this link in the CQuam discussion thread, but thought it interesting and amusing enough to share here so more of you get a chance to read it. For radio engineering geeks, programing buffs, and radio freaks, this is a good read.
http://www.oldradio.com/archives/warstories/md-quad.htm
TIB
What a terrific trip back to the Quad Era, such as it was.
Glad you found that, Tim, and shared it.
Yes TIB, a fun read that brought back memories of my own.
I liked that, looking backwards into the DEEP WEB. That was like early format web pages, all text and not distracting to read, refresing compared to the new sites that blast every gizmo in your face when you visit them. No I don't want your cookies or my fortune read.
I've seen vinly albums in quad, one jazz album by Chase comes to mind, and I had a quad demo album that I could never hear in quad but played fine in stereo. It was a matrix method in use, like FM stereo somehow, extra channels hidden in the stereo channels and needed a decoder, as explained on the back cover.
I liked that they could experiment using whole big radio stations, and it wasn't illegal or a threat to listenership in 1970. Imagine running "Barefoot" like he said, with no automatic level control, that would be unheard of today, but I'd love to hear it from a licensed station!
I've done it with my stations, you just have to really watch levels and keep your voice even, and know how to pull back from the mic when you shout.
In my experiments with the AM and FM kits, I didn't have any kind of level controls and hadn't even heard about compressors, though I did notice and wonder why radio stations could keep their levels smooth like they did. I thought they had a guy sitting at a desk listening and watching a level meter and constantly adjusting a master volume knob to do that. It was his job, all day.
My way to always keep my levels at "half volume" whatever that was, between "quiet" and distortion, that was my kid engineering standard. Of course with friends over, we'd get carried away and scream and laugh loud anyway into the crystal mic, and were probably 20 percent THD.
Great to hear the lengths they went to even get stereo to people in early times! It's clever to use two stations, but you can see how inefficient that is on the spectrum, and with listeners needing two radios. Anything they could do to feed two speakers in the listening area of the audience, like the drivein theater window speaker for one channel and car radio for another, and two Carrier-Current stations at a school.
The cool thing about the drive-in is that idea could be used for stereo movie sound too, with the speaker field given one channel, and a low powered transmitter in the projector building providing the other channel to the radio, the same idea. I wonder if any theater tried that with movie sound?
Really we have quad today, in home theater setups, and it does sound like it's in the author's perfected system, with main front channels and ambiance in the rear speakers. If that blog was written in the 1990s, that would be before serious home theater sound was in many homes.
You can get DVD audio with 4 channels and more, especially concerts and plain audio on DVD, and it's a quad effect, so all is not lost, or in the past, so don't feel bad.
I was thinking the same, my home theater system when I used it was pretty adept at surrounding me with sound. I finally took it off line, I am not much of a movie person, and everyone complained when I turned it up.
Regardless, and back on subject. That was a great read. I enjoyed it...