To music fans for whom even cassette tapes are a quaint throwback, here's a real obscurity: Quadraphonic sound systems were an experiment launched in 1970. Music came out of four speakers spread around the room--guitars over there, vocals over here, drums all around. In a perfect world, the listener would hear what it was like to be inside the studio as the songs were recorded. But the world was far from perfect.
“When quad came out, people were still listening to music on these little systems with a drop-down turntable and attached speakers," says Steely Dan engineer Elliot Scheiner. Even FM stereo was relatively new.
Worse yet, you could buy a new car for what a decent quad system cost. According to quad fanatic Tab Patterson, a Kentucky-based video editor and Webmaster of 4channelsound. com, a truly great system was about $3,500 in 1973-- adjusted for inflation, more than $17,000 today. And it was labor intensive, requiring special equipment, decoders, records, tapes and a sound engineer's expertise to set it up properly. Even if you configured it perfectly with the finest gear available, you had to sit in one spot to get the you-are-there experience.
“I thought it was a gimmick," Chicago producer James William Guercio says. “Then when I went in the room and listened, I said, 'Wait a minute--this is a whole different art form.' A lot of guys were doing it by just bouncing some echo around. I saw a new medium."
Pink Floyd saw the potential too. The Dark Side of the Moon from '73 “was anticipated to have a quad version," says Alan Parsons, whose quad-mix Dark Side is an underground classic. “We recorded the clocks for 'Time' on 4 of the 16 tracks. The 'Money' loop was recorded in a way where it would essentially walk around the room."
Not all producers at the time saw it the same way, though. Scheiner did extensive quad mixing on jazz recordings only to be sorely disappointed when he heard his hard work played back on consumer systems. “Turned out to be more effort than I was willing to put in to have somebody think I actually mixed it that way," he says. “I got out of it very quickly."
Eagles producer Bill Szymczyk was similarly unimpressed: “I vaguely remember doing some quad mixes, but it was really as an afterthought." Of the Eagles' On the Border and One of These Nights, which both have quad mixes, he says, “To be honest, I don't remember if I did those or not--but if they're good, I'll take credit for them."
Despite the obvious drawbacks, the industry smelled money. Convinced the public would catch up, it churned out quad mixes of everyone from Barry Manilow to the Archies. “Excuse my laughing, but it seems so unlikely the Archies would be in quad," says Parsons.
Not surprisingly, quad lurched through the '70s and died a largely unnoticed death right around the rise of disco.
But now it is back.
And while the Eagles' Szymczyk groans, “Oh my God, why?" fans (and, yes, they are out there) are ecstatic. A circle of hobbyists cracked the code to transfer the format to today's equipment, so now the music industry has jumped back into the sound it abandoned.
QUAD'S INFLUENCE LIVES
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