Who Remembers Quad Sound?

I'm old enough to remember when certain record companies and electronics manufacturers experimented with Quad sound. This was a unique "Dual Stereo" encoding system that required a special phono cartridge, a Quad compliant component and four speakers to reproduce. Sound like any recent audio technologies? Needless to say Quad was short lived due to less than stellar reviews, the price of admission and little software support (the few titles offered were mainly classical and pop).

My roommate and I went this one better using stuff we already owned. We put together a system that consisted of 2 AR Integrated amps, 1 pair of AR 3 speakers for the front, 1 pair of AR 4x speakers for the rear. I wired the speakers in a "Stereo Around" configuration that, no matter where you sat, you had a complete stereo sound-field. The results were spectacular! The sound was rich, warm, involving and filled the living room with ease. We could take advantage of our current LP and Tape collections without having to deal with format incompatibilities. At the time I had a Sony TC-355 reel to reel deck that had "Sound-On-Sound" dubbing facility which allows you to crudely overdub sounds. If this function was engaged with the "Monitor" on, you got incredible and variable echo effects. One night I was fooling around with this when some friends called. They had just dropped acid asked if they could come over to listen to music. I continued with my echo experiments until they arrived. I had left the tape deck going and audible. When they walked into the living room their voices instantly began echoing through all the speakers in glorious "Stereo Around" sound. They began laughing hysterically which, well, you get the idea.

I loved that system. After 30 some-odd years, multiple iterations, untold investments, I've finally put together an excellent system that accomplishes much of what that system did with just 2 speakers. Advances in digital amplifier technology, analog and digital source components, speaker designs and cable geometries can now yield unparallelled musical reproduction and amazing holographic imaging.

We live in a wonderful age!