Quadapter Back, Yay!

[Mallette]

Seriously, I have a substantial Firesign collection that began when I acquired "Bozos" in SEA during the Viet war. I've 20 or more LPs, a Laser disc, and a couple of VHS tapes as well as R2R and cassette copies of other things. I also have a book of their scripts, very handy as even after multiple listening one finds gems buried in the chaos of their mixes. As sure as pope doth poop in woods, I didst recently listen to "Shakespeare's Lost Comedy."

Dave

[Marvel]

I think I only had about three of their albums. The first was an 8Track tape the other two on vinyl. All long gone... []

Dave, I have a Pioneer LD player I'm giving away or throwing away. It has the remote with it too. It gives an error about the disc, that I believe is caused by the clamp to hold the disc tight. I don't have any LDs, so I wasn't going to mess with it. We had it at the school, and I imagine it actaully got very little use.

If you would like it I would be happy to send it to you.

Bruce

[Mallette]

Appreciate that, Bruce. However, I have a top of the line Pioneer (S-VHS out and 5 CD changer) I got along with about 40 discs for 50 bucks at an estate sale a few years ago. Actually, the CD player is top knotch.

LDs go pretty cheap on EBay and there's a few things there you can't get otherwise.

Maybe someone else here will be intrigued. Audio quality is often superb on these things. Video is much better than SD, but not quite as good as DVD. 480 interlaced, I think, though quite a few wide screen.

Dave

[DizRotus]

To fully utilize my new QD-1, I decided I need a turntable.

I just "won" an eBay auction for a Technics SL-1500 with some sort of Audio Technica cartridge. I exchanged several cordial emails with the seller prior to the end of the auction. He/she even asked for details on how to secure the platter for shipment, so I sent the pertinent page from the owner's manual. With my sniped bid I was pretty certain I'd get it. Irrespective, whoever got it deserved to have it arrive undamaged,

Does anyone have a gently used cartridge that needs a new home?

[Mallette]

Depending on model. AT carts are respectable and styli are available for most of them. I'd check it out first. Might work for you fine...at least until you get cartridge envy, then TT evnvy, etc, etc [6]

Dave

[DizRotus]

Dave-

As I type, I'm listening to "The Turning Point" by John Mayall, which I just got for $1, on my new to me Technics SL-1500 with Audio Technica AT14Sa cartridge (see attached pdf of eBay search results). It sounds great. I'd forgotten how good records sound. I'm eager to listen to this excellent recording of a live performance using the QD-1. That'll be the weekend, at the earliest.

[Mallette]

Yeppem, amazing what a dollar will buy in LPs. Now, your condemned to sitting on floors pawing through dusty boxes of Lawrence Welk and South Pacific soundtracks hoping to find that overlooked copy of No Longer Indian Summer Blues.

Looking forward to your experience with the QD-1. Fiddle with both the level and the position of your rears. Try different recordings. You'll both find some satisfying effects as well as get to analyze and postulate as to why this one works so well and others unpredictably. It's intimately tied to how the recordings are miked and mixed.

I've decided my Monte Carlo "rears" are going up on the walls directly point down at the listening sofa and precisely at 90 degrees to the seating. It's gonna be a very nice environment.

Dave

[DizRotus]

Yeppem, amazing what a dollar will buy in LPs. Now, your condemned to sitting on floors pawing through dusty boxes of Lawrence Welk and South Pacific soundtracks hoping to find that overlooked copy of No Longer Indian Summer Blues.

Looking forward to your experience with the QD-1. Fiddle with both the level and the position of your rears. Try different recordings. You'll both find some satisfying effects as well as get to analyze and postulate as to why this one works so well and others unpredictably. It's intimately tied to how the recordings are miked and mixed.

I've decided my Monte Carlo "rears" are going up on the walls directly point down at the listening sofa and precisely at 90 degrees to the seating. It's gonna be a very nice environment.

Dave

The rears will be attached to the joists in my basement office. I wondered whether to have them face each other, face the front or face the diagonal and now you introduce a hitherto unconsidered variable of facing the floor. I guess I've just got to experiment.

[Mallette]

Here is what I am doing with my Frazier Monte Carlo rears. Jack Frazier and PWKs sonic signatures are so seamless! Even those little babies are completely transparent to the K'horns. If you haven't seen this in my previous post on my new music room, the big black thing with the R2R on it is my Cinema F6 subwoofer...16hz, babycakes! Hoping to get the black formica on it before Christmas.

Dave

[DizRotus]

That looks great.

I notice the rears are not behind the listening position. I was expecting behind the listener would enhance the ambiance effect. Please elaborate.

[Mallette]

Not my experience, Neil. For one thing, it isn't really about a "surround" experience per se. It's USUALLY about depth and immersion and such placement works well for it. The front-rear balance isn't so much about front and rear as about seamless connection between the two. After all, the QD-1, while capable under ideal conditions of routing nearly descrete information to the rear, 95% of the time it will be simply placing the delayed returns of source material positioned in front of the microphones that bounced off walls and such where they belong. It is your BRAIN that will do the localization using the cues provided. Trust it to do the right thing and adjust the material or balance until it does. Bear in mind as much of this is from the sides of a hall or space as from the rear. Remember, this is not so much about "WOW" but about subtle improvements in reality.

That's why I generally reject those who characterize this as "4 channel" and such. It's really about 2 channel being played as it is actually recorded, that is, accurately.

Hope that makes some degree of sense....

Dave

[DizRotus]

While the forums were on hiatus, I got my eBay Technics turntable (see: http://community.klipsch.com/index.php?/topic/145944-bargain-turntable/) up and running. I've used the Reg Williamson cleaning sysyem (see: http://community.klipsch.com/index.php?/topic/145942-the-best-way-to-clean-preserve-vinyl/page-2#entry1661254) to clean some used records. In some ways the QD-1 does more than expected, while in other ways less. On the whole, I like it. I'm glad Dave got me started down this path. I feel like the prodigal son.

As Dave predicted, well recorded live analog (vinyl is my only available analog source) sounds best. For example, Sheffield Lab's, The King James Version sounds very good, as does John Mayall's The Turning Point. The improvement is subtle but real. Get used to the 3-dimensional depth and then switch to front speakers only and the sound collapses to the front.

At the other extreme is mono. Dave Brubeck's Jazz Goes To College is a well recorded mono LP. It has none of the "hidden" out of phase information on which the QD-1 relies. Nonetheless, to my ears, when not perceptible as a sound source, having some information from the rear speakers lends depth to the experience.

To my surprise, even the digital offerings of Pandora seem to benefit from the QD-1. The system is set up in the far less than ideal space of my basement office (see attached crude drawing). The "listening space" is behind where I toil at a computer. The 1st floor joists are exposed, forming the "ceiling" of the basement. Listening to Pandora via iPad or smart phone connected to my H/K 630 receiver via Bluetooth sounds very good. It doesn't sound as good as a vinyl recording of a live performance, but it sounds better than without it. The biggest surprise is the sense of depth perceived even when at the computer with my back turned to the whole set-up, including the "rear" speakers.

Office layout.PDF

[Mallette]

Well, I think perhaps I've learned how to set expectations. I've had some get one, set it up, crank up the rears, and say "yuk." What a surprise. Same guys who will paw throw six or eight pairs of tubes looking for the right sound. The QD-1 actually does nothing but play back what is there with actual fidelity. If it sucks, it will suck more. If it's good, it will get better.

I still am confident in saying it's by far the best and most natural way to achieve depth until the engineers and format developers learn to deal with multi-dimensional sound. Heck if you can set up two stereo mikes to correctly record, just a couple of more in precisely the opposite direction would be far superior to all the crap, smoke, and mirrors claimed for "surround."

Anyway, cheapest tweak I know off that really gets me off. Glad you're enjoying it. BTW, you often learn something about the recording methodology, mikes used, placement, and certainly mixing from how the QD-1 handles it. I find that fun.

Dave

Edited October 24, 2013 by Mallette

[DizRotus]

I'm hooked.

Some recordings are better than others, but the subtle presence offered enhances most recordings.

The best part is that Dave's post precipitated this Prodigal Son's return to vinyl. As much as I'm enjoying the re-acquaintance with the benefits of a good record, it annoys me that similar or better performance isn't available in digital formats.

I'm on record in this forum stating that vinyl is an inherently inferior medium. Dragging a tiny diamond across bumpy plastic and then subjecting the signal to RIAA equalization is not superior to using a laser to read 1s and 0s--or even RTR. I still believe that to be true. The best vinyl sounds great despite the format, not because of it. Nonetheless, the best vinyl sounds WAY better than the digital offerings of compressed CDs and mp3s.

We've paid too high a price for the convenience of portability and high storage capacity--both of which are great--but not at the expense of dynamic range and life-like music.

Vinyl is old school and requires effort. I'm glad to be back.

Edited November 5, 2013 by DizRotus

[Mallette]

Best conversion story I've heard in years.

Neil, welcome to the few, the proud, the weird.

Dave

[JBryan]

Hey guys,

I'm late to the party as usual and this doesn't actually fit into the conversation but I figured Dave and this crew would have some useful insight. I picked up a Marantz 4400 a few weeks ago and am trying to find a use for it. Its a quadradial receiver (4 channels) and seems to work well but I don't have much in the way of music to play on it (mostly quad LP's) nor do I have the means. I do have a Akai GX 400SS R2R deck on the shelf that should play quad tapes but I have some reservations and would like your advise.

First, I would obviously have to set up 4 speakers and I don't have 4 of the same. I do have a pr of Epic CF-4 and a pr of CF-3 which should work but is there any trick to setting 'em up for the best sound other than pointing them all at the listening position? Also, can anyone recommend a good quad cartridge at a decent price? Finally, I'll check to see if I have any quad R2R tapes but if I were looking to buy one to show off what a quad system can do - what would be a good choice? Thanks!

Edited November 5, 2013 by JBryan

[Mallette]

JBryan, methinks you didn't really follow the thread fully. The QD-1 is a passive device and uses only 2 channels of amplification. The speaker outs from a 2 channel device are connected to it and a simple circuit splits out the out of phase information and sends it to the rear speakers.

There is no longer any such thing as a 4 channel phono cartridge, unless there remain NOS from the heyday. RCA was the only company that fielded a "discrete" quad system for LPs. It multiplexed front and rear channels by doubling the frequencies of the rear channels and then splitting them out in the amplifier. It required a cartridge flat to 50k, problematic at best. Least successful of the LP quad schemes, the other two main players being QS and SQ which were both phase based logic driven systems conceptually similar to the original Dolby Pro Logic analog surround, but much more crude.

The QD-1 is much cleaner sounding and needs only a good analog stereo source and a couple of rear speakers to produce its magic.

Dave

[DizRotus]

Dave-

The Audio Technica AT14Sa cartridge that came with my eBay Technics SL-1500 TT is described as being made for CD-4 quad systems. I don't know about that, but I do know it sounds very good through the QD-1. For all I know, its CD-4 roots have no bearing on its use with a QD-1.

ve_audio_technica_at (1).pdf

[Mallette]

No use with the QD-1 at all, Neil, other than as a good sounding conventional cartridge. In all my LP picking I've never seen a CD-4 LP nor have I seen a reciever or amp equipped with the compensation circuits to downsample the multiplexed signal. Probably out there, but also probably just as crappy engineering as all the rest of the quad stuff. Even the few discrete 4 channel R2R recordings were gimmicky and not recorded with fidelity in mind, but more in "Hey, look what I can do" mode. If the 4 competing systems weren't enough to kill it, that attitude probably would have by itself.

I've often compared the Quad debacle to the Hindenburg disaster. Such airships were a great concept for which there are many applications today, but mental block placed in our minds by that single incident is virtually unrecoverable. Surround is the ONLY option for anything like high fidelity by definition. However, it may still be awhile before the stench of quad wears off.

Thank God for the QD-1!

As to A/T, I have heards some really nice ones and think they are often under regarded.

Dave

Edited November 7, 2013 by Mallette

[JBryan]

Thanks Dave... I did read through the thread and only chimed in because I knew you may actually be able to pass along some relevant info and advise. I came upon the Marantz quad receiver in a package deal and just wanted a few tips so I could give it a listen but I guess I can handle the setup with the manual. My brother had a quad system back in the early '70's but I don't recall ever hearing it in quad mode - just stereo through 4 speaks. I never though much about it and remember an advertisement in a magazine way back when showing a cartoon of a fella with 4 ears... after seeing that, it didn't seem like a viable setup. All these years later, I finally get a quad receiver and my interest is piqued but I doubt it'll go beyond that. Anyhoo... thanks for the reply - carry on.