Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 3/13/25 2:46 PM, Charlie Gibbs wrote:

On 2025-03-13, c186282 <c186282@nnada.net> wrote:
 

    But, remember the huge "quadraphonic" sales BS in
    the 70s/80s ? I think "Quadraphrenia" was named
    for it.
>
    It NEVER lived up to the hype - just More Expensive.

 I couldn't wait for the fad to end.  There were some truly
dreadful remixes (e.g. Santana's _Abraxas_), where the
sound gratuitously ping-ponged from speaker to speaker,
basiclly doing nothing but shouting "Listen to me!  I'm
quadraphonic!" while wrecking otherwise good music.

   Well ... they HAD to experiment/justify - SALES
   were in the balance !!!

Besides, I was pissed off that they wasted a whole channel.
If you want to do it right, why not put the four speakers
at the vertices of a tetrahedron and sit on an elevated
chair in the middle.  That way properly-made recordings
could give you full 3-dimensional sound.
 If it was just a matter of encoding sounds on a 2-dimensional
plane, our little trick of hooking a third speaker across the
hot terminals of the other two and putting it behind us did
much of the same thing with a conventional stereo system.

   If REALLY PROPERLY done, quad-sound might have been OK,
   maybe even a good thing.
   Wasn't.
   Ever heard recordings done using dummy heads with dummy
   ears ... the whole, mostly human, 360 experience, like
   being in a concert hall. Beyond 'quad' as we came to
   know and hate it.
   BEST sound I ever heard was from magneplanar speakers
   with beyond-consumer 200 watt feed plus subs. Spent
   lots of money on that back in the day. Lets you understand
   what "transparent" means. Not quad - just GREAT.
   No point in that now ... can't hear the full spectrum.
   But I *did* hear it .........
   Modern amps, STILL selling 4+1 or even bigger numbers.
   Sales knows no shame .......