I wanted to resurrect this 6 year old thread for a couple of reasons - one is there's a volume of great insider information in the first page from Darrell Johnson (
@DarrellJ ) who worked at the JVC Cutting Center in Hollywood where the majority of US CD-4 LPs were mastered. The other is because of this snippet from Billboard that Jon posted:
Darrell,
Here's the Billboard piece. Do you buy it?
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Jon, what was the date on the Billboard Capitol QS article?
It's from page 3 of the September 7th, 1974 issue of Billboard, and I think it's one of those kind of apocryphal stories that's lingered in quad-dom for decades because it gives people hope that there's even more double-secret quad out there just waiting to be discovered. To me it just never made sense - the "spokesman" in the article sounds confused, like a kid who didn't do his homework and got called on by a teacher to answer a question.
I was recently rummaging through some old issues of Billboard online and it turns out that Capitol rebutted this article the following week:
To me it sounds like Sansui was trying to bluff that QS was gaining market penetration by suggesting that lots of labels were doing this "stealth quad" thing, but it really makes no sense at all. Why go to all the trouble of mixing an album in quad if you're not going to tell your target audience so they can decode it? I saw a mention in one of the trades from 1974 that a quad mix cost about $5,000 (which is about $26,000 in today's money) to do - seems like a lot to spend on something you're going to keep a secret.
It's also worth noting that history has borne out everything Capitol says in this rebuttal article to be true - those 'Special Markets' easy listening LPs (Sounds of the 70's Orchestra, John Morell, San Fernando Brass etc.) were indeed the only SQ LPs they ever released. Both articles seem really light on details too - if a Billboard staffer heard some Capitol QS quad at a trade show, you'd think they'd be able to name at least one album or artist they heard. The only legitimate scenario I can come up with for this happening is that maybe Sansui brought some of the QS-encoded
Toshiba-EMI LP's from Japan like
The Lettermen Live in Japan, or they simply played some Capitol stereo material through a QS decoder in its "synthesizer" (aka upmix) mode and told the Billboard writer that it was quad.
It also seems like if either Sansui or Capitol were going to make any kind of announcement they'd do it somewhere more prestigious than the 'International Radio Programming Forum' and with a little more certainty than we got in that original article.
So while it's impossible to debunk the initial article entirely (you can't prove definitively that something doesn't exist) to me it seems pretty obvious that someone at Sansui was making it up as they went along at a trade fair, not expecting what they said to make it into print in Billboard.
