After some discussion over on this other thread about 70's Quad radio stations
https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/fo...r-quadraphonic-information.34508/#post-706454
Made me think, what all you OG Quadies were
thinking and doing during the dark Quad/Surround decades of the 1980s thru to around 2000, about it all?
Also, because there were probably little market places to pick up the old content like now; of places like - discogs, eBay, Amazon etc.
I'm feeling that this QQ forum would have been a real lifeline.
Good little sidebar Mr. Pupster. Glad you mentioned it.
And you started by mentioning the 80's which was indeed the start of the Surround Sound Dark Ages. A few years after Star Wars came out the market was flooded with craptastic low dollar & low quality receivers all centered around playing original Dolby matrix surround. We went from high quality surround for music that could be simply used as is or slightly modified for Dolby video decoding. Now the Dolby receivers were of course hyped by salesman as being equally good for music as well as movies. Which it wasn't.
When I got married in '82 I already had a QSD-1 &Fosgate Tate 101A. On my honeymoon I brought back an Integrex Ambisonic decoder and added that. So I was pretty insulated from the hideous onslaught of audio for video.
I replaced the QSD-1 with a Sansui QSD-1000. Then several years later the Fosgate developed noisy everything and the Sansui crapped out. I set my sights on this new Angel of Audio called Dolby Pro Logic II. I did not want a receiver again so I bought one of the few DPL II stand alone units, the Tag McLaren AV32R
For about $4k I consider this my first real audiophile purchase. Alas it developed early Alzheimer's and as the company went kaput I purchased an Anthem pre-pro.
So I struggled by with DPL II, not happy with it, and that's what drove me to develop a method of upmixing on the PC that was like the Sansui QS Surround sound mode. Many mixes, still very happy many years later with what I did.
But a new resource came along & it is farther back than most of us remember: digital surround sound. Yup, about 1995. Many people opted for the Millennium DTS decoder & even tho I was drawn to it I also knew if I wanted to enjoy movies I needed Dolby AC-3 too. I purchased a Marantz AC-3 decoder that had been modified by a company called MSB with an add on DTS board. It worked perfectly. I had the best of both worlds. And for those not in the know, before DVD, Laserdisc had Dolby Digital surround replacing one of the two (stereo) analog chs. This wasn't SPDIF but RF AC-3 & demodulated to surround. Laserdisc was also capable of carrying DTS by replacing the 2 digital stereo chs, just like a DTS CD.
Alan Parsons' On Air DTS CD was the first music I ever heard in that format & it truly brought tears to my eyes. Not only was the music pretty good, the fidelity & surround mix was so clean & distinct it was something we could only dream about 10 years earlier.
And then came SACD, DVD-A, etc. Life is good. But the above is how I got through the Great Quad Depression.
. Then I became aware of SACD/DVD-Audio being muted as the next new thing, so when I could I started buying discs (most from Acoustic Sounds in the US & thus the import tax hit). Then come the end of 2001 I bought my first surround Yamaha Amp & with very small speakers; and that was the start of a whole new level of music madness!
