WHat about four speakers.......

I agree with TWL. I think there is potential in multi-channel reproduction, but I have yet to hear it done "correctly".

I'm not sure this thread is exactly about quad... but that was certainly an attempt at this.

In my personal experience, I listen to (what I would like to call, if such a thing can exist) "4-channel stereo" much of the time. The only company I'm aware of that explicitly offers such a mode (5-channel stereo, just lose the center) is Adcom, and I haven't much enjoyed what I've heard or owned from them. I have an Acurus Act-3, which I purchased ONLY because it 1) will allow independent volume control over front vs. rear via a balancing adjustment, and 2) will allow me to hook everything up to it, HT (seldom-used) included. That said, I don't really like this unit much either.

I am definitely *not* a pre/pro expert (I try to pretend they don't exist) and that's the one place I always run and hide in this hobby... it's hard for me to select a pre/pro because all I really want is 4 channels (front + rear) with independent volume control to move the emphasis forward and backward, as needed. HT capability is also a nice thing to have, but in every unit I've researched, the HT angle seems to be all they are paying attention to, and good 2 or 4-channel non-altered playback is either impossible, or an afterthought. All the pre/pros I've ever looked at seem to display an enormous HT bias. I would rather have a pure 2x2 setup without all the delay and echo and who knows what these systems always seem to force one to use.

Are there any units out there that offer HT capability while offering a good 2x2 (stereo front + rear) mode without all the HT echo party/arena/stadium/jazz club hoo-ha? I'm ignorant in this arena, let that be said. Last time I looked, I was very, very discouraged.

I think I should chime in here, all of the above makes perfectly good sense and that was also the reason why I refrained from any experiments into that direction until I heard that Quad's Peter Walker had a speaker setup ( a wall of his stators) not unlike the one I had arrived at PLUS Quads (don't know how many though) arranged along the side (not back) of his listening room. When I had managed to obtain a pair of ESL63 from ebay at a very good price I started experimenting and finished placing the speakers at right angles from the main speakers halfway between them and my listening position fairly close to the side walls, firing at each other and giving them a dedicated amp and preamp, fed from the tape out of my main preamp, a Jadis 200. I have the dedicated preamp close to my listening position, so I can dial in the exact dose of side information for every piece I am listening to. The dialing in has to be done in very, very tiny increments and what is most important, seperately for the left and the right side, in order not to ruin sound stage information and the placement of instruments and voices therein. However if done right, it will give back ambience to overly dry recordings and add width and depth and a sense of immediacy to good ones. I will never go back to the classic setup and found this to be a great step forward in my personal enjoyment of my rig. However the step between enhancement and ruin of a presentation is very slight and it is frankly even more difficult than properly dialing in a subwoofer. I also think, that it is essential with such a setup, that main and side speakers should be of the same make, or at least similar in their voicing and characteristics and all this should not be attempted for the very reasons given above, if the auxiliar side speakers cannot be dialed in exactly for each LP, Cd or master tape being played. Cheers, Detlof

In the mid-'80s Sony put out a $600 ambiance/delay unit, the 505ES, a digital unit based on a combination of the features of two '70s analogue units by companies named Sound Concepts and Benchmark. The Sony unit delays and rolls off the sound to the rear speakers within programmable parameters, and the rear speakers have to be similar to but can be much smaller and less expensive than the front speakers. The real key, however, is that nothing requires you to run the front speakers through the unit. The result is convincing hall sound with no gimmicks, and nothing fouling up your megabuck front channels. Within a year Sony had screwed up later models with more bells and whistles, requiring you to run the front channels through the unit, and inflating the price. Then Lexicon came along and went even further. Fifteen years later, several friends and I have kept our old Sony units, had them rebuilt as to connectors and some wiring, and treasure them. In the meantime my front channel components have increased astonomically in price as I upgrade, and not one audiophile who has dropped by for a visit hasn't first questioned my sanity for keeping the rear channels in the system, and then been shocked at how much they contribute when I turn them off. Four speakers, yes, it can work wonders. Without a delay, I doubt it would help much. As to what's possible or available now, who knows what the right manufacturer has done or could do if someone could just keep it from mucking it all up with more "innovations"....

I suspected all along that people who insist on the importance of cables would simply freak out at the thought of adding channels. Yippers! Imagine having to have the best Siltech all around! Imagine having to cryo the lot! Mythtrip, better ring up some other site if you want to have anyone consider for a nanosecond the benefits of more than two channels. There is more chance to find some guy extolling the virtues of mono, horns and SETs being fed ticks and pops here than anywhere else. I assume you are relatively new to audio. Multichannel in various guises has been around for a mighty long time. Attempts were made at quad sound, with LPs, decades ago and foundered, inter alia, on the problems associated with stores keeping multiple formats. Even before that, Dynaco had some primitive form not requiring any special recording using four speakers and changing phase in the rear ones, if I recall. Not a great proposition, but showed some imagination and low cost implementation at least. Another approach, which for many years I felt could provide quite good result if properly implemented, was to synthesize effect channels from stereo records. At the outset these could be divided into two distinct lots: analogue, which sounded like s...t (remember SAE?) and used bucket brigade circuitry which should have given analog a bad name forever, and digital, which, because of the name had to be given short shrift by the analogue maniacs. These digital time delay units by doing the signal processing in the digital domain did not introduce a lot of noise or distortion compared to the analogue units. Audio Pulse, long defunct, was the first to come out with digital delay units. Many moons ago I bought their model 1000 and used it for a number of years. Primitive, noisy, but effective, if used in small doses. For a number of years companies such as Yamaha, Koss and JVC brought out improved models. I used the JVC XP-1010 for many years and, as were certain reviewers at Stereophile, was quite pleased with the results. Now comes multichannel SACD and DVD-A. This looks a bit like the four channel wars of yore, were two different incompatible systems, requiring separate inventories of software clashed. Add to that the intervening wave of multichannel HT and you have a messy situation, which will be very difficult to solve. The standard chosen for multichannel SACD is difficult to fathom in that it calls, if done by the book, for five identical full range speakers (see the problem with high-enders wondering how to finance five Grande Utopias or Soundlabs and fit them in their rooms) fed by five equally powerful amplifiers (ditto the remark on speakers, Wolcotts or Halcros all around please). You would sit in the middle of these speakers, three at the front, two to the rear, in an arc type set-up, and for good measure add a sub-woofer. Quite a menu, I think, when all you should want is to reproduce ambiance. Yes, multichannel is probably as big, if not a bigger, an improvement over two channel stereo as the latter was over mono. Don't expect any positive comments on it though from the cable sniffers, and believers of "micro-dynamics" (something like noise within noise, I guess), the absolute virtue of analogue, cryoed dipsticks, the microphonic nature of solid state circuits, and the Great Pumpkin. From the mid-fi trenches, I remain just a two eared guy. Good day..