What am I hearing

To Muncybob-Yes! That psychoacoustic affect was patented by a small Maryland company in 81-82 called Psi-coustics. They were friends of mine. They did it with a solid state tape loop device (like an Eq) Within a few years another Maryland company, Polk Audio, patented the circuit at speaker level with their SDA line. My guess is they had one of the early units. Radio Shack bought or leased the IMX patent from Psi-coustics and had it in some of their EQ's as well. I like the last Polk SDA's that did not have the tweeters as part of the circuit. We humans get little or no location cues above 3K. Properly set up they have the biggest and best image possible. This affect is recording dependent of course. It does nothing to a mono signal and can give a bit of a hole in the middle on some recordings. But on the right recording there is nothing better for involvement in the stereo image. I still use a set of their best model: SDA SRSA 1.2 TL. quite often. Lots of fun! Freaks people out when they hear it. They look around for other speakers.

Q-sound is a great effect, and Roger Water's "Amused to Death" is an awesome example (and album), particularly when the speakers are set-up properly and you are sitting dead centre. I have windows on the right side of the room and, when I play the opening track from "Amused to Death", everyone, and I mean everyone, who I've played it for thinks the dog's bark is coming from my neighbour's yard outside and past my window. But, as I've said, the speakers have to be set-up properly and you have to be sitting pretty much dead centre. The album has a lot of great examples of Q-sound, particularly the TV/radio throughout the album and the piano in the first couple of minutes of Track 3. Definitely one of my favourite sounding, and generally favourite, album.

Totally agree with Roger Water's Amused To Death. To me it is the perfect showcase of what Q-sound is capable of. Another Pink Floyd related track is the unlisted track commonly called "Soundscape" by PF fans on the PULSE cassette tape release. It is a collection of sounds varying from lawn mowers, rain, jungle sounds, frogs, crickets, etc and very convincing the sounds are coming from outside the house.

A_L

I just picked up the Madonna "Immaculate Collection"and on most of the tracks the Q sound is really evident.All tracks are incredible sounding.If you think the Roger Waters is good check this one out!The material might not be the best but the recording they did on this is nothing short of a miracle.It is now the most "Holographic" sounding CD in my collection.The song "Voque"is over the top.With Q sound being kinda of old technology why don't more artist use this in there recordings?If your listening to strait ahead jazz or chamber music you would'nt want to use this technique but for alot of other types of music it could be a great tool for a recording artist!