by Edward Tatnall Canby
CLAUSTROPHONIA. Some people may wonder why a few of us writers keep hammering
away on that well-explored subject, quadraphonic sound. It's a dead goose,
isn't it? Well, I'll admit it's a struggling goose with problems. No wonder
it won't fly. It has three wings and eighteen legs and not enough lift to get
off the ground. Suffers from discular discrophy, a disease whereby the parts
take off in all directions. A flying fibrillation. "Fly SQ!" says
one wing. "Fly CD-4!" says another. And the third? Its time will
come. Between 'em all, you'll have to admit, quadraphonic hasn't yet reached
the stratosphere, though latest measurements place it at least a number of
inches into launch, flailing madly. Yet, I love it, and I think it has a future,
like the ugly duckling.
You know, this month is our 27th anniversary (and mine) on the audio circuit, a long time and not far from one third of the entire history of reproduced sound, going back to old Thomas Alva Edison and his Little Lamb. What I'm wondering is, will the quadraphonic goose ever make it to its proper niche? A lot of people think not. They don't think it's very important. Just another gadget ploy, etc., and so on. What people think in our sort of business, tends to be the pragmatic truth, at least for the moment.
And so quadraphonic sound, right now, is suffering from a lack of importance. In a word, it is being ignored.
What concerns us is why? And some curious ideas have been sprouting within me on this score. I don't believe these people! What I think is that quadraphonic is too important. It offers too much. Too much, too quick. So we pretend it isn't there.
Music Everywhere
In the big world outside of hi-fi, where people these days are practically wired for sound, with transistors, pocket recorders, car radios, 8 tracks, cassettes and, of course, stereos all over, plus sound in banks, elevators, rest rooms, planes, supermarkets, swimming pools, ski runs, quadraphonic admittedly has no place.
These messages are coded for our own zany sort of listening, lo-fi, fragmented, back-grounded, threshold-liminal even at top volume and perfectly satisfactory to most hearers.
These signals need no help from our latest four-way system. They do very well in straight mono (even via stereo!), from the thin squeak of a tiny radio, dangling on a wrist, to the bellow of gigantic mono sound I looked at the other day in a New York rock type night spot, the big speakers turned off and silent. These are brute force messages, even the tiny ones, and they do their job without quadraphonic aid.
But even our musical friends shun quadraphonic, which is something else again. People who will go right out and spend thousands of dollars on "good equipment" (they avoid the term "hi fi") in order to set up the right sonic environment for their home living, even these people, stay away in droves. They buy stereo.
Sticking With Stereo
A young lawyer, very music minded, just called me. He has bought himself a whole new system, from the ground up, including a cassette deck.
(Guess why he called. You guessed. He wants to copy off my disc records.) After a long description of it all, I asked him, why not quadraphonic? H--- no, was the instant answer. Why that? Perfectly affable, of course. Just not in any way interested. It's not for him. Why? I didn't press the issue. But if I had, he would have trotted out all the appropriate reasons. Expense. That's easy. Anything is expensive when you don't really want it. Too complicated.
No room for it. In that big place of his! And anyhow, what's in it for me? A lot of extra fuss for nothing much but gadgetry. That would be his attitude.
I see it differently. Quadraphonic, he has sensed all too quickly, might just be a bit too much for him. This he is not saying, but I get the drift. Even sight unseen and sound unheard, he is already aware of a certain something in this quadraphonic, a sort of threat. He is not stupid. He gets the all-important message.
He spends plenty of time listening.
He wants his music right, of good quality, up to date, well reproduced, well played, and ready at his elbow.
But it is only a part of his life. It must fit, elegantly. It must not be too pervasive; that would be disrupting. (It's his home after all.) This music must be around, but not too much around, if you see what I mean. And that's what he has, to perfection.
What I perceive, then, is a carefully hidden element of fear. He doesn't realize it, but I sense it. This quadraphonic thing might make the sort of demands on his lifestyle that he is not prepared to accept. Why should he? Our problem is that he is instinctively right. This is indeed the very nature of the quadraphonic impact-haven't we been saying so right along? You can catch the idea easily enough just from the ads. Surround Sound! It grabs. It plasters you with sonic experience. It comes at you from everywhere on all sides, it lifts you right out of your living room (uh uh), it plonks you right in the heart of the music (uh-uh). Correct. The four-way speaker array is, in fact, much more potent than any mere two speaker stereo, over on one side of a room. It carries more information, it demands more attention. It removes more of the actual environment, plays down the listening room, builds up the music itself. Good. But our lawyer friend, before he has heard so much as a note of it, steers straight away. To a safer sound-stereo. Fine thing.
That message is getting to a great many people and in my mind, over and above ALL the other pressing reasons, this is the reason quadraphonic is still making a slow start. This thing really might change our lives (and we aren't too sure we like the idea). Fear of the unknown.
How We Listen
The change, again, is much more profound than mere equipment and furniture problems might indicate, though these make a fine excuse because they do exist. It's in our listening itself, our very habits of living.
Long held habits, collectively built up over several lifetimes straight from Edison through the mono age and on safely into stereo-habits so finely tuned now and so extremely satisfactory at this late date that few people can contemplate any sort of fundamental listening change without feeling very uneasy.
I think that stereo for a short time posed a similar problem, back at the beginning, and ran into similar emotional resistance. It didn't last long.
Mainly, stereo was just a physical nuisance, since it involved a then-drastic rearrangement of furniture, from the concept of a single point-source mono sound, to the idea of a whole wall, or a wide stretch thereof. I can remember how thoroughly I had to rebuild my own listening area and my whole concept of speaker placement, room reflections and so on, before I got the hang of stereo listening. So it was with most of us. But what we soon found, was that once our stereo was settled in place, we could settle back pretty much into our old listening habits.
Stereo brought extra sonic information, more realism. In mono, we had listened through a sort of "hole in the wall" (a favorite analogy, back then), from our listening room into another and bigger space in which the music played. (The virtues of recorded space were discovered long before stereo came along.) Stereo enlarged that hole to encompass an entire wall. You looked right through one end of your room, or out one whole side, into that other and bigger space, now made more immediate and real via the stereo interaction between the speakers. But the music, you understand, was still out there, beyond. You were still in here, on your side of the wall, listening from the safety and comfort of your own private quarters. You still are, in present stereo. It's a foolproof listening system. To be in two places at once! Marvelous idea. Isn't TV the same? And reading the morning paper at the breakfast table? This is so much a part of our existence that it amounts to a basic security. We need it. A good part of a century has gone into the development of its myriad details in all their subtlety. Let's not rock that living room couch too hastily.
Stereo, you see, went just far enough and not too far. It modified our lives mainly in pleasurable ways, without any great new demands. We became, in the end, relaxed and confident with it, at ease in our home listening. Stereo was, and is, a big success.
One might suppose that quadraphonic merely adds a bit more to the same easy, happy perception. Reasonable--but not so. We can manage the new furniture. What bothers is the crucial surround sound, the very basic and prime idea of quadraphonic, the configuration which launched it in the first place. It works. It breaks straight into the whole concept of living room listening which we have built up so carefully over these years.
No more walls. No more you, in your living room, looking out, towards those other sonic places-that safe, private, and detached you, enjoying just as much as you want and no more. Now you are IN the music. It buffets you, it hits you. Surround Sound. Don't you see how the very ads we have used are bound to generate resistance, as well as sales? Fascinating, but also scary. Here are those four speakers, and there you are trapped, caught. Where is your fine living room now? Gone! The ads tell you so. The music engulfs you from every side. You aren't even there; you are in some new and (maybe) wonderful place. Ugh. Some people just want to sit down and relax. I can see how some might call it claustrophonia.
Of course, this is all figurative, not literal. The furniture stays put, the living room is still comfortable. (Though some people wrongly think you'll need swivel chairs, preferably motorized.) You can hear the new back speakers without even craning your neck; they behave very nicely. You're really OK! You're out free. You can go ahead, just as usual.
And yet you can't. There is a difference and you will not be able to avoid it. The difference will grow on you, inevitably, without fail, and you will indeed have to adjust your life style to some degree. You will listen harder.
You have to. You won't be able to help it. Slowly but surely, in the end, you will have to adjust. It may be a bit trying, but in the end, it will be very rewarding.
Stick with stereo, though, and you'll have no problems. A lot of people are sticking with stereo.
Which shows an awareness, I think, that has not yet come to our manufacturers. People in general are surprisingly quick to catch on when their close interests are involved.
So, problems or no, quadraphonic sound is the best thing that has ever hit home listening. I say that as a teacher, not a salesman. I say it because, for the first time since Edison, our sound can now take our listening back towards where it began-live music and active involvement. The live concert, as you know, if you go, demands a kind of attention that we simply have not been prepared to give to our home listening. No noise, no wiggles, and if you so much as rustle a program you get stared at. Living music, in the act of being made, on the spot, in real time. It is there-and so are you-a marvelous conjunction. If you are knowledgeable, if you know how, you can be entirely rewarded for that sort of concentration because live music has a formidable audio-visual punch.
Now we have an electronic medium, at last, with a similarly potent punch-not merely volume, but information power. It is NOT the same as a live performance. But it has comparable potency, and this for the first time. If that power is there, then people will find out how to use it.
Sooner or later they will come around. A new impact at home, and new ways of ordering lives to fit. That will take adjustment. Which is exactly what people now understand.
Sextaphonic, octaphonic, room-a phonic. Once this new medium gets going, we'll never be the same again.
So have patience! We have to get the lumbering, discrophic, quadraphonic goose into the air, first of all. We should lay off all that Grab-You-Surround-You propaganda. It scares. Lay on some soothing syrup. It's not going to be as bad as you think, folks. Might even be Fun.
(Source: Audio magazine, Jun. 1975, Edward Tatnall Canby)
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