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From: ted@dgbt.doc.ca (Ted Grusec DGBT/DBR)
Newsgroups: rec.audio.high-end
Subject: Re: 3 Observations On Q-Sound - What's going on???
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Date: 4 Feb 91 16:25:56 GMT
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I think it's quite safe to assume there never will be any "classical"
recordings done with Qsound. Qsound is a gimmick which may or not be
successful with commercials and garbage music. I suspect it will go
the way of the "hula hoop" and other like momentary cultural oddities.

Qsound is a development by Archer Communications, a company in Calgary,
Alberta, Canada. It purports to produce "3 dimensional sound" from the normal
stereo pair of speakers. It had a public test on a Coke commercial which was
broadcast during some major televised sports event about a year ago.
Apparently, major film people and audio record producers have shown interest in
the technology, and some pop records are being produced now with Qsound
encoding. It requires nothing additional by way of equipment at the consumer
end. The normal two-channel stereo equipment is supposed to give you the
perception. Archer Communications has stirred up a lot of stock market
activity.

While the whole thing is, technically, a "secret", it is going through patent
procedures now and in the course of this, various details have emerged. These
were reported in the November 1990 issue (vol.13, no.11) of STEREOPHILE, in the
"Update" section - an article on "Canada/UK" by Barry Fox, beginning on page
64. This would be the reference article to send interested people to.

Fox reports that Polygram, a Phillips subsidiary and one of the three largest
record companies, is "... the first record company in the world to use the new
Qsound system...".  The technique creates an "exaggerated stereo effect", and
listeners vaguely report that it makes music `"sound louder"'. Polygrams
committment, relative to its output is tiny, some 20 records over the next 18
months. The idea is related to other techniques used at various times all the
way back to the 1970's, which take advantage of the fact that the perception of
spatial direction is frequency dependent.  To a golden ear, the effects of
these various techniques is quite "phasey" and the various implementations
(e.g. "Hafler" or "Dynaquad" in the 70's) have never gone caught on. Fox
describes the Qsound process in some detail. To summarize briefly, amplitude
and phase are varied differentially along the frequency continuum. And so, Fox
says that "the effect is thus purely artificial, and arbitrary". Pure trial and
error, apparently, are used to find a sought-for position in space for given
instruments.

If I can state my personal opinions now, the key thing here is the
"artificiality" that Fox talks about. Qsound has little to do with the way
sounds occur in nature, or in the concert hall. So, if it the technique has any
future at all, it will be in specialty use of sound, such as in TV or radio
commercials, or in movie special effects, or in pop music gimmicks. And, of
course, even there, it is still quite unknown whether it will be successful,
i.e. accepted, or even "properly" perceived, by listeners. Qsound is one of
very many attempts to produce "startling" auditory effects. I have heard a
digital tape using another technique, "holographic" sound, which is generically
similar to Qsound in its effects. Once you have been initially impressed by
unexpected spatial attributes (in this case, a children's fairy tale
broadcast), two things happened for me. One, on second hearing it was
irritating, and, two, the "so what" response. And I don't want to hear it
again, thanks. This is NOT serious audio.