WHat about four speakers.......

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..

Detlof: sorry about my poison pen (hmm, keyboard?) coming out again. Some time, when the moon holds water, I revert to my true nature: that of a curmudgeon. No excuse, but I guess TWL's early post is what prompted my barbs. Again, what bothers me the most is the knee jerk reaction to whatever new, large electronics companies propose, that I have come to expect from a lot of audiophiles and, you will have to admit, the vast majority here, contrasted to the ready acceptance of products that come from so-called designers, that actually offer nothing or next to nothing but are hailed as major breakthroughs. Just read the comments on the sound quality of SACD or the need for such a format posted on A'Gon. It has not been out that long and a lot of people here have already relegated the whole thing to the trash bin of audio history. Since SACD is a double barrelled approach, in that it is both a high resolution format (in answer, I guess, to all those who have criticized Red Book CD into disrepute) and a multi channel format, it is difficult to comment on one and not the other. The reaction to the better resolution is to say that it is good, but not as good as "my vinyl rig" (Geez I wish I could hear such a rig). The reaction to multi channel is to say that the whole thing is not worth considering even for a moment since the pinnacle of sound reproduction has been reached with two channels ("you know we only have two ears") and since multi channel, whether synthesized or brought about by multi channel software, is only really feasible in the digital domain, the same people have to slap it down hard, especially in answer to a neophyte, so that the one and only true virtuous analogue road to sound Nirvana is safe. Not to draw lines in the sand, but why not ask the dyed-in-the-wool analogue/vinyl people to refrain from commenting on the new formats, if after the most cursory listening they pronounce it as mediocre compared to their technology of choice and also to refrain from commenting on multi channel if all they have to say is that it a good idea whose time will never come? Sorry for the rant, I would have a number of questions on setting up a multi channel system based on the ITU Standard recommendations for SACD reproduction. I hesitate to ask them in this forum, as its membership (at least some of its most vocal portion) appears at best totally uninterested, and at worst quite hostile, or at least cynical, to anything that really changes their beloved paradigm. My most basic recommendation at this point is the following: buy the cheapest Sony SACD player you can find, buy the Vaughn Williams "A Sea Symphony" on Telarc and tell me that it can be bested by another recording available in another format, even in two channel mode (for sake of diplomacy, I refrain from using the usual "at any price" taunt here). I can only guess how wonderful it should sound when I have the extra channels connected. By the way, the term "micro-dynamics" seems to me to be an oxymoron, unless one believes that every part of infinity is also infinite in itself... Regards and salutations from the mid-fi trenches.