WHat about four speakers.......

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..

What about: http://ambiophonics.org/

Plato, thanks for the address. This method has been widely discussed in Europe and widely acclaimed by the critics, but also here the public did not really respond in sufficient numbers, to make the whole project commercially viable.

Pbb, fankly I don't understand your attitude. Your post is full of interesting information. But then, why all that gall? If you find us here all so ridiculous or impossible, why bother with us? Shakespeare comes to mind, to me you have, what he calls a "jaundiced eye". Well on second thoughts, perhaps you need us, to get rid of your "humours", to quote him again. Hope you felt better after you had written that post. Only it is now us, who have all that bad air. (us = people, who think cables important.)Why punish us, if you are not interested to hear what we can? I don't get it. Respectfully,
Detlof

I'll admit to using the Dynaco-style L-R rear speakers scheme in my reference rig. I have a 6x8 pass-through library just behind my listening chair, and mounted small monitors high up on the sidewalls, facing each other, using barely visible AWG20 black hook-up wire, and of course a nice wire-wound 40 ohm pot. I rarely use it on classical works, but on some jazz and rock it's a great way to provide ambience and wider stage for lean or dry recordings. Plus it subtlely fills that walkway with enough sound so that it doesn't sound like a big "null" as I walk through it to sit down in the sweet spot.
My system consists of a 7.5' equi-triangle in a 24' long room, so I have lots of room behind the speaker plane, thus providing a VERY deep stage. However, dialing in these rears progressively shortens the stage depth as the rears fill in! It's almost like having my listening chair roll forward on rails! Not at all an improvement on great classical recordings, but fun for multi-mono rock and jazz.
The solid copper Radio Shack AWG20 and small bookshelf monitors (Super-Zeros, Atoms, etc.) are fine for this, as one is only trying to dial in a bit of L-R ambience, so perfect timbral matching and low-frequency extension are NOT important, unlike true digital surround matrices.
I just set up such an HT system in a larger, livelier adjacent family room from mid-fi NAD receiver and Spendors, and with NAD's EARS 5.1 synthesis from FM 2ch or TV 2 ch. the fake-surround is fun. But there's NO question that the ultra-deep stage I get from my 2ch ref rig is much preferable for serious classical and jazz listening. I'm glad I didn't try to make an all-purpose music-and-HT system...I think digital surround has a long way to go in soft-ware development before it becomes an efficient, viable alternative to nearfield 2 channel in a well-damped room!