SurroundByUs.com

Hello to all!
First & foremost let me thank everyone on the staff for creating the SBU forums. Stereo to surround is indeed a delight to me & I look forward to sharing & learning a lot here.

I live in the area of Kansas City, MO, middle of the middle of the good ‘ol USA. Most of my career has been in professional photography (advertising/commercial) & pro photo lab work. Seeing the transition to digital I have been employed for about the last 15 years in diagnostic imaging in the medical field (I won’t bore you with any further detail.)

When I was quite spam I picked up the latest issue of Popular Electronics (1972) & read an article by J. Gordon Holt titled “Hafler vs. Schieber: four channels on disc.” I had one spare full range speaker lying around & hooked it up in the Hafler/differencing method & put on a stereo copy of Switched on Bach. The speaker layout was a good equilateral triangle & the high separation source material was magic. Life hasn’t been the same since.

From that point I have owned a Sansui QS-1, Sony SQ 2020, Sansui QSD-1, QSD-2, QSD-1000, QSE-5b encoder, EV encoder, Kenwood 4480 quad receiver (my one & only receiver), Multiple Fosgates including the Tate 101, built a two band Photolume QS decoder, built a Vista SQ full logic decoder, built one Integrex Ambisonic decoder & modified another, IMF Ambisonic decoder, various CD-4 deocders, 1st gen Marantz AC3 deocder modified for DTS& a Tag McLaren AV32R. I always appreciated the dedicated true surround sound formats but so very much that I wanted to listen to was only stereo and I always felt that the surround synthesis from the QS units worked miracles. Yeah, since that day in ’72 I have always, always, had some form of a surround sound set up to enjoy my music.

As time as gone on I now find myself happy with PL II for most all casual listening but eventually I sorted out how to use the PC to replicate QS synthesis. Actually it is more like high separation RM great circle decoding applied to stereo play back. Zero decoding artifacts, so much greater control if just a bit of intelligent creativity is applied. One of the most interesting comments I have read elsewhere in these posts is that 2ch stereo is really like compressed surround, & I totally agree. There is an infinite possibility of amplitude & phase combinations between those two channels, & picking a few parameters as a starting point wondrous things can happen.

Most of my current line up of audio gear is: Panasonic BD10A Blu-ray, Denon 2910 DVD, Pioneer DVL-700 Laserdisc, Something or other S-VHS, Panasonic AU1000 projector with 8' screen, Geffen HDMI switcher, Anthem AVM30 surround pre-amp, 3 Adcom 555 power amps, Infinity Kappa 9 fronts, Kappa 7 rears, & Infinity center front. As Infinity is now such a pathetic shadow of it’s former self I always feel the need to say these are not the spam & terrible Kappa’s you might be thinking of, but rather awesome speakers from the golden age of audio. Even tho the front Kappa’s have two 12” woofers each, & the rear’s have one 12” woofer each, I still have a home brew sub-woof with another two 12” drivers. I really hate boomy mid-bass so they are kept fairly tame but when a movie soundtrack demands you can actually feel the concrete floor vibrate in my basement (bassment?) theater/ music room.

For PC work on audio/video I am now on my third gen dedicated build for these projects. Asus P6t Deluxe mobo with i7 920 air OC’d to 3.6GHz, 12 Gig ‘o OCZ DDR3 PC1600 RAM, Radeon 4890, M Audio Delta 1010, Pioneer CD/DVD read/write with Blu-ray playback (TMT 3 with AnyDVD HD). The hard drive set up is a bit unique. I have two Super Talent 64GB SSD’s in RAID 0 for my C drive; OS & apps only. Another four Seagate 1TB HDD’s as two RAID 0 pairs. These are my data discs… the basic idea is to read from one while processing & writing to another. And then a single Seagate 1TB plugged into my last SATA socket to use only as scratch/temp. Vista 64.

Sorry to go on so long. I tend to post notes in bursts, several lengthy ones & then maybe I dry up for a while on things to say.

Looking forward to making sense of all this bidule/humidity/ARGTC stuff. Odd terms at first but then I was able to eventually figure out what Gerzon was talking about so there might be some hope for me. I know there will certainly be good help on the forum.

Scott in real life.

Very interesting first post Scott. You certainly come very well equipped to have hours of fun in our company and I have a definite feeling this is going to be a two-way process. So make sure you shout if you need anything, we love to help and see one of ours grow into an expert converter.

Given that French is my mother tongue, I am curious about the "Bonjour" part in your subject line...

Welcome aboard Scott!

"Humidity" as in "dry" (un-processed) and "wet" (processed) sound. 100% humidity would be all wet, or all processed sound. 0% humidity would be all dry, or un-processed sound.

FYI, it's ARTGC, for Automatic Real Time Gain Control.

Cheers!
Zeerround

Welcome aboard, Scott. Yet another guy with a more impressive system than I've got.

We'll help up make sense of all the weird terms. They made no sense to me either three years ago and, here I am, co-running my own site now. Just feel free to ask as many questions as you need to. We've got three moderators and a whole lot of members to help you along.

Sorry about the Chiefs this year.

Scott,

We'd love to hear more about your methods!

I actually spent a few hours googling "QS", looking at patents etc.

Still wondering what you've come up with. Do you end up with DTS 5.1 or QS encoded quad?

Cheers!

PS I'm a California resident, born and raised