A letter in response was published in June 1970 (Vol.2 No.10):
Gotcha!
Editor: At last, your fatuous pontificating has tripped you on your face!
Your anti–four-channel "editorial" in the last issue made me boiling mad. This is a legitimate advance in the audio art, and should be acknow ledged as such, particularly in a publication that purports to be in the vanguard of perfectionist-type high fidelity. Instead of citing a half-dozen reasons why it would not go over, Stereophile should have encouraged its supposedly perfectionist readers to support the new four-channel medium to the best of their ability, in hopes of ensuring that it does get off the ground.
The fact that some of your reasons for your "reservations" about four-channel's future may be valid does not, however, change the fact that your main argument against it—its incompatibility with the disc medium—is based on an outright lie. It is practical to record four channels on a disc. Such a system has already been demonstrated, as was reported in the January 1970 issue of Stereo Review. Now, what do you think of the future of four-channel stereo?—Mike Percival
Van Nuys, CA Our editorial about four-channel stereo was written before there had been any announcement of the Scheiber process for matrixing four channels into two (footnote 1), and it was too late to change our statement by the time we started hearing rumors about it. Second, since we have still not heard a demonstration of it up to the time of this writing, we must reserve judgment as to whether or not the system is practical in terms of the kind of reproduction we have come to expect from good discs. We cannot conceive of any way in which additional information can be gotten onto a disc without either an increase in the available bandwidth, which will put almost impossible demands on a medium that is already taxed to the limit, or without drastically restricting the bandwidth that is available for each signal channel.
As for our fatuous pontification about the future of four-channel stereo, we feel it is our first obligation to our perfectionist-type readers to tell them the truth as we see it, and that is what we did in our editorial. If we had any confidence in the record industry's desire to use four-channel stereo to improve the realism of reproduced sound, we would be much less cynical about the "promise" of the new medium. But if they are not interested in giving the buying public realism in two channels, why should we expect it in four?
Our advice to perfectionists is still: Save your money, or spend it on proven quality, until the record industry has shown through its actions that it intends to back up its claims about the enhanced realism of four channels.—J. Gordon Holt
Footnote 1: Matrixed 4-channel LPs were introduced commercially as the CBS SQ system and Sansui's QS system.—Ed.
Van Nuys, CA Our editorial about four-channel stereo was written before there had been any announcement of the Scheiber process for matrixing four channels into two (footnote 1), and it was too late to change our statement by the time we started hearing rumors about it. Second, since we have still not heard a demonstration of it up to the time of this writing, we must reserve judgment as to whether or not the system is practical in terms of the kind of reproduction we have come to expect from good discs. We cannot conceive of any way in which additional information can be gotten onto a disc without either an increase in the available bandwidth, which will put almost impossible demands on a medium that is already taxed to the limit, or without drastically restricting the bandwidth that is available for each signal channel.
Footnote 1: Matrixed 4-channel LPs were introduced commercially as the CBS SQ system and Sansui's QS system.—Ed.
