Ahd Now, Quadrisonic

Oh no, not again! The hi-fi industry, which periodically brings out new devices to make music listeners dissatisfied, is about to unwrap another surprise. After spending twelve years convincing the record-buying public that two ears are better than one, high-fidelity manufacturers have now embarked on a drive to prove that four ears are twice as good--at least. Their excuse: quadrisonic sound, pioneered by Acoustic Research, a leading maker of hi-fi equipment. Audio enthusiasts have been jamming themselves into demonstration rooms in New York's Grand Central Station to hear the astonishingly lifelike effect created by four amplifiers, four loudspeakers and a four-track, four-channel tape recorder.

Four-channel stereo at first suggests mainly gimmicky possibilities--tap dancers banging their way across the living room and out into the kitchen; Valkyries swooping about the house like big-bosomed mosquitoes. Yet it has serious potential in recording. Certain kinds of music can be adequately heard no other way: the Berlioz Requiem, for instance, with its four brass bands in opposite corners, or the antiphonal music of Gabrieli.

Four-channel sound, soon to be available only on prerecorded tape (and only from Vanguard Records) has rich though agonizing implications for the record industry. For years, enthusiasts have predicted that tape would replace records, pointing out that it wears longer and is almost impossible to scratch. Its major flaw--tape hiss--has finally been alleviated with the improvement of tape materials. The cartridge and cassette business is booming. Some seers now predict that the wonders of quadrisonic sound will provide a final push for tape against disks.

Rescue Ahead. Maybe. On the other hand, disks have been around since 1887, and music lovers are fondly accustomed to the pleasurable shape and fed of platter recordings. Besides, record companies have a heavy investment in disk recordings. But to go on gratifying the old record-buying public, manufacturers will probably have to come up with something that does not yet exist --a practical, marketable disk offering four-channel sound of quadrisonic tape. The technical problem--essentially how to squeeze four channels into one groove and then play them off again with high fidelity--has long seemed insoluble. Last week, however, a man came forward who seems to have solved the puzzle. He is not an engineer but a bassoonist named Peter Scheiber who lives in Rochester, N.Y. He uses a coding system to compress four sound channels into two, overlays them on tracks in either disk or tape, and then retrieves them again.

At a demonstration arranged for TIME'S music editors and a panel of scientific experts, Scheiber and his partner Tom Mowry played music ranging from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake to rock and electronic music specially composed for the four-channel medium. The sound quality proved remarkably high, though not as high as equivalent tapes.

Scheiber's process is new and virtually untested. But it does have one great commercial virtue--compatibility with existing hi-fi systems--for it requires only an "encoder" at the recording studio and a "decoder" in the home of the listener (in addition to the extra amplifiers and speakers). Yet whether the Scheiber system or something like it will really end by saving old-fashioned platter records from the tape revolution depends on the public. No one knows how record collectors will face up to the trouble and cost of replacing their favorite old recordings with new ones--either on tape or disk--in quadrisonic.

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