ABSTRACT
I clearly remember spending a great deal of money at Record Plant in 1972 to build one of the first control rooms for Quadraphonic Sound. Tom Hidley, by this time having graduated from Record Plant to form Westlake Audio, designed all four speakers to operate equidistantly from the audio engineer's mixing position at the console. We also had four joysticks installed in our API console to properly take advantage of all of the unnatural effects that our gleeful clients could think of. Revolving the drums, constantly changing the position of the vocalist or the lead guitar, 360-degree applause—you name it, they tried it. Quad was very short-lived, and they said it was a flop “because no one has four ears!” A complete failure in a very short period of time. If you don't bet, you can't win—but damn, it's sometimes so very expensive to lose.
