[Red Badger]

QUADRAPHONIC never really took off................

[dfwgator]

My dad had a quadrophonic receiver.

The funniest was that there were actually Quadrophonic 8-Track players.

[ETL]

QUADRAPHONIC never really took off....

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Quadraphonic sound

Quadraphonic (or Quadrophonic and sometimes Quadrasonic) sound – equivalent to what is now called 4.0 surround sound – uses four channels in which speakers are positioned at the four corners of the listening space, reproducing signals that are (wholly or in part) independent of one another.

Quadraphonic audio was the earliest consumer product in surround sound and thousands of quadraphonic recordings were made during the 1970s.

It was a commercial failure due to many technical problems and format incompatibilities.

Quadraphonic audio formats were more expensive to produce than standard two-channel stereo.

Playback required additional speakers and specially designed decoders and amplifiers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadraphonic_sound

[ctdonath2]

Now we have 9-speaker “surround sound” systems.

[plain talk]

“QUADRAPHONIC never really took off................”

Nope. I never had a full quad system although I got an interesting sound back in the day with two stereo systems with a speaker in each of the four corners. I also had quad headphones which I used with my Teac 4-channel reel-to-reel for my homebrew recordings.

[suthener]

“QUADRAPHONIC never really took off................”

I remember paying .25 to sit on the floor of a round room in Panama City, Fl. to listen to a demonstration of quadraphonic stereo in the early 70s. It was state of the art at that time.

[Larry Lucido]

[Ben Hecks]

I had a 4 channel open-reel tape deck and quadraphonic amplifier (and 4 speakers, of course). My music library consisted of about 18 discrete four channel tapes which might have been all that were ever recorded. Then, they began to sell 4 channel LPs which I thought was a gimmick - after that, 4 channel died.

[Calvin Locke]

IIRC, if the cartridge was the slightest bit off, you could end up destroying the quad groove-within-the-record=groove, severely impacting the listening experience of the higher priced record.