Martin Schmidt
I’m in my “study” in my house in Baltimore.
Where would you be ?
To tell the truth, my life, other than playing music live or doing school visits or helping out at the True Vine Record Shop, most of what I do is at home. Our studio is at home, I use a computer to make music in this study, too…if this terrible amazing awful thing wasn’t happening, I would likely be at home anyway.
What have you been doing lately?
Hilariously enough, since you ask, I have been obsessing over listening to and consequently creating quadrophonic music… the home listening aspects of multi-channel music have turned out to be a challenge! But not what I thought. Here are a lot of my semi-continuous semi-random thoughts and questions about this:
My DVD player died, and I had always promised myself that when that happened I would replace it with a Blu-Ray player, and having a Blu-Ray player would seem silly if I didn’t have a 5.1 system. Fortunately, a friend who moved across country in his car had given me his old 5.1 amplifier so all I needed was more speakers. I went to the local stereo-palace (we still have one in Baltimore called Soundscape!) and bought the “rear” speakers meant to match my front ones (Polk Audio, I can’t remember what the model is). I decided to see if I could skip the “center” speaker, and I don’t feel the need for a subwoofer in our fairly small living room. It was VERY exciting for me to discover that HDMI carries multichannel sound from the Mac Mini that we use to “watch TV”. I’m telling you, it’s a brave new home-listening world for me!
Once I had hooked all that up I set about finding multi-channel music to play on my new system!
Surprise! It isn’t easy at all (at least in the United States) to find anything that IS multi-channel to play on one’s new multi-channel audio system.
A tragedy of the marketplace! What happened? What is happening? It actually does kind of break my heart. I don’t know if I have an extra ear that no one else has, or what, but I really LOVE this thing, this event of multichannelism, whether in the home or in the concert hall. When I’m carnival-barking for the concerts I present in Baltimore I liken it to the difference between, on a hot day, standing in front of an air conditioner (stereo) and diving into a cool swimming pool and swimming (multichannelism). So, at home, I’m motivated, but frustrated. What’s the problem?
The nomenclature would seem to be a big stumbling block…what is it functionally called in daily speech? You know, the kind of speech one uses when you are looking for something on the internet… 5.1 music? Surround sound music? Because there I am, looking at the digital marketplace, READY TO SHOP, capitalism’s hot foreplay moment, and I can’t find anything to shop FOR.
Surround?
5.1?
Octophonic?
Quadrophonic?
Ambisonic?
3D sound?
MCH?
Quad?
That is too many possible search terms! And when I do start clicking on any possibly exciting links, they lead to people TALKING about it, not DOING it. Mostly talking about how it failed, isn’t “worth it”, etc. but not exclusively.
(I would love if people sent me some other links to places that sell, deal with, enthuse about this subject, I’m not a journalist, I’m a lazy consumer.)
Why don’t “WE” the, um, electronic music community, whatever you want to call this, the people reading this, care much about multichannel home listening? Because I’m with you! I love this stuff and I didn’t acquire a home setup until two months ago!
Considering that multichannel sound is…almost common in “our” festival life, electronic/electroacoustic music world, I find it strange that we’ve largely just given up on home listening…because…well, I don’t need to tell you why you haven’t pursued it…you are thinking about why you haven’t likely pursued it right now.
I assume your reasoning is the same as mine was, it’s a hassle, and there isn’t anything compelling to listen to anyway!
MAYBE there is a secret marketplace in a language other than English. That would be frustrating to me, but at least it would be there, and I would struggle through it in my mono-linguistic idiocy.
I know, I talk too much, and Francois wanted a one sentence answer to this.
But I’m glad I found ElectroCD out of Canada selling all those Empreinte Digitales stuff!
And… frankly, I haven’t listened to Dark Side of the Moon for a VERY long time, but I acquired the original quad mix of it and… well it’s pretty good.
It’s embarrassing, isn’t it, that in the marketplace, in the culture, THESE are the multichannel events that people are still talking about, rock dinosaur stuff, using the only word that has stayed sexy for “normal” record collectors, quad. It’s true I’m not even counting 5.1 mixes of Sting or whatever.
Have a look at this, sort of encouraging, but… I get the impression that many of these folks don’t even know that electroacoustic music exists? Or that there is (in my mind, anyway) a “huge” and living “scene” of people (“us”) who are very concerned with these issues.
https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/forums/
The numbers 5.1 are not sexy… we all know they connote the soundtrack to a movie SO timidly mixed that you would even know there WERE rear speakers… it is unsurprising the vast majority of people ended up asking themselves “why did I bother setting this up?”
As I’m writing this, I live in horror, of course, of being told that there is an obvious resource that I just don’t know about, if there is, forgive me. Geez, I didn’t even know .WAV would hold multichannel information!
But anyway, blah blah, that’s what I’ve been thinking about and DOING, besides cooking and cleaning, and I’ve definitely used up all my answer space, and charity from you, dear reader.
