Fake record?

Coming back around to the original question (fake records...remember?), the illegal reproductions of ACTUAL records (in all formats) are called "pirate" records - those which include legally unreleased material such as studio outtakes and "live" concerts are "bootleg" records. Pirates can be differentiated from legit records by poor graphics on the jacket or labels or obvious surface noise on an otherwise "mint" record. Pirates could either be outright copies of actual labels or fly-by-night operation record companies (Taiwan was great for these in the 1960s and 1970s - I saw a bunch of such records in a Half-Price Books store recently). Cassettes and 8-track tapes were also notoriously pirated.

Re: CD-4 Quad records, they did have superior performance but demanding on playback equipment. For correct CD-4 performance, you needed a correctly aligned decoder, a Quad cartridge with Shibata or Quadrahedron stylus tracking at really light weight and aligned and set up correctly on a quality turntable and tonearm with low capacitance wiring. SQ until late in the game had inferior performance until the Sansui and Tate matrix decoders got up to speed around 1977.

Fake Records,

There are lots of well known counterfeit records out there. The all time leading example would be Vee Jay's Introducing The Beatles. Version One copies with Stereophonic banners are most likely fakes. If your Stereo copy has a glossy black label record inside, you have a counterfeit. Let It Be has known counterfeit examples, David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold The World" exists in fakes.

More on CD-4:

In my entire life, I have seen only two CD-4 records that worked correctly. Both were in stereo stores demoing CD-4.

I own three records in CD-4 - all used. All of them are extremely noisy when played in CD-4. They were killed by their previous owners before I bought them at used record stores (I was a college student during the quad years, and had very little money for new records). Even the calibration record that came with the (used) demodulator was quite noisy.

This is not noise that could be a result of misadjustment of the arm. It was the result of extremely tiny motes of dust embedded in the record grooves. What was inaudible when the record was played with the demodulator bypassed sounded like crashes when played with the demodulator on. Snap crackle pop! A stereo record with such noises would have to have visible scratches on it.

I once saw a CD-4 record become contaminated in a stereo store. It was playing, and I was listening to it. A woman stopped at a mirror on the wall next to the display and put on some face powder. A few seconds later, the record started making the snap crackle pop sounds. The salesman ran over to see what was wrong. He asked me if I had touched the turntable. I said, "No. It started after a lady put some powder on her face by that mirror." He then stopped the player and cleaned the record. The entire record then made the crashing sounds, not just the part that was played after the powder was used. He was unable to remove the noises.

In addition, play with a standard stereo cartridge reduces the amplitude of the carrier, causing a hissing that people call "sandpaper quad."


The main fault of the CD-4 system is that is was not robust enough to stand up to normal use.

The big problem with CD-4 was US record pressing plants using cheap, poor vinyl which was limited in playing life. Japanese CD-4 Quad LP discs did just fine on playing life. They were far superior pressings made on harder vinyl which kept the carriers good. The special vinyl mandated by JVC for CD-4 wore like iron. It was best known by it's use in Mobile Fidelity LP discs made by JVC Japan. CD-4 is a delicate system demanding optimized setup and maintenance. In Quad, Sansui's QS was the best practical Quad LP system due to being the most Stereo and mono compatible, simpler encoding and decoding, and a superior matrix using Steering logic. And it was less demanding for users and the recording industry,

I agree that QS was best overall. And Dolby Surround is essentially based on QS. Although the speakers operate differently, the sound source locations are encoded in the same way for both.

But I actually liked the EV-4 system better for classical music with recorded ambiance, because it had more separation between the front and back.

Part of the problem with US vinyl was the Arab oil embargo during the time CD-4 was being made. Most record companies were using recycled vinyl. But CD-4 was still too fragile to be viable. If you owned a CD-4 record, you had to be careful what you played it on and under what conditions, or it is ruined.