by Glen O'hara

Reprinted from Mix Magazine, September, 2000.

The consumer rush to buy home theater systems and DVDs has been one of the great retail success stories of the past half-decade. Early prognosticators predicted a much slower ramp-up time, citing the chicken-egg syndrome. Hardware won't sell without the available software (i.e., DVDs), and software won't be made available until there's a large enough installed base of hardware. Well, the floodgates have opened, with hundreds of DVD titles available and countless more on the way as studios trip over themselves to put out catalog material-most of it in 5.1-channel surround sound.

How those older films are taken from mono or stereo to 5.1 surround has become increasingly important to the sound-conscious consumer. Some film studios are converting material in-house: others are relying on independent shops. One such facility is Quad Teck Digital/FDS Labs of Los Angeles, founded by industry-veteran Hank Waring.

Waring has been in the recording industry profesionally for almost 50 years, starting at the age of 16 for KFXM radio in San Bernadino. He built his first studio in a garage soon after, working with acts such as Canned Heat, Wee Five, Johnny Burret and many others. In 1959, Waring started in disc mastering at Capitol Records. From there, he went to Radio Recorders in Los Angeles, then to Century Records as the chief engineer of the mastering department. On July 1, 1964, Waring started his own mastering house in Hollywood called DCT Recorders.

In the early '70s, Waring, with the help of his German engineering partners, started a research and developement division known as FDS Labs. This R&D led to the developement of FDS hardware systems for noise removal and siganl processing for overall improvements in sound quality.

In 1974, Waring started the two-room Quad Teck Recording Studios in Los Angeles. Groups and artists that came to Quad Teck included Bob Marley, Gladys Knight, Los Lobos, Della Reese, Percy Faith, The Platters, The Olympics and many more. When the CD market hit, along with it came the need for noise removal and remastering analog tape for CD release. Quad Teck did the cleanup work for the Beatles' Abbey Road for CD release, as well as mastering for John Lee Hooker, Dukes of Dixieland, Bob Marley, John Lennon and many more.

Waring started cleaning up older movie soundtracks for BMG's film division, UFA, and that brought in similar work on films from other companies. This led to a whole new FDS process that he and his German partners began to develop. Then came 5.1 surround. The FDS Labs' system was updated to a 6-channel compatiblity with 32-bit/96k processing, and the ability to put that information back into a 16-bit format without losing its 32-bit quality. The system's ability to find missing pieces of music and effects that have been canceled out due to phase problems contributes a great deal to the sound it can achieve for 5.1 surround. The bells and whistles version of the FDS process is called "5.1 plus 5" surround sound. This system creates a phantom between each of the five speakers in the surround field, resulting in a seamless surround environment without the need to sit in a designated "sweet spot."

The film version of the Full Dimensional Sound (FDS) mastering system, which makes use of proprietary, custom-designed DSP chips, provides:

"The key to our FDS process is its work in the time domain. All of our processors in the chain mantian CTC down to 5 to 15 picoseconds of jitter correction," says Waring, referring to the units' Constant Time Control. "In fact, many of our clients initially think we accomplish our dramatic results with equalizers; yet the fact is, we do very little EQ, with the bulk of the process involved in correcting phase and timing. Phase correction is a major part of the FDS process in bringing out the clarity and detail of instruments and voices that are sometimes deeply layered in the mix. Our processors can take standing waves out of the audio, revealing hidden clarity and ambience, even from monophonic recordings."

Another major key to the FDS system is its "library" of over 100,000 "fingerprints," as Waring calls them, of instruments and voices. "These are not 'samples' in the traditional sense," Waring says.

The six-room Quad Teck/FDS Labs facility contains a custom Sony digital-mastering mixer, with a Tascam TM-D4000 and TM-D1000s used for level control. Signal stays at 24-bit/48KHz for film, 44.1K for DTS products and music remastering.

(Quad Teck Digital, 4007 West Sixth Street, Los Angeles, CA 90020; 213/383-2155; Fax 213/383-2158; info@fdslabs.com.)