by Marc Loftus

Reprinted from Post magazine, June, 2000.
www.postmagazine.com

Quad Teck Digital is using proprietary technology to remaster mono and stereo releases to the 5.1 surround format. The facility, which has been in business for 36 years, got into surround remastering approximately three years ago and has worked with Morgan Creek/Warner Bros. on numerous multichannel DVD releases.

Quad Teck has five rooms in its Los Angeles facility, three of which are set up for 5.1 remastering work. There are plans to bring the location's additional two audio suites into the 5.1 world as well. The company also has a location north of LA in Palmdale, where it runs two 5.1 remastering rooms. All of the suites are based around the FDS system developed by Quad Teck's FDS Labs research and development division. The rooms also feature Tascam's TM-D1000 digital console, which is used primarily for its digital I/O capabilities and to monitor levels, as well as EV monitors and Sony DAT players.

The FDS Superbit Plus II system was developed by company founder and president Hank Waring using proprietary chips and electronics developed with German-based partners. The system allows the facility to create discrete channels for surround from mono and stereo soundtracks, without the use of delays or EQs.

Waring says the FDS system has its roots in two-channel mastering. WHile working with artists such as Buffalo Springfield, Three Dog Night, Deep Purple, Iron Butterfly, The Rolling Stones and The Turtles, he found that phasing problems made cutting records difficult.

"I was just trying to correct phasing problems on disc cutting so I could put more level on without lifting," explains Waring. "We started that in 1964. We were trying to keep the needle in the groove, because if you had vertical problems, especially bass problems, the needle would lift and then you would have a skip. I came up with many ways to do it, but the main way was to correct the problem before it got to the cutter head. That was the key. And I did this for many years without telling people what I was doing, cutting things that nobody else was able to cut. The way to do that is to try to keep things in phase alignment. And on CDs we put the warmth of analog on digital.

Remastering projects to 5.1 also has its roots in Warings earlier work. "I never appreciated how people were doing pseudo stereo," says Waring. "Thirty years ago I did mono-to-stereo and it sounded more natural, and I didn't use equalization.

Without giving away too many details of FDS Labs' proprietary technology, Waring does say this: the basic FDS system is able to find information on a tape that has been canceled out through phasing.

"There is more information on a piece of tape than a normal system can't find," says Waring. "We call it re-entry. We are able to find these missing parts and retriece this additional information.

Waring refers to the process as "phase tuning." The process works on both digital and analog formats and eliminates the need for remixing. Waring also points out that there is no need to work from the multitrack originals in order to create a surround track.

Quad Teck has used its FDS systems to remaster several projects for 5.1 release for Warner Bros., including The King and I, Wrongfully Accused, and The Chill Factor. The facility also performed 5.1 remastering from stereo for True Romance, Two if by Sea, and Pacific Heights for Morgan Creek. Quad Teck's remastering mono credits includes Little Princess and Flying Deuces. The facility recently completed work on the DVD version of The Whole Nine Yards. "We were A/B-ing it at Warner against a mag," Waring recalls of Nine Yards, "and the guys were saying, 'your level is louder than ours, but ours is in the red.?' You could hear everything that you would have had to turn up 20db to hear, and we were getting it without noise.

Quad Teck VP Jeff Kirk adds that unlike other processes that use panning, delays, and reverbs to create surround tracks, their process easily folds down to stereo, eliminating the need to provide DVDs with a seperate LT/RT track for listeners without multichannel home theater systems. Quad Teck can also create what it calls "5.1 plus 5," whereby a phantom speaker is created between each of the five main speakers.

In addition to DVD titles, Quad Teck is seeing a demand for its 5.1 remastering services from production music libraries looking to remaster their original stereo music catalogs. And the work is stacking up. In fact, Kirk says that the question was raised by one client - who could bring as many as 200 titles a year to Quad Teck for remastering - about whether or not they would be able to meet such a demand.

"That's why we are building up as many facilities as we can," says Kirk. "There will be a cap on it, because with the proprietary electronics - the boards and the chips - there's only so many [systems] that can be made. A lot of those chips where one-offs and were not mass-produced.

So why not manufacture systems and try to sell them? There seems to be plenty of work to be had. And there are other competing facilities that have announced plans to market systems based on their own proprietary systems.

"A lot of people have said to us, 'Why not bottle this and sell it?' But that's not our goal," Kirk explains. "We are strictly here to be a service."

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

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