A buddy of mine's been cleaning his attic and just dropped off a pair of Pioneer quadraphonic headphones. I have no idea what I'll do with them, but I am thinking of doing a quadraphonic mix just for the hell of it. Problem is, the only way to actually listen to it is through these headphones!
 
Can anybody think of another use for them? Like maybe playing instruments through two channels while I monitor vocals through the other, for tracking vocals?

Get Alan Parson's quad mix of Dark Side Of The Moon, and play it over...and over...and over...and over...
 
Did that with the original quad LP. I had 4 monster JBL studio monitors (yeah, I didn't know the diff between a monitor and a speaker back then, and they needed to be played LOUD to have any nuance at all, but they looked way cool) hooked up to a quad amp in my college apartment. Good thing my neighbors loved my tunes!
 
Edit: I was going to make a joke about 4-ears (vs. 4-eyes), but that would have disrespected the Floyd.

I vaguely remember those.
How are the transducers situated to create a quad headphone?
Are there 4 transducers?
Do you need 4 ears? (sorry)
Do they really work or did marketing invent these?
I vaguely remember magazine articles saying that they don't really work well, could have been written by Craig! 
I would definitely make a quad mix of something to try them. Sounds like fun!

Yes, they actually have two speakers in each can (which are rather large), one facing the ear from the front, the other from behind. The cable breaks out into two 1/4" plugs. Only two ears are required, which is a convenience.
 
My buddy had bought them around 1980 to monitor his TEAC 3340S, a four-track recorder. In 1984 he gave me that 3340S in lieu of payment for work I had done on his first album. That, along with a Pioneer 2-track for mixdown, was the centerpiece of my recording setup for many years until I went all digital. But he didn't offer me the quadraphonic headphones at the time and I didn't even know he had them until he showed up with them yesterday.
 
John, I am intrigued by the possibility of getting hold of some classic quadraphonic mixes, but I don't know how that would work. Are they available as interleaved multitrack files? And if so, how do I decode them? If they're separate front and back files I could load them into the DAW and route them to the two headphone outputs on my interface.

bitflipper
Yes, they actually have two speakers in each can (which are rather large), one facing the ear from the front, the other from behind. The cable breaks out into two 1/4" plugs. Only two ears are required, which is a convenience.
 
My buddy had bought them around 1980 to monitor his TEAC 3340S, a four-track recorder. In 1984 he gave me that 3340S in lieu of payment for work I had done on his first album. That, along with a Pioneer 2-track for mixdown, was the centerpiece of my recording setup for many years until I went all digital. But he didn't offer me the quadraphonic headphones at the time and I didn't even know he had them until he showed up with them yesterday.
 
John, I am intrigued by the possibility of getting hold of some classic quadraphonic mixes, but I don't know how that would work. Are they available as interleaved multitrack files? And if so, how do I decode them? If they're separate front and back files I could load them into the DAW and route them to the two headphone outputs on my interface.

I'd start here, with CDs that are quad-encoded. See what you like, and what you can track down. Would love to know the results.
 
http://www.surrounddiscog...m/quaddisc/quadcds.htm

TEAC 3340S! I got a publishing deal with Warner Brothers Music makeing 4 track demos on that machine! We mixed down to cassette. Oh the ping ponging! Great machine!

Usually the result of such headphones is less than impressive. You can find similar things on sale today, there are "surround" or "7.1" headphones you can get with multiple drivers in them. They don't do that great a job of giving a surround effect. You usually get a better surround effect from regular 2 driver headphones that are combined with something that does HRTF processing like a SoundBlaster Z or one of the stand alone Dolby units like the Astro Mixamp Pro.
 
You can play with DVD-A content, if you want some surround content to mess with. Foobar2000 knows how to deal with them when given the foo_input_dvda.dll addon, and there's a program called DVD-Audio Explorer that can pull the audio off the disc and decode the MLP format.

Oh yeah, I loved that 3340S. But by 1981 quadraphonic was already dead, so it never occurred to me to try making a discrete 4-track mix. My final medium was cassette, but I'd mix the 4-track to a second 2-track machine first. In those days I didn't really appreciate how much of the mixing work was being done for me by the cassette tape! Now I understand people's love for tape sims in the digital world (even though I don't use them myself).
 
Sycraft, thanks for the Foobar tip. I am a longtime fan of Foobar, but was unaware of the dvd-a add-on.
 
And thanks, John, for the quad CD link. My initial research had shown that although the original Red Book draft included support for 4 discrete interleaved channels, it was later dropped from the formal spec. Consequently, no CD players were ever built that could play back 4-channel data. But your link suggests that quad content does exist on CD. However, I am still unclear as to how one goes about playing them. It lists three different encoding methods but does not explain them.
 
I think for now I will just do a quad mix for my own amusement, and anybody who wants to hear it will have to stop by and listen on my newly-acquired headphones.
 
 
 

I remember the quadraphonic cartridge.