What am I hearing

Spaz,

Debbie Gibson's "Only in My Dreams" in 12" vinyl is a great record for that effect where the music goes around behind you and way out to the sides. Near the end, the percussive sounds circum-navigate the room (counter-clockwise if I recall correctly.

I also own a Vinx CD, "Rooms in my Fatha's House," that has some of this effect on certain tracks. It's uniquely good music in my opinion. The artist Vinx is one of a kind.

If you like Madonna, her "Immaculate Collection" CD has great quasi-surround effects on a few of the songs. "Vogue" is probably the best engineered of those tracks, though there is another cool track near the end that has a thunder storm going on behind you.

Check it out, and thanks for listing your quasi-surround (SuperImage) recordings. It's intriguing how these effects can emerge from just two stereo speakers!

With the Roger Waters cd it's a process called Q sound. "The Soul Cages" by Sting was also recorded with this process. The first time I listened to "The Soul Cages" my speakers were next to a set of French doors and I could've sworn music was coming through the doorway from the adjacent room.
Another cd I recently discovered with holographic sound is "Life On A String" by Laurie Anderson. If you system produces deep bass, watch out for track 6 on this one; my walls shake.

I remember that Roger Waters CD sounding excellent, but on the whole QSound is a bit gimmicky for my tastes and occasionally sounds flat-out wrong to my ears (see Madonna's "Immaculate Collection").

On earlier (pre-90's) Roger Waters tracks you're probably hearing holophonic imaging, which is a variation on binaural recording.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holophonics

It is very easy in todays world of digital plug ins to make this happen. if you take a signal X, all in the R ch only and then put the reverse phase of X all in the L ch it makes the image go way far right outside the speakers. It is a psychoacoustic affect that tricks the brain. I love it too. The best recordings I have heard that do this are:

Nina Hagen "African Reggae" on a few of her albums-get the full version, not the edit on the US version
Adrian Sherwood "Boogaloo" from Never Trust a Hippy
Massive Attack "Karmacoma-Mad Professor remix" from No Protection or the singles box

ET

Hall and Oates mfsl gold disc "Your Kiss Is On My List"
Amazing

There is a track on Ginger Baker's "Going Back Home" (I think #3) where Bill Frisell's guitar sounds likes it's coming from way off to the right and way in front of the speakers. I have a door in to the room near there and it sounds like he is outside the door.

Excellent album by the way.

Electroid....is what you are descriding the same as Polk's SDA effect from year ago?

Whould you say that some systems exaggerate this effect even more?

Plato'
your kidding me about Debbie Gibson?

To Muncybob-Yes! That psychoacoustic affect was patented by a small Maryland company in 81-82 called Psi-coustics. They were friends of mine. They did it with a solid state tape loop device (like an Eq) Within a few years another Maryland company, Polk Audio, patented the circuit at speaker level with their SDA line. My guess is they had one of the early units. Radio Shack bought or leased the IMX patent from Psi-coustics and had it in some of their EQ's as well. I like the last Polk SDA's that did not have the tweeters as part of the circuit. We humans get little or no location cues above 3K. Properly set up they have the biggest and best image possible. This affect is recording dependent of course. It does nothing to a mono signal and can give a bit of a hole in the middle on some recordings. But on the right recording there is nothing better for involvement in the stereo image. I still use a set of their best model: SDA SRSA 1.2 TL. quite often. Lots of fun! Freaks people out when they hear it. They look around for other speakers.

Q-sound is a great effect, and Roger Water's "Amused to Death" is an awesome example (and album), particularly when the speakers are set-up properly and you are sitting dead centre. I have windows on the right side of the room and, when I play the opening track from "Amused to Death", everyone, and I mean everyone, who I've played it for thinks the dog's bark is coming from my neighbour's yard outside and past my window. But, as I've said, the speakers have to be set-up properly and you have to be sitting pretty much dead centre. The album has a lot of great examples of Q-sound, particularly the TV/radio throughout the album and the piano in the first couple of minutes of Track 3. Definitely one of my favourite sounding, and generally favourite, album.

Totally agree with Roger Water's Amused To Death. To me it is the perfect showcase of what Q-sound is capable of. Another Pink Floyd related track is the unlisted track commonly called "Soundscape" by PF fans on the PULSE cassette tape release. It is a collection of sounds varying from lawn mowers, rain, jungle sounds, frogs, crickets, etc and very convincing the sounds are coming from outside the house.

A_L

I just picked up the Madonna "Immaculate Collection"and on most of the tracks the Q sound is really evident.All tracks are incredible sounding.If you think the Roger Waters is good check this one out!The material might not be the best but the recording they did on this is nothing short of a miracle.It is now the most "Holographic" sounding CD in my collection.The song "Voque"is over the top.With Q sound being kinda of old technology why don't more artist use this in there recordings?If your listening to strait ahead jazz or chamber music you would'nt want to use this technique but for alot of other types of music it could be a great tool for a recording artist!