Four-Channel's Time Has Come (Again)
By Joseph McLellan
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, July 10, 2005; N10

There was a time, not too long ago, when some of us thought that digital stereo -- the compact disc -- was the ultimate medium for recorded music. It was the final stage in a long history of recording technology, dating back through more than a century of improvements that included scratchy 78-rpm shellac discs.

We were wrong. The CD has now had its memory vastly enhanced by DVD technology, which gives it a visual dimension, and super-audio -- SACD -- which offers four or five channels of high-definition digital sound. Suddenly, a nearly forgotten episode in recording history has returned.

In the 1970s, major record labels began recording their product in four channels and launched a campaign to sell quadraphonic sound to consumers.

But the analog playback technology then available to music lovers fell short of the potential in the master recordings, quadraphonic sound was abandoned and hundreds of programs recorded in four channels were released in two.

Still, the four-channel masters survived, and now, with the arrival of SACD for home systems, their time has come.

One company, PentaTone, founded in the Netherlands in 2001, has been right on top of this development, while the traditional major labels have been too busy lamenting their dwindling sales to take much advantage of the opportunity.

PentaTone's managing director, Giel Bessels, said in a recent interview with Fanfare magazine that in 2002 the label's founders "became convinced that surround sound would take over from stereo in the same way as stereo had replaced mono over time."

PentaTone has bet heavily on that theory and is in a position to win big. It has come into the American market with a brilliant catalogue of four- and five-channel recordings, some newly made but many of the best digitally remastered from Philips recordings that were issued in stereo and won glowing reviews. I have sampled some of these: Handel's 16 Organ Concertos complete on four discs with Daniel Chorzempa as soloist, Schumann's "Frauenliebe und Leben" sung by Elly Ameling, and Stravinsky's "L'Histoire du Soldat" and other orchestral works conducted by Paavo Jarvi. These were selected not only for their outstanding performances but for their varied sound perspectives. In every case the surround sound gave the performers a striking presence; it sounds like the standard of the future. Meanwhile, SACDs also play well in old-fashioned stereo, so listeners not yet wired for surround sound can collect them looking forward to an eventual equipment upgrade.