On Tue, 28 May 2013 18:34:12 -0700, "William Sommerwerck"
wrote:

There was a standard for four-channel recordings, in which the disk ran twice
as fast and had 1/2 the two-channel playing time. Unfortunately, there was no
backward compatibility -- the four-channel disks could not be played in
two-channel on regular players. So they were never made.

It was dropped in the IEC specification:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-channel_compact_disc_digital_audio

I may have told this story before... I was working for Intech in
Santa Clara during the 1970's. There were several divisions under one
roof, including one that made high end A/D and D/A converters. Sony
was using Intech converters in their recorders and parked a small team
of engineers in the building to do who knows what with the converters.
Intech catalogs were loose leaf pages in a red ring binder. I still
have a few floating around. The red ring binders were everywhere and
apparently, the Sony people used them for collecting their data and
test results. It eventually became the "red book".

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558