I don't agree at all. Consumers at the time did not perceive a need for quad. Even though the first systems came out around the height of the home stereo evolution, I can't recall any audiophile friends or just music lovers who ever mentioned it to me. And at none of the stations I was with did we ever get a call about quad... even though during a part of that time a local station was promoting heavily their quad program.
That's a typical demand / content issue. The first flatscreen TVs were very expensive, but they were something nearly everyone wanted. So, as the early adopters with money got them, prices came down and at the same time product was adapted or created.
During the 80's I saw several studies that showed that about 80% of radio listening was mono. Quad was a step to far.
FM had more than half the total audience by 1977, and more than half the music audience by around 1975. That was the era of component stereos, but, still, those were minimally used for radio and mostly for recorded music on disc or tape. Most in-home listening was to the clock radio, the kitchen radio, the bathroom or rec room radio.
Conceptually, yes. But even by the early 80's, as I said, the majority of listening was in mono to mono radios.
If you go back to the ratings data from the 70's, as well as at one's own proprietary research when we started doing perceptuals in the early 80's, the radio day began in the bedroom, and between bedroom and kitchen, there was more listening to music stations than in the car.
"At work" never meant "in the office". At work is often the loading dock, the auto repair shop, the tile and carpet guy's portable, the delivery truck. And every manner of station was listened to.
Most music listening was not "serious" but done in the background while working, getting up, cooking, barbecuing and all the other stuff that radio has traditionally accompanied people at. Very little radio listening like that was done on the stereo; when the stereo was on for radio, it was usually as a background for a party, a gathering, and whatever. Nobody sat around listening to music radio in the living room the way they did for Jack Benny.
It was, in fact, a proposition of "nobody perceived a benefit of value". They may have been curious. I am curious about a Rolls Royce, but I do not see a cost / benefit equation that satisfies me. Same with quad. No demand because there was not a groundswell of curiosity of the kind that drives early adopters.
I paid just under $5000 for my first Apple computer in '80 (my first home computer was in '75). Most people did not see the benefit over-weighing the cost yet; I did and gradually so did others. But darned if I was going to spend a thou' or two on Quad. No benefit perception.
And despite all that, how long before the station quit wasting money? No ROI, just a wave that never crested.
I define broadcasters as operators of stations that had to make money, cover expenses and return some cash to investors. Nobody saw the potential in quad save a few stations that ended up proving the rest of us to be totally right.
Oh, I put the first stereo FM in South America on the air in the 60's. I believed in that and could see potential and a way to set us apart from competitors. We were FM and we were stereo. Nobody else in the market could say either of those things. We made money very quickly.
HD was a marketing concept, paid for by broadcast companies that were afraid of the word "digital" and aided in taking some Alcatel and other source research and making a digital fully compatible system. They did not see that HD would be totally opaqued by smartphones and streaming.
The DAB band was not allocated in the US, and nearly all of us saw DAB as the child of government dominated radio in certain nations in Europe. It was tried commercially in Canada and failed. It is not doing nearly as well as expected in Australia. In part, nobody wants to buy a new radio when they have "radio" on their smartphone.
And, of course, hundreds of billions of dollars of radio assets were sold based significantly on the coverage value of their licenses. Broadcasters, the NAB and even our regulatory and legislative entities could not see the economic structure of radio destroyed in the worlds most developed radio economy.
It was quite well studied "back then" that the effects of ambient vehicle and road noise effectively meant that most people listening to radio in the car were de facto listening to mono. The few that bought high-end audio gear for the car often wanted "loud" and not "good".
Code applied to what is often no better than 128 kbs MP3s. Again, no demand.
I meant, again, that consumers did not care because they could not perceive any significant advantage worth spending money on.
AM is pretty much dead because the early 1930's allocation system did not contemplate both urban sprawl and increasing noise levels. HD stereo was tagged on at the insistence of the FCC, which was not going to approve FM IBOC without an AM system incorporated in it. The FCC still thinks that AM can be "revitalized" but their only answer has been to give bad AM stations a bad FM translator signal.
