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Letters

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Parent Issue
Day
31
Month
January
Year
1975
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LETTERS

To The SUN,

Most of us are aware of the women's movement, at least to the extent of knowing it exists. Women have been challenging society with increasing strength for most of this century. One of the exponents of the women's movement is Gay Liberation, a broadly based emerging consciousness which challenges sexist Amerika.

What most people are not aware of is the emergence of men, both gay and straight, who challenge our sexist society, by coming together to discover that all men don't want to conform to society's rigid sex roles. This movement is a few years young and very small and scattered compared to the women's movement.

In Ann Arbor there is a group of us working to establish a men's community, where men can be together to talk about our feelings, share ideas, and in general to offer one another support for wanting to be different from what society expects of us.

Last semester there was a series of men's raps at Guild House. For four consecutive weeks 50-60 men met in small groups to discuss such areas as sexism, relationships with women, with men, gayness, sexuality, sex roles, marriage, divorce, and many others. Several on-going groups were formed to meet weekly to share more of each other's lives.

A group of us has been meeting since December to set up another series of men's raps. They will happen for 12 consecutive Thursdays, the first being Jan. 23. The time is 7:30 P.M. and the location is Tyler No. 4, in the basement of East Quad. The entrance is the Willard St. archway. Turn left and take the first door. Go downstairs and turn right. It is the first room on the right. We hope to be involved in a variety of activities other than just rapping. The kinds of things we do will depend on people's energies and interests.

For further information the people to contact are Arnie Sciullo, 662-0071 and Jim Oakley. 665-7218.- Arnie Sciullo, Jim Oakley Ann Arbor

"Men, both gay and straight who challenge our sexist society by coming together, discover that all men don't want to conform to society's rigid sex roles."

Dear SUN, 

In your recent stereo special the quad article mentioned quad broadcasting in Detroit, saying that Detroit was among the last major cities to have a quad radio station. As it turns out, there is no station in Detroit, and I doubt there is one anywhere, that broadcasts quadraphonic programming 24 hours a day. The current "King Quad" claims of 24 hour quad broadcasting have little technical basis and are largely promotional hype.

The technical basis for matrix quad broadcasting (the only discrete broadcasts are being conducted on a test basis in California) is fairly simple. Quad matrix systems used in the home are all technically referred to as 4-2-4 matrix systems. All this means is that the four original channels are encoded into a two channel system and then recorded on record or tape and then decoded back to four channels at the listener's decoder. Since on a record or tape the encoding has already been done, the two resulting channels can be conveyed over the two channels of stereo FM just as readily as they can be through the wiring of a listener's stereo to his decoder; it makes little difference to the encoder how the two channels get to it as long as they contain the encoded signal. Thus, when a stereo station plays a matrix record or tape it will be correctly decoded if listened through the right decoder. This explains how stations such as WABX can offer occasional selections and programs in quad.

On the other hand, when WWWW claims to be broadcasting in quad 24 hours a day they are engaging in pure sham. In order to legitimately broadcast quad continuously they would have to be constantly playing quad records; and there are just not enough quad records out to do that. Instead they fake it. What they do is to feed their stereo program signals to a couple of inputs on their Sansui QS encoder -a device designed to do the 4 to 2 encoding. The catch is that the encoder needs 4 separate input channels and it is only given the two stereo channels. Obviously there is no way for the encoder to come up with the missing signals-with only stereo going in the best that can be expected is an altered stereo signal coming out, which is exactly what is broadcast. All that the encoder manages to do is to rearrange the ambient mush which you hear when listening to a stereo station in quad.

Listen and see. If you know someone with quad equipment listen to a stereo station in whichever quad matrix modes are available. Then tune to WWWW and try the same thing. The effect is very similar-a surrounding mush but no true quad sound.

What the deal is, then, is that WWWW's 'quad' is nothing more than a promotion ruse-after all, large ads featuring 'quadzilla' are a lot more enticing than ads featuring the same old shit. Sansui tries hard to get stations to buy and use their encoder and push quad because, of course, Sansui is a large manufacturer of quad equipment.While they tell the broadcaster that quad can be created from stereo to create "an additional marketplace for the broadcaster", what they really see is an additional marketplace for Sansui quad equipment. Thus, 'quadzilla' is not quad, hut a scam run to WWWW's and Sansui's mutual benefit. -Art Beutler Ann Arbor

"When WWWW claims to be broadcasting in quad 24 hours a day they are engaging in pure sham."

Dear SUN, 

The woman writing about an Aerosmith concert made a lot of interesting and valid points about attitudes that preach non-conformity but are ultra-conformist. All the readers of your paper realize that you conformists are still living in the late sixties with your devotion to Dylan, Grateful Dead (they are, too!), and John Sinclair prototypes, but only a small portion, I bet, feel the way you guys do.

To illustrate a point, look back at the David Bowie "review" one of your no-talents did a couple of months ago To this reader, it appeared that the poor guy was nervous about his reputation for attending Bowie's show and then writing about it! I think he called David a glitter-rocker, and that right away discredited his review. To call a man who has generated such genius music for four years in a row a non-value "to the people" is to say that Bob Dylan does not have stock in oil corporations and is not a multi-millionaire. Bowie is the 1970's as were Dylan and the Beatles the 1960's, in as far as impact on music and innovations for positive change. Also, anyone who has the balls to couple David with Hollywood's Alice Cooper, has no obvious knowledge of the mammoth talent of the former and the showmanship of the latter.

When I was a high-school freshman in Detroit, John Sinclair was a curiosity, not the social "leader" some here in A2 consider him. But that's all nostalgia for us "Vietnam babies", as is the hippie-psychedelic bands that were sold to us as symbols of revolution and peace (funny thing how these two words go together in the 1960's). But we grew older, and no longer children, we put away our Donny Osmondesque "brother and sister" bands, along with their weak themes for the seventies.

However, until it came to a point of nausea in reading some of the quips about Bowie and new bands that mean change (remember the word?), I personally respected the tastes of music of Woodstock Generationers like yourselves, although it is passé. To this reader, most of the SUN's musical attitudes have been just too conformist for people who have grown out of that stage. Otherwise, you people seem to want an objective paper to the A2 community, which shows in some decently-written columns of the SUN.

Maybe for improvement, you could hire music critics who know music today and not yesteryear, or present both sides of the musical spectrum, without cop-out and no-basis quips of nothingness toward the "new" revolutionary trends; i.e., Bowie, in music.  -T. Hazee Ann Arbor

"How many other feminists agree with Jane Alpert that they should no longer mourn the deaths of 42 male supremacists at Attica?"

Dear SUN,

This is a brief response to some points in Mary Hoadley's letter (SUN, Jan. 6).

First, whatever fear or paranoia SUN articles have encouraged has been justified and documented by continual revelations in the straight media - CIA domestic surveillance being simply the latest example. Such "fear" is not at all equivalent to the "yellow peril" fear which justified and encouraged murder in Indochina (and at home eventually).

Secondly, Jane Alpert is no longer a fully devoted member of the New Left but a nonrevolutionary feminist who is as confused as the romantic ultra-left adventurists she now rejects. How many other feminists agree with Jane that they should no longer mourn the deaths of 42 male supremacists at Attica? Maybe feminist intellectuals like Jane can explain how they differ from Nelson Rockefeller who, I'm sure, doesn't mourn the murders at Attica. -Venceremos, Charles P. Finn  Charlottesville, VA