Pound-for-pound, Vogue by Madonna is one of the most remarkable examples of artificial stereophonic sound ever produced.
As a lover of hi-fi, Madonna wasn't really on my radar until someone steered me toward this gem. After about 50 listens and some really interesting research on QSound (the tech used to produce it), I ended up featuring it in my hi-fi music recommendation newsletter.
IMHO Orbital - The Box (part 2) works even better[1].
Some of the sounds are clearly behind me, to my sides, or surrounding me. And things move around.
Some cool stereo effects, but not something I'd ever want to listen to. I don't see anything interesting about putting nature sounds and a Pink Floyd sample over a very repetitive electronic loop. Maybe I didn't get far enough, since it's 20 goddamn minutes long. To me, Vogue is ear candy. De gustibus!
A lot of stereo/3d stuff translates differently to each listener. Q sound might not work for you the way it does for others (none of the 3d sound stuff seems to work for me).
You can't just throw out Orb and expect me not to get extremely excited. Now I have to listen to this entire youtube performance. THANKS.
Thanks for submitting this here, very cool article — I hadn't heard of QSound before.
I don't know, I always thought it sounded simplistic, cheap and dated, even at the time. Placing stuff in the stereo field has been bog standard music production since the 70s. Q sound adds a _little_ bit to it, but somewhat importantly if you are actually listening to this song in a dance club it's all completely lost, a lot of clubs don't have any kind of stereo separation.
Just compare it to stuff that was coming out of the acid house scene at the same time (yes i know this song isn't really acid house -- but it does have a lot of fun stereo effects):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qexS5hBB1C0