This reminds me of "Zaireeka" by the Flaming Lips, an album that was sold as four separate CDs and you would have to cobble together every boombox, stereo, and Walkman in your house to try and play them all at the same time. So, you would hit the "play" button on disc #1, frantically try to match your timing with disc #2, inevitably be a few seconds late on disc #3, etc. The end result was that the music never sounded the same twice, especially once you started experimenting with mixing and matching a few of the discs together instead of all four at once.
Even if you start the discs at the same time, they won't finish at the same time. The timing skew on CD players was such that you'd actually accrue a few seconds of error over the course of the songs. I think I remember reading that this even surprised the Flaming Lips.
I tried to create a website that would play this. Basically an ad hoc surround sound. The theory was that people would load it on 4 different devices, and one play button would start them simultaneously through websocket messages. Unfortunately I learned that the timing of the html5 audio element varies too much between browsers and devices.
This brings back fond memories of a house party we threw in college where we got a bunch of gear and put speakers all throughout the house. So CD 1 might be playing through a speaker in the basement and BR1, CD2 playing in living room and BR1, etc. Made for a really cool effect where different rooms had very different feels, and certain places in the house where you could get the full mix.
I've listened to the "combined" version on Spotify and it just doesn't have the same effect. I can distinctly remember having a "WOW" moment the very first time I tried to play all of the CDs together and certain tracks synced up together. I couldn't recreate it a second time though -- each attempt was a bit different.
Pretty much. Not surprisingly, Wikipedia does a much better job explaining it than I did [1].
Zaireeka is the eighth studio album by American rock band The Flaming Lips,
released on October 28, 1997 by Warner Bros. Records. The album consists of
four CDs designed so that when played simultaneously on four separate audio
systems, they would produce a harmonic or juxtaposed sound; the discs could
also be played in different combinations, omitting one, two or three discs.
Each of its eight songs consists of four stereo tracks, one from each CD.
