5 More Vocalion Surround SACD Releases - Earth, Wind & Fire, O'Jays, Harold Melvin & Blue Notes, Miracles, Helen Reddy (Jan 2020)

[esimms86]

In for all of these!

I bought:
Way of the World in SQ, CD, 2ch SACD, expanded CD in EWF Albums box.
Spirit in SQ, CD, expanded CD in EWF Albums box.

Helen Reddy both Q8, LP & import CD

O'Jays both SQ

Haven't owned Blue Notes or Miracles on any format.

Quad Linda, your credit card is on fire!

 

[4-earredwonder]

Quad Linda, your credit card is on fire!

Maybe we should all have a 'bonfire' as between the December/January D~V QUAD releases ALL our credit cards are ON FIRE!

 

[Juggsnelson]

Obviously I ordered all 5 of these immediately! I haven't even started listening to the last batch yet.

 

[HDave]

Just ordered the Earth Wind and Fire 2fer, a good batch for possibly selling out.

 

[IDJIT DRAGON]

While I've appreciated what Vocalion were doing I haven't really liked any of the music that they've been offering but this batch has changed that and I've ordered the EWF, Ojays and Melvin after a quick sampling of the albums on Google Play

Cheers

Martin

 

[steelydave]

Will there be @steelydave liner notes on any of these? Would love to hear about his research into these titles and their quad mixes...

I didn't write anything for this batch - they were done at the same time as December's slate of rock releases, for which I contributed the liner notes to the Guess Who Wheatfield Soul/Canned Wheat. I did, however, once again have the distinct pleasure of assisting D-V's graphic designer Paul with the artwork and layout for these discs. I think he's once again outdone himself with combining the album covers that make up each release - the PIR and Earth Wind & Fire titles all have really striking visual identities, and he's managed to integrate the essential parts of all of them without things becoming a disjointed mishmash. We also had access to the quad master tape boxes and pilfered them for every extra bit of information about studios, engineers, and recording/remix dates we could find. This led to a few interesting revelations, including the fact that the quad mix for Earth Wind & Fire's That's the Way of the World was done by the team of Don Young and Harold J. Kleiner (who did some of the best quad mixes that D-V have reissued recently including the two Poco quad mixes and Derringer's All American Boy), and that the quad mix for The Miracles' Love Crazy was done by **** Bogert and Warren Vincent at A&M studios in Hollywood, a development that I'm sure @fredblue will great with a very hearty "I told you so" when he finds out.

I also proofread the liner notes that are included in these releases - the four R&B titles were done by Mojo and Record World contributor Charles Waring, and are up to the same high standards of his other work for D-V in 2019, but I wanted to pay special tribute to the liner notes for the Helen Reddy two-fer, which were penned by none other than QQ's @humprof. If you're like me and know almost nothing of Reddy's music you might just think of I Am Woman (the song) as sort of a pop culture punchline, but Michael's warm, engaging and immaculately researched liner notes not only tell a much bigger and more interesting story both about the artist and her music, but also provide a fantastic sense of its cultural relevance both in the context of the time they were released and today. I honestly think this might be the best liner note that's ever accompanied a D-V release, and I'll gladly include my own contributions in that.

I think of all these discs the one I'm anticipating most is the O'Jays Survival/Family Reunion twofer, for several reasons. The primary one, of course, is that these are two of the very best albums that the group ever put out - as PIR's marquee act they got the best of Gamble & Huff (and their collaborators) songwriting, and the most elaborate, biggest budget productions. It's these big, lush productions that make these two albums ideal candidates for quad, and I think the fact that both these albums required two engineers each (Survival: Joe Tarsia & Jay Mark, Family Reunion: Jay Mark & Arthur Stoppe) hints at just how complex these mixes were to execute. The interesting thing for me in these two albums is that even though they both came out in 1975, they're very different sounding records - Survival very much continues the gritty, message-driven sound of Ship Ahoy, whereas with Family Reunion you start to hear the smoother, disco-influenced sound that would be the hallmark of the mid/late-70s PIR releases. The other reason I'm excited about this reissue is the fact that both these albums were SQ-only releases originally - given how much of a revelation the SACD of MFSB's Philadelphia Freedom (another SQ-only release from the same time frame) was last year, the potential for what's on these discrete 4-channel masters promises to be revelatory. And to top it off, it's been my experience the last year or so that the element in recordings that seems to benefit most from Mike Dutton's remastering expertise is vocal harmonies - I'm not sure what his secret sauce is, but harmony vocals on D-V releases often make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up if I play them at volume. I think it's also worth mentioning that there's never been a US or EU stereo release of Survival that wasn't horribly compressed - as far as I know the first (and only) domestic CD issue is the Sony Legacy version which I think is about DR9. There was a Japanese issue in the mid-90s that's uncompressed, but it's a pretty dull and midrangey affair that sounds like a flat transfer of a copy tape or something. Either way, I expect Mike's masterings of both the stereo and quad mixes of these two albums to be definitive.

Much of the same thing can be said about the two Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes albums, except the quad mixes are really a study in contrasts, approach-wise. Black & Blue was one of the first quad mixes done at Sigma Sound's Studio B (along with Billy Paul's War of the Gods) and it's very much of the show-off variety, with lots of swirling round-the-room pans and four-corner directionality. Wake Up Everybody, on the other hand, while still fully discrete, is a much more nuanced mix - I feel like some of the quad mixes from the end of the format's lifespan were getting so accomplished that they'd be hard to differentiate from the best modern 5.1 remixes, and Wake Up Everybody is a candidate for that distinction. As with the O'Jays, the Harold Melvin back catalogue suffers from the blight of the vast majority of CD reissues (aside from maybe being bright and overly-compressed, a mastering style that doesn't fit the warm, laid-back style of the music at all, a situation I'm sure will be remedied on this new SACD.

I don't want to sell Earth Wind & Fire short by saying too little, but I think plenty has been said here already - if you like R&B and surround music at all, these two albums are everything you'd want. Not only does the group hit its songwriting stride to such a degree that it makes their previous two quad albums look like warm-ups, you also get both albums mixed by CBS's two quad supremos: Don Young on That's the Way of the World, and Larry Keyes on Spirit. I liked the quad mix of That's the Way of the World so much that I spent nearly a month of evenings trying to remaster my own Q8 conversion of the album a few years back. I can't wait for the day that D-V disc plops through the letter box, because the first thing I'll do is delete that conversion. I've never owned Q8 of Spirit - it's so elusive that I'd be dubious about it's very existence if I hadn't seen a couple of pictures of it online. I can't even remember the last time it came up for auction on eBay, but it's the kind of tape that would've easily fetched $200 (if not more) in the days of the bidding wars.

Despite boasting one of **** Bogert's standard 'drums in one rear speaker and bass guitar in the other' quad mixes (like Return to Forever's Musicmagic and Tower of Power's Aint Nothin' Stoppin' Us Now) which isn't my favourite quad approach, I still really enjoy The Miracles Love Crazy album. This is definitely one of those 'never would have heard it if not for quad' discoveries, but I hope a few people here will take the chance. If you're on the fence about this, look up the song Spy For Brotherhood or the title track on Youtube and see if it's your cup of tea. There's so little of this kind of music (disco-era soul) in quad, I'm grateful we're getting this one - as @sjcorne said previously, as one of Columbia's final quad offerings in 1977, the Q8 of this title is so rare you can't even find a photo of it online.

 

[bmoura]

I've ordered the EWF, O'Jays, and Melvin

Same here - ordered the DV SACDs from EWF, O' Jays and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes with Teddy Pendergrass.

 

[Scott65]

just put my order in
DSML8571

Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes - Black and Blue & Wake Up Everybody [SACD Hybrid Multi-channel]
£11.99

1
£11.99


CDSML8574

Earth, Wind & Fire - Spirit & That's the Way of the World [SACD Hybrid Multi-channel]
£11.99

1
£11.99


CDSML8566

The O'Jays - Survival & Family Reunion [SACD Hybrid Multi-channel]
£11.99

1
£11.99


CDSML8569

The Miracles - Love Crazy & Miracles [SACD Hybrid Multi-channel / Stereo]
£11.99

1
£11.99


CDSML8573

Paul Mauriat - Love Sounds Journey & bonus tracks [SACD Hybrid Stereo]
£11.99

1
£11.99


CDLK4627

Helen Reddy - I Am Woman & Long Hard Climb [SACD Hybrid Multi-channel]

 

[Quad Linda]

Steely Dave, you truly are a treasure!

 

[fredblue]

I didn't write anything for this batch - they were done at the same time as December's slate of rock releases, for which I contributed the liner notes to the Guess Who Wheatfield Soul/Canned Wheat. I did, however, once again have the distinct pleasure of assisting D-V's graphic designer Paul with the artwork and layout for these discs. I think he's once again outdone himself with combining the album covers that make up each release - the PIR and Earth Wind & Fire titles all have really striking visual identities, and he's managed to integrate the essential parts of all of them without things becoming a disjointed mishmash. We also had access to the quad master tape boxes and pilfered them for every extra bit of information about studios, engineers, and recording/remix dates we could find. This led to a few interesting revelations, including the fact that the quad mix for Earth Wind & Fire's That's the Way of the World was done by the team of Don Young and Harold J. Kleiner (who did some of the best quad mixes that D-V have reissued recently including the two Poco quad mixes and Derringer's All American Boy), and that the quad mix for The Miracles' Love Crazy was done by **** Bogert and Warren Vincent at A&M studios in Hollywood, a development that I'm sure @fredblue will great with a very hearty "I told you so" when he finds out.

I also proofread the liner notes that are included in these releases - the four R&B titles were done by Mojo and Record World contributor Charles Waring, and are up to the same high standards of his other work for D-V in 2019, but I wanted to pay special tribute to the liner notes for the Helen Reddy two-fer, which were penned by none other than QQ's @humprof. If you're like me and know almost nothing of Reddy's music you might just think of I Am Woman (the song) as sort of a pop culture punchline, but Michael's warm, engaging and immaculately researched liner notes not only tell a much bigger and more interesting story both about the artist and her music, but also provide a fantastic sense of its cultural relevance both in the context of the time they were released and today. I honestly think this might be the best liner note that's ever accompanied a D-V release, and I'll gladly include my own contributions in that.

I think of all these discs the one I'm anticipating most is the O'Jays Survival/Family Reunion twofer, for several reasons. The primary one, of course, is that these are two of the very best albums that the group ever put out - as PIR's marquee act they got the best of Gamble & Huff (and their collaborators) songwriting, and the most elaborate, biggest budget productions. It's these big, lush productions that make these two albums ideal candidates for quad, and I think the fact that both these albums required two engineers each (Survival: Joe Tarsia & Jay Mark, Family Reunion: Jay Mark & Arthur Stoppe) hints at just how complex these mixes were to execute. The interesting thing for me in these two albums is that even though they both came out in 1975, they're very different sounding records - Survival very much continues the gritty, message-driven sound of Ship Ahoy, whereas with Family Reunion you start to hear the smoother, disco-influenced sound that would be the hallmark of the mid/late-70s PIR releases. The other reason I'm excited about this reissue is the fact that both these albums were SQ-only releases originally - given how much of a revelation the SACD of MFSB's Philadelphia Freedom (another SQ-only release from the same time frame) was last year, the potential for what's on these discrete 4-channel masters promises to be revelatory. And to top it off, it's been my experience the last year or so that the element in recordings that seems to benefit most from Mike Dutton's remastering expertise is vocal harmonies - I'm not sure what his secret sauce is, but harmony vocals on D-V releases often make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up if I play them at volume. I think it's also worth mentioning that there's never been a US or EU stereo release of Survival that wasn't horribly compressed - as far as I know the first (and only) domestic CD issue is the Sony Legacy version which I think is about DR9. There was a Japanese issue in the mid-90s that's uncompressed, but it's a pretty dull and midrangey affair that sounds like a flat transfer of a copy tape or something. Either way, I expect Mike's masterings of both the stereo and quad mixes of these two albums to be definitive.

Much of the same thing can be said about the two Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes albums, except the quad mixes are really a study in contrasts, approach-wise. Black & Blue was one of the first quad mixes done at Sigma Sound's Studio B (along with Billy Paul's War of the Gods) and it's very much of the show-off variety, with lots of swirling round-the-room pans and four-corner directionality. Wake Up Everybody, on the other hand, while still fully discrete, is a much more nuanced mix - I feel like some of the quad mixes from the end of the format's lifespan were getting so accomplished that they'd be hard to differentiate from the best modern 5.1 remixes, and Wake Up Everybody is a candidate for that distinction. As with the O'Jays, the Harold Melvin back catalogue suffers from the blight of the vast majority of CD reissues (aside from maybe being bright and overly-compressed, a mastering style that doesn't fit the warm, laid-back style of the music at all, a situation I'm sure will be remedied on this new SACD.

I don't want to sell Earth Wind & Fire short by saying too little, but I think plenty has been said here already - if you like R&B and surround music at all, these two albums are everything you'd want. Not only does the group hit its songwriting stride to such a degree that it makes their previous two quad albums look like warm-ups, you also get both albums mixed by CBS's two quad supremos: Don Young on That's the Way of the World, and Larry Keyes on Spirit. I liked the quad mix of That's the Way of the World so much that I spent nearly a month of evenings trying to remaster my own Q8 conversion of the album a few years back. I can't wait for the day that D-V disc plops through the letter box, because the first thing I'll do is delete that conversion. I've never owned Q8 of Spirit - it's so elusive that I'd be dubious about it's very existence if I hadn't seen a couple of pictures of it online. I can't even remember the last time it came up for auction on eBay, but it's the kind of tape that would've easily fetched $200 (if not more) in the days of the bidding wars.

Despite boasting one of **** Bogert's standard 'drums in one rear speaker and bass guitar in the other' quad mixes (like Return to Forever's Musicmagic and Tower of Power's Aint Nothin' Stoppin' Us Now) which isn't my favourite quad approach, I still really enjoy The Miracles Love Crazy album. This is definitely one of those 'never would have heard it if not for quad' discoveries, but I hope a few people here will take the chance. If you're on the fence about this, look up the song Spy For Brotherhood or the title track on Youtube and see if it's your cup of tea. There's so little of this kind of music (disco-era soul) in quad, I'm grateful we're getting this one - as @sjcorne said previously, as one of Columbia's final quad offerings in 1977, the Q8 of this title is so rare you can't even find a photo of it online.

amazing info!! thank you for sharing and thanks for everything you do

hope there'll be some new steelydave essays in the future and meantime very much look forward to reading humprof's liner notes!

its uncanny (standby, its gloating time!) because i did indeed predict both that TTWOTW was a Kleiner & Young mix and Love Crazy was a Vincent & Bogert job, they both had their respective hallmarks.

i can't understand why those Kleiner & Young mixes (or rather those i surmised were and turned out to be) didn't get credited on the sleeves and i've wondered why none of those "Bass Rear Left/Drums Rear Right" mixes post Minnie Riperton's "Perfect Angel" in '74 (which i did indeed suspect were all by Vincent & Bogert and now this latest revelation pretty much clinches it for me) had Quad credits on the sleeves at all!

now i think i know why, maybe.. they were A&M guys! so rather than someone like CBS' in-house engineer Larry Keyes, who always got a credit, even on his last Pop mixes in 1977 (Electrified Funk, Go For Your Guns).. so perhaps there wasn't the same obligation on CBS' part to have the Quad Engineer Remix Credit on the final release?

ahh.. time for a lay down, that was all way too much specumalating for a Sunday!

 

[GOS]

Steely Dave, you truly are a treasure!

He sure is.....when he goes into those long posts, with all that great information, I'm simply captivated from start to finish. So excellent to read!

 

[J. PUPSTER]

I didn't write anything for this batch - they were done at the same time as December's slate of rock releases, for which I contributed the liner notes to the Guess Who Wheatfield Soul/Canned Wheat. I did, however, once again have the distinct pleasure of assisting D-V's graphic designer Paul with the artwork and layout for these discs. I think he's once again outdone himself with combining the album covers that make up each release - the PIR and Earth Wind & Fire titles all have really striking visual identities, and he's managed to integrate the essential parts of all of them without things becoming a disjointed mishmash. We also had access to the quad master tape boxes and pilfered them for every extra bit of information about studios, engineers, and recording/remix dates we could find. This led to a few interesting revelations, including the fact that the quad mix for Earth Wind & Fire's That's the Way of the World was done by the team of Don Young and Harold J. Kleiner (who did some of the best quad mixes that D-V have reissued recently including the two Poco quad mixes and Derringer's All American Boy), and that the quad mix for The Miracles' Love Crazy was done by **** Bogert and Warren Vincent at A&M studios in Hollywood, a development that I'm sure @fredblue will great with a very hearty "I told you so" when he finds out.

I also proofread the liner notes that are included in these releases - the four R&B titles were done by Mojo and Record World contributor Charles Waring, and are up to the same high standards of his other work for D-V in 2019, but I wanted to pay special tribute to the liner notes for the Helen Reddy two-fer, which were penned by none other than QQ's @humprof. If you're like me and know almost nothing of Reddy's music you might just think of I Am Woman (the song) as sort of a pop culture punchline, but Michael's warm, engaging and immaculately researched liner notes not only tell a much bigger and more interesting story both about the artist and her music, but also provide a fantastic sense of its cultural relevance both in the context of the time they were released and today. I honestly think this might be the best liner note that's ever accompanied a D-V release, and I'll gladly include my own contributions in that.

I think of all these discs the one I'm anticipating most is the O'Jays Survival/Family Reunion twofer, for several reasons. The primary one, of course, is that these are two of the very best albums that the group ever put out - as PIR's marquee act they got the best of Gamble & Huff (and their collaborators) songwriting, and the most elaborate, biggest budget productions. It's these big, lush productions that make these two albums ideal candidates for quad, and I think the fact that both these albums required two engineers each (Survival: Joe Tarsia & Jay Mark, Family Reunion: Jay Mark & Arthur Stoppe) hints at just how complex these mixes were to execute. The interesting thing for me in these two albums is that even though they both came out in 1975, they're very different sounding records - Survival very much continues the gritty, message-driven sound of Ship Ahoy, whereas with Family Reunion you start to hear the smoother, disco-influenced sound that would be the hallmark of the mid/late-70s PIR releases. The other reason I'm excited about this reissue is the fact that both these albums were SQ-only releases originally - given how much of a revelation the SACD of MFSB's Philadelphia Freedom (another SQ-only release from the same time frame) was last year, the potential for what's on these discrete 4-channel masters promises to be revelatory. And to top it off, it's been my experience the last year or so that the element in recordings that seems to benefit most from Mike Dutton's remastering expertise is vocal harmonies - I'm not sure what his secret sauce is, but harmony vocals on D-V releases often make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up if I play them at volume. I think it's also worth mentioning that there's never been a US or EU stereo release of Survival that wasn't horribly compressed - as far as I know the first (and only) domestic CD issue is the Sony Legacy version which I think is about DR9. There was a Japanese issue in the mid-90s that's uncompressed, but it's a pretty dull and midrangey affair that sounds like a flat transfer of a copy tape or something. Either way, I expect Mike's masterings of both the stereo and quad mixes of these two albums to be definitive.

Much of the same thing can be said about the two Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes albums, except the quad mixes are really a study in contrasts, approach-wise. Black & Blue was one of the first quad mixes done at Sigma Sound's Studio B (along with Billy Paul's War of the Gods) and it's very much of the show-off variety, with lots of swirling round-the-room pans and four-corner directionality. Wake Up Everybody, on the other hand, while still fully discrete, is a much more nuanced mix - I feel like some of the quad mixes from the end of the format's lifespan were getting so accomplished that they'd be hard to differentiate from the best modern 5.1 remixes, and Wake Up Everybody is a candidate for that distinction. As with the O'Jays, the Harold Melvin back catalogue suffers from the blight of the vast majority of CD reissues (aside from maybe being bright and overly-compressed, a mastering style that doesn't fit the warm, laid-back style of the music at all, a situation I'm sure will be remedied on this new SACD.

I don't want to sell Earth Wind & Fire short by saying too little, but I think plenty has been said here already - if you like R&B and surround music at all, these two albums are everything you'd want. Not only does the group hit its songwriting stride to such a degree that it makes their previous two quad albums look like warm-ups, you also get both albums mixed by CBS's two quad supremos: Don Young on That's the Way of the World, and Larry Keyes on Spirit. I liked the quad mix of That's the Way of the World so much that I spent nearly a month of evenings trying to remaster my own Q8 conversion of the album a few years back. I can't wait for the day that D-V disc plops through the letter box, because the first thing I'll do is delete that conversion. I've never owned Q8 of Spirit - it's so elusive that I'd be dubious about it's very existence if I hadn't seen a couple of pictures of it online. I can't even remember the last time it came up for auction on eBay, but it's the kind of tape that would've easily fetched $200 (if not more) in the days of the bidding wars.

Despite boasting one of **** Bogert's standard 'drums in one rear speaker and bass guitar in the other' quad mixes (like Return to Forever's Musicmagic and Tower of Power's Aint Nothin' Stoppin' Us Now) which isn't my favourite quad approach, I still really enjoy The Miracles Love Crazy album. This is definitely one of those 'never would have heard it if not for quad' discoveries, but I hope a few people here will take the chance. If you're on the fence about this, look up the song Spy For Brotherhood or the title track on Youtube and see if it's your cup of tea. There's so little of this kind of music (disco-era soul) in quad, I'm grateful we're getting this one - as @sjcorne said previously, as one of Columbia's final quad offerings in 1977, the Q8 of this title is so rare you can't even find a photo of it online.

I’m ready for Reddy now! My apologies to one of my favs here @humprof; if I’d only known! And the little angel shouldn’t make that long arduous journey all by herself; she’ll need company crossing the pond

And to @steelydave you’ve just made my day!

 

[fredblue]

He sure is.....when he goes into those long posts, with all that great information, I'm simply captivated from start to finish. So excellent to read!

i get that fuzzy feeling when he goes into a long one..

 

[fredblue]

I’m ready for Reddy now! My apologies to one of my favs here @humprof; if I’d only known! And the little angel shouldn’t make that long arduous journey all by herself; she’ll need company crossing the pond

And to @steelydave you’ve just made my day!

cos its one for the Pupster,
two for the 'Prof,
three for Helen Reddy,
lets go man go!!



hurry up postie and drop my batch on the mat!!!!

 

[Quad Linda]

I'd love to see Love Song for Jeffrey and Free & Easy get the Dutton Q-twofer treatment. You and Me Against the World & Angie Baby were their respective hits.

Lovesong is the only Reddy Quad I didn't get. I did get it on LP & CD.

 

[humprof]

I didn't write anything for this batch - they were done at the same time as December's slate of rock releases, for which I contributed the liner notes to the Guess Who Wheatfield Soul/Canned Wheat. I did, however, once again have the distinct pleasure of assisting D-V's graphic designer Paul with the artwork and layout for these discs. I think he's once again outdone himself with combining the album covers that make up each release - the PIR and Earth Wind & Fire titles all have really striking visual identities, and he's managed to integrate the essential parts of all of them without things becoming a disjointed mishmash. We also had access to the quad master tape boxes and pilfered them for every extra bit of information about studios, engineers, and recording/remix dates we could find. This led to a few interesting revelations, including the fact that the quad mix for Earth Wind & Fire's That's the Way of the World was done by the team of Don Young and Harold J. Kleiner (who did some of the best quad mixes that D-V have reissued recently including the two Poco quad mixes and Derringer's All American Boy), and that the quad mix for The Miracles' Love Crazy was done by **** Bogert and Warren Vincent at A&M studios in Hollywood, a development that I'm sure @fredblue will great with a very hearty "I told you so" when he finds out.

I also proofread the liner notes that are included in these releases - the four R&B titles were done by Mojo and Record World contributor Charles Waring, and are up to the same high standards of his other work for D-V in 2019, but I wanted to pay special tribute to the liner notes for the Helen Reddy two-fer, which were penned by none other than QQ's @humprof. If you're like me and know almost nothing of Reddy's music you might just think of I Am Woman (the song) as sort of a pop culture punchline, but Michael's warm, engaging and immaculately researched liner notes not only tell a much bigger and more interesting story both about the artist and her music, but also provide a fantastic sense of its cultural relevance both in the context of the time they were released and today. I honestly think this might be the best liner note that's ever accompanied a D-V release, and I'll gladly include my own contributions in that.

I think of all these discs the one I'm anticipating most is the O'Jays Survival/Family Reunion twofer, for several reasons. The primary one, of course, is that these are two of the very best albums that the group ever put out - as PIR's marquee act they got the best of Gamble & Huff (and their collaborators) songwriting, and the most elaborate, biggest budget productions. It's these big, lush productions that make these two albums ideal candidates for quad, and I think the fact that both these albums required two engineers each (Survival: Joe Tarsia & Jay Mark, Family Reunion: Jay Mark & Arthur Stoppe) hints at just how complex these mixes were to execute. The interesting thing for me in these two albums is that even though they both came out in 1975, they're very different sounding records - Survival very much continues the gritty, message-driven sound of Ship Ahoy, whereas with Family Reunion you start to hear the smoother, disco-influenced sound that would be the hallmark of the mid/late-70s PIR releases. The other reason I'm excited about this reissue is the fact that both these albums were SQ-only releases originally - given how much of a revelation the SACD of MFSB's Philadelphia Freedom (another SQ-only release from the same time frame) was last year, the potential for what's on these discrete 4-channel masters promises to be revelatory. And to top it off, it's been my experience the last year or so that the element in recordings that seems to benefit most from Mike Dutton's remastering expertise is vocal harmonies - I'm not sure what his secret sauce is, but harmony vocals on D-V releases often make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up if I play them at volume. I think it's also worth mentioning that there's never been a US or EU stereo release of Survival that wasn't horribly compressed - as far as I know the first (and only) domestic CD issue is the Sony Legacy version which I think is about DR9. There was a Japanese issue in the mid-90s that's uncompressed, but it's a pretty dull and midrangey affair that sounds like a flat transfer of a copy tape or something. Either way, I expect Mike's masterings of both the stereo and quad mixes of these two albums to be definitive.

Much of the same thing can be said about the two Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes albums, except the quad mixes are really a study in contrasts, approach-wise. Black & Blue was one of the first quad mixes done at Sigma Sound's Studio B (along with Billy Paul's War of the Gods) and it's very much of the show-off variety, with lots of swirling round-the-room pans and four-corner directionality. Wake Up Everybody, on the other hand, while still fully discrete, is a much more nuanced mix - I feel like some of the quad mixes from the end of the format's lifespan were getting so accomplished that they'd be hard to differentiate from the best modern 5.1 remixes, and Wake Up Everybody is a candidate for that distinction. As with the O'Jays, the Harold Melvin back catalogue suffers from the blight of the vast majority of CD reissues (aside from maybe being bright and overly-compressed, a mastering style that doesn't fit the warm, laid-back style of the music at all, a situation I'm sure will be remedied on this new SACD.

I don't want to sell Earth Wind & Fire short by saying too little, but I think plenty has been said here already - if you like R&B and surround music at all, these two albums are everything you'd want. Not only does the group hit its songwriting stride to such a degree that it makes their previous two quad albums look like warm-ups, you also get both albums mixed by CBS's two quad supremos: Don Young on That's the Way of the World, and Larry Keyes on Spirit. I liked the quad mix of That's the Way of the World so much that I spent nearly a month of evenings trying to remaster my own Q8 conversion of the album a few years back. I can't wait for the day that D-V disc plops through the letter box, because the first thing I'll do is delete that conversion. I've never owned Q8 of Spirit - it's so elusive that I'd be dubious about it's very existence if I hadn't seen a couple of pictures of it online. I can't even remember the last time it came up for auction on eBay, but it's the kind of tape that would've easily fetched $200 (if not more) in the days of the bidding wars.

Despite boasting one of **** Bogert's standard 'drums in one rear speaker and bass guitar in the other' quad mixes (like Return to Forever's Musicmagic and Tower of Power's Aint Nothin' Stoppin' Us Now) which isn't my favourite quad approach, I still really enjoy The Miracles Love Crazy album. This is definitely one of those 'never would have heard it if not for quad' discoveries, but I hope a few people here will take the chance. If you're on the fence about this, look up the song Spy For Brotherhood or the title track on Youtube and see if it's your cup of tea. There's so little of this kind of music (disco-era soul) in quad, I'm grateful we're getting this one - as @sjcorne said previously, as one of Columbia's final quad offerings in 1977, the Q8 of this title is so rare you can't even find a photo of it online.

Before Dave swells my ego here, I’ll just second Linda, Adam, Gene, and Pup's remarks below: he is truly Dutton's secret weapon. And I have to say that while I’m pleased with how things turned out, I had more than a little help from my friend(s), from start to finish: not just the shining example of Dave’s work to study--and he’s a master of the genre, as we know--but also the immeasurable benefit of his advice and coaching. This was a rewarding gig (musically and intellectually, anyway; Mike Dutton ain’t Rockefeller!) and as you might guess, the folks at D-V are kind and delightful. But it also involved a lot of work. So I won’t report Dave to the Labor Relations Board, but the fact that he writes up these long insider previews--our own bespoke QQ liner notes--for free is another mark of his generosity!

 

[Philip Spinner]

Can't wait for Spirit. Loved the q8 but didn't play it much because I didn't want to wear it out. Doesn't really matter anymore.

 

[Quadwreck]

I am so damned happy with what Dutton Vocalion has been putting out, all I can add is thank you and keep them coming.

 

[GOS]

I am so damned happy with what Dutton Vocalion has been putting out, all I can add is thank you and keep them coming.

Me Too! They are simply knocking them out, I almost can't believe it really. I mean....WOW! Who knows what they will come up with next? Always exciting....

 

[Old Quad Guy]

The Earth, Wind and Fire 2fer, Finally, finally we get in Quad the entire album “That’s the Way of the World.” Not to mention “Spirit” as well. You know that SACD will sellout quickly. Two of the best Quadraphonic titles ever released. Now all we got to do is keep buying when we can. That’ll be the best way to get more titles.