Wasn’t Cowboy Junkies Trinity Sessions recorded live on a single bidirectional mic? Similar to how many of the old Living Stereo LP’s were recorded. Someone, somewhere once mentioned a rejected 5.1 mix of Trinity Sessions existed and that just seemed crazy, that someone would reprocess that album to fake surround sound. As for Direct To Disc albums, I have a couple EP’s by The Roy Ayers Quartet with Sonny Sharrock that were Japanese Direct To Discs from the early 70’s, Tower Of Power also did one, there were numerous jazz and pop vocal releases and more recently one appeared from 4/5th of Sonic Youth about 15 years ago (Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley and Jim O'Rourke's “Melbourne Direct”) and there was a label in the late 00’s that released a handful of them. Also, Jack White currently does a series of direct to lathe “Live At Third Man” 12” releases in limited runs. For the uninitiated, the complication with direct to disc releases is that you have one lathed acetate to make stampers from, which means it’s typically a one smallish pressing and your done, ‘stop the presses before the pressing quality suffers’ kinda situation, which makes them necessarily limited run and some quite rare. Sheffield Labs did a fair number and also did CD editions of some of those, which would necessitate mastering from the vinyl where no tape existed (unless they ran tape simultaneously through the live sessions). I once found a mariachi album in a dollar bin and kept it for years because the cover was so ridiculous (kind of a conversation piece). When the joke got old, I put it up on eBay and it sold for around $500.
