Discussion with Thomas Mowrey

[peterzach]

Peter, check out post #5 here for the latest great stuff coming out now. Here is a list of other titles by the label. All very good!

Link: http://www.sa-cd.net/alltitles2/31/1

Jim

Jim, thats my problem I look at that list has 12 pages and I just tune out as I have no clue out of the 12 pages what I should try.

edit

I think I was just sending same time as Thomas M. replying.
Thankyou so much Thomas.
peter

 

[Lute]

Some Quad recordings on PentaTone's SACDs are more discrete than others. I am listening to this lovely SACD of Rossini's famous overtures now. This one is immersive 4.0. The strings' sound is slightly thin, but nothing to worry about. This is wonderful music making. Recommended!

I see the producer of this recording is Vittorio Negri. I wonder if he shared Mr. Mowrey's philosophy of 360 degree surround sound.

 

[winopener]

Thomas,
the pdf is a wonderful reading, and if possible i have two questions for you:
- page 22: "every record that DG produced during this period was made in surround" From 1970 to .... and that involved only the Symphony Hall in Boston, or other venues too?
- page 21: "James Brown. I could tell you a story about that signing that would leave your jaw on the floor, but that will have to wait for another time". Now?

 

[Thomas Mowrey]

View attachment 18442

Some Quad recordings on PentaTone's SACDs are more discrete than others. I am listening to this lovely SACD of Rossini's famous overtures now. This one is immersive 4.0. The strings' sound is slightly thin, but nothing to worry about. This is wonderful music making. Recommended!

I see the producer of this recording is Vittorio Negri. I wonder if he shared Mr. Mowrey's philosophy of 360 degree surround sound.

I met Vittorio Negri a couple times, attended one of his sessions in Boston with Colin Davis (I think it was Sibelius' Fifth Symphony), and thought he was an excellent producer. I can well imagine that this Rossini recording sounds wonderful, but was surprised to hear that it was "immersive", if by that word you mean 360 degrees of direct sound sources, rather than only ambiance in the rear. I know that no other DG producer was recording in that configuration, and would be surprised if any of the Philips people had been doing so.

 

[Thomas Mowrey]

Thomas,
the pdf is a wonderful reading, and if possible i have two questions for you:
- page 22: "every record that DG produced during this period was made in surround" From 1970 to .... and that involved only the Symphony Hall in Boston, or other venues too?
- page 21: "James Brown. I could tell you a story about that signing that would leave your jaw on the floor, but that will have to wait for another time". Now?

I was producing for DG exclusively in America, but I was in Hamburg and Hannover every few months for A & R and marketing meetings and post-production, so I was in pretty close touch with what other producers were doing. There could have been some exceptions to my statement that "every record that DG produced during this period was made in surround" (for example, I doubt that this or that solo harpsichord recording produced by Dr. Andreas Holschneider was in quad, and I'm not sure about solo piano either!), so maybe this was overstatement, but I am quite sure that all symphonic and operatic recordings were in quad during that period (roughly 1970-76). I believe DG made about 300 of them.

No, I'm afraid that the James Brown story will have to wait for still another time! There's a good one about the signing of The Osmonds too, and that one I can tell, but it's rather long, so I'm not sure that this is the appropriate venue, and in any case, it's too early in the morning to do it now!

 

[Lute]

I met Vittorio Negri a couple times, attended one of his sessions in Boston with Colin Davis (I think it was Sibelius' Fifth Symphony), and thought he was an excellent producer. I can well imagine that this Rossini recording sounds wonderful, but was surprised to hear that it was "immersive", if by that word you mean 360 degrees of direct sound sources, rather than only ambiance in the rear. I know that no other DG producer was recording in that configuration, and would be surprised if any of the Philips people had been doing so.

Thanks for your reply on this one. I'm not sure whether I would strictly classify this one as a 360 degree surround recording. That's why I was curious to hear your view on Mr. Negri's recording style. This Rossini Quad does not have clearly discrete aspects in the rears, such as the children's choir singing off in the distance on the Bizet - Carmen recording. But, the rear channels work integrally with the front channels. This is why I used the term "immersive". The rear channels are providing more than just quiet hall ambience, like some other PentaTone Quad SACDs.

To be honest, I find terms such as "discrete" and "immersive" are used rather freely in the recording industry and can be confusing. Today I was listening to Telarc's Baroque Music for Brass SACD. On the cover it clearly states "Discrete Multi-channel Surround". But, this recording doesn't have clearly discrete elements coming from the rears. Rather it has an exceptionally deep soundstage that vividly captures the natural reverberation of the recording venue. So, the listener isn't really sitting in the center with the performers situated around at 360 degrees. Now, this might be subtle point that's open for debate, but I would still classify this as an immersive recording. I know many people have strict views on what is "real" surround sound. Perhaps I am a little more lenient.

Addenda: Would the fact that Phillips (and not DG) did the Rossini Quad recording make any difference?

 

[Thomas Mowrey]

Thanks for your reply on this one. I'm not sure whether I would strictly classify this one as a 360 degree surround recording. That's why I was curious to hear your view on Mr. Negri's recording style. This Rossini Quad does not have clearly discrete aspects in the rears, such as the children's choir singing off in the distance on the Bizet - Carmen recording. But, the rear channels work integrally with the front channels. This is why I used the term "immersive". The rear channels are providing more than just quiet hall ambience, like some other PentaTone Quad SACDs.

To be honest, I find terms such as "discrete" and "immersive" are used rather freely in the recording industry and can be confusing. Today I was listening to Telarc's Baroque Music for Brass SACD. On the cover it clearly states "Discrete Multi-channel Surround". But, this recording doesn't have clearly discrete elements coming from the rears. Rather it has an exceptionally deep soundstage that vividly captures the natural reverberation of the recording venue. So, the listener isn't really sitting in the center with the performers situated around at 360 degrees. Now, this might be subtle point that's open for debate, but I would still classify this as an immersive recording. I know many people have strict views on what is "real" surround sound. Perhaps I am a little more lenient.

Addenda: Would the fact that Phillips (and not DG) did the Rossini Quad recording make any difference?

Your description of the Klangbild that Negri painted for this Rossini recording is very evocative and appealing — that is, I can pretty much hear what you're talking about, and you have put your finger exactly on the reason for this effect when you wrote "the rear channels work integrally with the front channels". So even if no direct sounds of instruments are coming from the rear, it is the relationship between the front and the rear that creates the effect. The are several factors that would contribute to that, but the most important one would be the distance between the front and rear mikes on the left side, and the same on the right. If they are too close, an unpleasant "comb filter" effect would be produced in the stereo mixdown, and if they are too far, you would hear only ambiance from the rear in quad. Negri apparently found the right medium, and I can believe that this sound picture would be very "immersive" even if no direct instrumental sounds are perceived to emanate from the rear. BTW, does the packaging say which hall this recording was made in?

The word "discrete" has apparently taken on a different meaning in recent years from what it meant back in the early days of quad. Now it seems to refer to what I have been calling "360-degree-direct" in my recent revisiting of quad, whereas in the late 60s and the 70s, when all of the controversy about matrixing was swirling around, "discrete" meant independent channels which had never been encoded by matrixing.

In Philips, the functions of sound engineer and producer were often combined in a single person, and that was the case with Negri. He did both, at the same time.

In DG, this never happened. For DG recordings, there were were always three people at the session (sometimes more, if it was a big opera production). One was the Aufnahmeleiter, who was the studio producer for that session, and was responsible for musical matters — reading the score, marking it, keeping track of takes, talking with the conductor, etc. He was the "recording leader" (could have been called the Aufnahmeführer, but for the unpleasant connotations of that word). He might have also been the executive producer, who had been in charge of the artist's contract, negotiations with managers, etc, but he might also have been simply the recording leader, with the executive production function having been fulfilled by someone else.

The second person at a DG session was the Tonmeister, who was the sound engineer. He operated the mixing console, and was often referred to as "balance engineer". He had pretty much a free hand in determining all aspects of microphoning and mixing. The third person at DG sessions was the Tontechniker, or recording engineer. He worked under the Tonmeister, and operated the tape recorders during the session as well as physically splicing the tapes in post-production, under the direction of the Aufnahmeleiter.

I almost always worked as both executive producer and studio producer. The reason that most of my productions were recorded either 8- or 16-track was that I wanted to have the ability to create the final mixes in post-production, which I did, rather than having them be written in stone at the sessions by the Tonmeister. Usually this was pretty successful, but that is not to say that DG didn't make thousands of great recordings using their traditional division of labor. They did.

 

[GOS]

Peter, here are links to the Amazon sites which offer the recordings displayed on post #5 above, as referred to by Jim below:

http://www.amazon.com/Bizet-Carmen-...51&sr=8-1&keywords=bernstein+carmen+pentatone

http://www.amazon.com/Berlioz-Damna...330&sr=8-1&keywords=damnation+ozawa+pentatone

http://www.amazon.com/Berlioz-fanta...&keywords=berlioz+fantastique+ozawa+pentatone

The surround layers of all three of these SACDs are DSD transfers of the original 360-degree, immersive quad mixes which I made in the early 1970s. While Carmen is perhaps the most satisfying overall, I (perhaps immodestly) recommend all of them to you. For straight-out surround thrills and twitches, however, try movements 4 and 5 of Symphonie Fantastique and the final scene (last half-hour) of The Damnation of Faust, which contains a hair-raising Ride to Hell and arrival there.

Awesome! For those considering buying any of these....the one listed in the last link (Fantastique) is less than $15!! Seems like a steal to me...I ordered a copy. The other 2 are more typical of SACD prices....

 

[Thomas Mowrey]

Awesome! For those considering buying any of these....the one listed in the last link (Fantastique) is less than $15!! Seems like a steal to me...I ordered a copy. The other 2 are more typical of SACD prices....

The reason that Symphonie Fantastique costs half as much as Carmen and the Damnation of Faust is the Fantastique is a single SACD, whereas the other two have 2 SACDs each.

 

[GOS]

The reason that Symphonie Fantastique costs half as much as Carmen and the Damnation of Faust is the Fantastique is a single SACD, whereas the other two have 2 SACDs each.

Ah, OK. Gotcha....good to know. I hadn't even gone to look closely at them all yet. I don't own any classical hi-rez yet, so this should be a good start. Appreciate all your comments in this thread.

 

[fizzywiggs41]

"Why should we give them clouds that bring rain when we have sunshine" that quote shows us what type of backwards thinking your masters at DG were all about when they were provided with an oppurtunity to issue quad records (as early as 69 yet).
Thank goodness you went ahead and mixed in quad anyway Thomas!
Shows a rebel spirit I admire.






derek

 

[Franklin]

Hi Thomas

I have the 1975 DGM/Fiedler version of Tchaicovsky's 1812 Overture. Do you have many memories of that recording and/or mix?

- Mike

 

[GOS]

This is an amazing thread....love hearing from Thomas and all the memories....bring it on. We love hearing the old stories.

 

[Thomas Mowrey]

"Why should we give them clouds that bring rain when we have sunshine" that quote shows us what type of backwards thinking your masters at DG were all about when they were provided with an oppurtunity to issue quad records (as early as 69 yet).
Thank goodness you went ahead and mixed in quad anyway Thomas!
Shows a rebel spirit I admire.- derek

Derek, the actual line which DG's worldwide chief of recording operations, Peter Burkowitz, wrote to me was, "Why should we spend good money buying clouds to bring rain, when what we need is sunshine". I think I still have his letter somewhere, but haven't been able to locate it.

The thing is that while while I brought the concept of making surround recordings to DG, and I also arranged with Peter Burkowitz to do the demonstration of matrix quadrophony (I owned 15% of Peter Scheiber's patents on it) to all DG and Philips top executives in Baarn, Holland in November, 1969, it turned out that Burkowitz was correct in his assessment that matrixed quad was not quite good enough to provide the full surround experience to home listeners who were accustomed to the infinitely random-phase listening experience of completely discrete stereo channels. I wrote about that at length earlier in this thread, so I won't repeat it here, but what is important is that the third and fourth channels of matrix quad sucked up that infinitely random phasing that gives great concert music recordings their "you-are-there" feeling of openness.

Matrixed quad was good enough to set Ray Dolby off on the path to his $2-billion fortune from movie soundtracks (and his name posthumously pasted on the Hollywood theatre where the Oscars are held), but it wasn't quite good enough for Deutsche Grammophon recordings. Peter Burkowitz was more prescient than I in rejecting it — which, not incidentally, the entire record industry did a few years later. The money that the record industry lost on matrixed quad was the rain that Peter didn't want DG to buy when what it needed was sunshine.

That said, he and the managements of DG and Philips were completely supportive of actually making recordings in quad, and they did so for about six years. As I mentioned earlier, there are about 300 of them in the DG vaults, which DG has at least partially opened to PentaTone.

Let's see what people think of them.

 

[Thomas Mowrey]

Hi Thomas

I have the 1975 DGM/Fiedler version of Tchaicovsky's 1812 Overture. Do you have many memories of that recording and/or mix?

- Mike

Hello Mike,

I do remember making this recording very well, in June of 1971. The original LP coupling was with Bolero, and we did one three-hour session for each of them, on the same day. Then we edited the 1812 quickly, and on a blazingly hot day a few days later, Arthur Fiedler came in to Symphony Hall to conduct three stagehands in the cannon shots. Each of them had a 12-gauge shotgun loaded with black powder. They stood in the three balconies of Symphony Hall (the fourth wall was, of course, the stage) and four microphones were set up in a traditional quad array.

Günter Hermanns played back the edited music tracks into loudspeakers close to Arthur, and he gave cues to each stagehand when to shoot. It was so loud that I was afraid the ceiling might fall in! It was also so loud that Arthur came away from that session looking like he had just come back from a battlefield. And it was so loud that one of the stagehands, Al Amendola, lost most of the hearing in one of his ears. Afterward Günter and I synched up the quad music tape and the quad cannons tape for the final quad and stereo mixes.

Maybe PentaTone will release the quad mix on SACD sometime, or maybe DG will do it on Blu-ray. I hope so.

44 years ago.

 

[Lute]

Your description of the Klangbild that Negri painted for this Rossini recording is very evocative and appealing — that is, I can pretty much hear what you're talking about, and you have put your finger exactly on the reason for this effect when you wrote "the rear channels work integrally with the front channels". So even if no direct sounds of instruments are coming from the rear, it is the relationship between the front and the rear that creates the effect. The are several factors that would contribute to that, but the most important one would be the distance between the front and rear mikes on the left side, and the same on the right. If they are too close, an unpleasant "comb filter" effect would be produced in the stereo mixdown, and if they are too far, you would hear only ambiance from the rear in quad. Negri apparently found the right medium, and I can believe that this sound picture would be very "immersive" even if no direct instrumental sounds are perceived to emanate from the rear. BTW, does the packaging say which hall this recording was made in?

I'm not sure if you can make it out,
but it says, "Recorded: London (Wembley), Brent Town Hall, 5/1974".

I've been listening to this SACD over and over. These overtures of Rossini's are so deliciously irresistible. And Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy were in top form. Many readers here might be more familiar with this ensemble's performances on the soundtrack to the wonderful film "Amadeus". They certainly had a flair for Rossini's works as well as Mozart's. Marriner's interpretations remind me of George Szell's inspired performances with Cleveland...tight, crisp and bubbling over with joy. How fortunate for us that these performances were recorded in Quad and that we now have this Quad jewel reissued by PentaTone!

It's such a pleasure to have you here, Thomas. I am delighted to see that everyone finds your discussion of Quad's history and recordings as fascinating as I do. What a story that is about the Tchaikovsky recording session! Poor Arthur Fiedler and Al Amendola! I hope his hearing came back. The things people do for art!

 

[winopener]

Helo Thomas,

That said, he and the managements of DG and Philips were completely supportive of actually making recordings in quad, and they did so for about six years. As I mentioned earlier, there are about 300 of them in the DG vaults, which DG has at least partially opened to PentaTone.
Let's see what people think of them.

If matrixed quad wasn't going to go for DG/Philips, why they didn't do later CD4?
I know it has its drawbacks but it was fully discrete, JVC Japan pushed very hard to get labels into the CD4 camp and having DG on the CD4 roster would had been a killer move toward matrixed SQ or QS. Philips did some CD4 in Japan (catalog prefix 4DX, +- 50titles), so the idea wasn't too far fetched, but IIRC no classic titles in the 4DX releases.

 

[Franklin]

Then we edited the 1812 quickly...

This is one of the things that fascinates me with classical music - that it can be heavily edited, as well as different performances and recordings and somehow getting a superb job on all three. On some recordings the edits can be really plain to hear - I have a Nutcracker performance by Rozhdestvensky/Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra (1961, produced by David Haklin) and the edits are - at least in places - very easy to hear, with maybe a slight thud in places too, but the edited piece is much more beguiling to me than Andre Previn's later reading (1972, produced by Christopher Bishop), which appears to be a better recording and edit. That said, I think Ansermet's reading from around 1959 is my favourite of the three. I've noticed that UK Decca in the late 50s really managed to nail some recordings and performances, and they knew how to cut it on vinyl too. First editions of early Decca, EMI and DGM classical can go for silly money overhere in the UK!

 

[Thomas Mowrey]

Helo Thomas,



If matrixed quad wasn't going to go for DG/Philips, why they didn't do later CD4?
I know it has its drawbacks but it was fully discrete, JVC Japan pushed very hard to get labels into the CD4 camp and having DG on the CD4 roster would had been a killer move toward matrixed SQ or QS. Philips did some CD4 in Japan (catalog prefix 4DX, +- 50titles), so the idea wasn't too far fetched, but IIRC no classic titles in the 4DX releases.

I actually never saw or heard a CD4 disc, but the rap on them was that they could only be played a few times because the special "Shibata" stylus would destroy the microscopic squiggles of the 20kHz subcarrier, thus erasing the rear channels. I think that was the reason that CD4 was even less viable than matrixing.

 

[Thomas Mowrey]

View attachment 18467

I'm not sure if you can make it out,
but it says, "Recorded: London (Wembley), Brent Town Hall, 5/1974".

I've been listening to this SACD over and over. These overtures of Rossini's are so deliciously irresistible. And Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy were in top form. Many readers here might be more familiar with this ensemble's performances on the soundtrack to the wonderful film "Amadeus". They certainly had a flair for Rossini's works as well as Mozart's. Marriner's interpretations remind me of George Szell's inspired performances with Cleveland...tight, crisp and bubbling over with joy. How fortunate for us that these performances were recorded in Quad and that we now have this Quad jewel reissued by PentaTone!

It's such a pleasure to have you here, Thomas. I am delighted to see that everyone finds your discussion of Quad's history and recordings as fascinating as I do. What a story that is about the Tchaikovsky recording session! Poor Arthur Fiedler and Al Amendola! I hope his hearing came back. The things people do for art!

I never heard this Rossini Overtures record. It certainly sounds exciting. My own favorite of these pieces was a London disc from the 60s conducted by Piero Gamba (sometimes called "Pierino"). If you get a chance, listen to Semiramide on that. Look at the reviews of it on Amazon, here: http://www.amazon.com/Rossini-Overt...=8-1&keywords=pierino+gamba+rossini+overtures

That Semiramide is one of the most exciting recordings I've ever heard.

And no, unfortunately, Al Amedola never recovered his hearing in that ear. As you (and the MGM Lion) said, Ars gratis artis!