HiRez Poll Garfunkel, Art - BREAKAWAY [SACD]

[mediumwave13]

100% this is correct.

This album has more diagonal placements than almost any other quad mix, but they're absolutely intentional. You can swap the rears, which basically puts these instruments, which are phantom quad center (LF & RR or RF & LR) along the side walls (LF & LR, RF & RR) and make the waveforms "look" balanced, but the immersive effect of the mix - and Bill Schnee's intention as the quad mixer - is lost.

If you want any more confirmation that the diagonal pans are correct, listen to the end of Waters of March, there's a circular around-the-room pan of a synthesizer or something during the fadeout (akin to the circular snare drum at the beginning of One Word from Mahavishnu Orchestra's Birds of Fire) and if you swap the rears on this album is now zig-zags nonsensically all over the place.

Furthermore, think about the quad mix folded down to stereo (or SQ encoded stereo) when instruments are diagonally placed in quad, they fold down to phantom center (if they're a mono instrument) or a stereo spread in stereo if they're recorded that way. Take the piano in I Believe When I Fall in Love, which is diagonally panned in the quad mix. If you fold that down to stereo you get the piano beautifully stereo spread from left to right in the stereo mix. If you swap the rears in the quad mix and fold it down to stereo you now get the piano (which would be in Left Front & Left Rear or Right front & Right Rear) folded down to double volume mono in one speaker, and that is not what the original stereo mix (which the quad mixes always tried to mimic to some degree) sounds like.

Stereo compatibility was a big feature of the SQ system (hence the name SQ = Stereo-Quadraphonic) and there are almost no quad mixes that feature stereo material along the side walls, because when it folded down to stereo it appeared in mono. Stereo spreads were always placed along the left-right plane (either front speakers, rear speakers, or diagonally) and this album is no exception.

Okay, that makes perfect sense. The drawback of working within a flawed medium (SQ, not quad itself!)

 

[van1]

The disc sounds great, why even try to mess with it

 

[ar surround]

The disc sounds great, why even try to mess with it

Because it seems that we just can't help ourselves.

 

[SomethingAnything]

(I have deleted this post for fear I have somehow inadvertently caused offence. Apols all.)

 

[mediumwave13]

Okay, I've been meaning to say this for a while, and this seems as good a time as any: this forum has a problem. I put my opinion forth which, upon learning why it was wrong, I then openly accepted was incorrect. The whole forum is literally here for us to discuss and learn about different releases, sound quality, content etc. Turns out, I like to rip my discs and give the waveforms a visual once over, like many others here. Upon ripping this disc, I noticed something and voiced it because I thought it would be an interesting discussion.

I don't understand why snarky comments have then been made. This isn't helpful or engaging dialogue; this is gatekeeping. We're meant to be a community united together by a common interest. Unfortunately there seems to be more and more of an elitist mentality creeping in and I no longer wish to engage with it any further. Which is a real shame, because I feel excited to talk about this hobby with kindred spirits. Hopefully I'll meet some more in person.

 

[fredblue]

if this forum has a problem it is maybe that its members care about Surround music - a lot! maybe sometimes too much!

we're pretty much all fanatical about this stuff on this forum and there's no harm, no foul in putting forward an opinion on something such as this and i'm glad you did.

fwiw, i suspected there may be something up with the "Breakaway" Quad mix when i started mucking about with the Surround Master decoder nearly 10 years ago and having decoded the SQ LP of "Breakaway" i noticed the waveforms (particularly of the relationship between the Fronts and Rears) the disc was decoding differently from how i was expecting.

fast forwarding a bit from 2015 and several other "kooky looking waveform" old Quads later (including The Isley Brothers "3+3", The O'Jays "Ship Ahoy", Paul Simon's "There Goes Rhymin' Simon" & "Still Crazy After All These Years" Quads) it emerged after doing more research and discussing it with others here and so on, that these diagonal pans were indeed a thing with Quad back in the day and intentional mixing moves rather than mistakes in the mixes as suspected.

i do hope you don't leave with a sour taste and you stick with us!

in the scheme of online forums etc., QQ feels quite light on snarky comments! yes there's some light hearted humourous banter at times and we all get our knickers in a twist sometimes but seldom anything overly rude or aggressive that i've encountered in the last 15 years of being a participant here.

you know, when i reflect and think about it, i've been "getting it wrong" with Surround for 30 years from my first forays in the hobby right up until the present day and along with the headscratching and the cable futzing and the sleepless nights, it's been so much fun learning via the same kind of experimentation and examination you're doing now and then discussing it with like-minded folk here, where the knowledge base of members past and present is second to none, i would say

 

[SomethingAnything]

(I have deleted my previous post and this one in case I have somehow inadvertently caused offence to a surround buddy. Apols all.)

 

[kenm]

100% this is correct.

This album has more diagonal placements than almost any other quad mix, but they're absolutely intentional. You can swap the rears, which basically puts these instruments, which are phantom quad center (LF & RR or RF & LR) along the side walls (LF & LR, RF & RR) and make the waveforms "look" balanced, but the immersive effect of the mix - and Bill Schnee's intention as the quad mixer - is lost.

If you want any more confirmation that the diagonal pans are correct, listen to the end of Waters of March, there's a circular around-the-room pan of a synthesizer or something during the fadeout (akin to the circular snare drum at the beginning of One Word from Mahavishnu Orchestra's Birds of Fire) and if you swap the rears on this album is now zig-zags nonsensically all over the place.

Furthermore, think about the quad mix folded down to stereo (or SQ encoded stereo) when instruments are diagonally placed in quad, they fold down to phantom center (if they're a mono instrument) or a stereo spread in stereo if they're recorded that way. Take the piano in I Believe When I Fall in Love, which is diagonally panned in the quad mix. If you fold that down to stereo you get the piano beautifully stereo spread from left to right in the stereo mix. If you swap the rears in the quad mix and fold it down to stereo you now get the piano (which would be in Left Front & Left Rear or Right front & Right Rear) folded down to double volume mono in one speaker, and that is not what the original stereo mix (which the quad mixes always tried to mimic to some degree) sounds like.

Stereo compatibility was a big feature of the SQ system (hence the name SQ = Stereo-Quadraphonic) and there are almost no quad mixes that feature stereo material along the side walls, because when it folded down to stereo it appeared in mono. Stereo spreads were always placed along the left-right plane (either front speakers, rear speakers, or diagonally) and this album is no exception.

All this time I thought SQ stood for Sony Quadrophonic, at 72 I'm still learning new things. I have the Vocalion SACD of Breakaway and enjoying the music and the mix very much. I only got as far as a SQ Prologic Decoder back in the day and was never thrilled with "surround sound" of these LP discs. I wonder if I got a "Surround Master" device is it capable of decoding my SQ LP collection into a far better "discrete" sounding effect ?_ I bought a ton of those LPs, would it also work on QS, RM LPs ? Thanks for any help, not a "tech guy" by any means. These new BD surround releases are amazing, makes my old QUAD original releases sound so primitive except for my QUAD reel to reel tapes especially the ones that run 7 1/2 ips with Dolby B encoding.

 

[Victor Bisio]

It's the best sounding surround disc on my system that I own. YMMV.

 

[steelydave]

The disc sounds great, why even try to mess with it

I agree with you on the first part wholeheartedly, but I think a healthy amount of curiosity is a good thing. Perhaps he should've phrase his post as a question rather than a statement, but the one of the ways we make discoveries and advancements in our understanding of quad and surround is by challenging conventional wisdom. Like this poster, I also used to think that the diagonally panned instruments in quad mixes were wrong, so much so that I wrote a bunch of long posts about it here (which still seem to endure as accepted truths despite my best efforts to explain how I was wrong) and it wasn't until I had the pleasure of speaking to Sigma Sound's Arthur Stoppe that I came to understand the logic (no pun intended) behind diagonal placements.

When I first got into quad in about 1998 or 1999 there was so little concentrated knowledge that it seems like the stone age compared to today. I remember vividly being on a discussion site back then and people were complaining that the GRT Q8s (the company that licensed quad from ABC and its subsidiaries mostly) were the worst quad mixes going, because it seemed like the instruments and voices were coming from everywhere and nothing made sense. The post that sticks in my mind referenced the Mountain Greatest Hits quad mix, and said something like "it sounds like some junior engineer and his buddy went into a studio on a weekend with a six pack of beer and did whatever they wanted." What this poster (and most of us at the time) didn't know was that most GRT Q8 tapes suffer from a channel assignment issue where the front right and rear left (or front left and rear right) channels were swapped, meaning things that were in the front channels, like vocals, were coming out of one front channel, and one diagonally opposite rear channel. So the poster was right in the strictest sense, that these mixes as they were made no sense, but it took years of us us collectively questioning "is this this what they actually intended?" to get to the point where we now accept that most GRT Q8s suffer from this problem, and that the mixes are actually pretty great in their 'proper' form.

If mediumwave13 hadn't brought this up in this thread, we never would've had the opportunity to talk about these mix decisions, so I see his post as a positive thing - a few more people have come to understand the idea of 'diagonal pans' and maybe enhanced their listening enjoyment of this album, and the many other quad mixes that were originally mixed for SQ that follow this same 'pseudo-quad centre' mixing style.

Okay, I've been meaning to say this for a while, and this seems as good a time as any: this forum has a problem. I put my opinion forth which, upon learning why it was wrong, I then openly accepted was incorrect. The whole forum is literally here for us to discuss and learn about different releases, sound quality, content etc. Turns out, I like to rip my discs and give the waveforms a visual once over, like many others here. Upon ripping this disc, I noticed something and voiced it because I thought it would be an interesting discussion.

I don't understand why snarky comments have then been made. This isn't helpful or engaging dialogue; this is gatekeeping. We're meant to be a community united together by a common interest. Unfortunately there seems to be more and more of an elitist mentality creeping in and I no longer wish to engage with it any further. Which is a real shame, because I feel excited to talk about this hobby with kindred spirits. Hopefully I'll meet some more in person.

I know this will sound kind of trite given the replies were to you specifically, but try not to take this kind of thing personally. I'm not sure how long you've been into surround (I see you joined in 2021) but the larger context of this is that people here are protective (and maybe overly protective sometimes) of the D-V name, both because of how many highly desired quads like this one they've been able to release over the years, but also because for the first few years or so they endured a lot of dismissive criticism from the 'stereo is the only true way to listen to music' crowd on certain other "audiophile" forums. D-V released easy listening and they said "yeah but they can't release popular music" and then they did and the response was "yeah but it's R&B and jazz, not rock so who cares" and then they released some rock and it was "yeah but it's not the rock we wanted" and then they released some of that, and it was "yeah but where do their master tapes come from, the booklets don't say anything!" So when you suggested that the channels were swapped, even though it was (as I previously said, well-intentioned) you just put up the antennas of a number of loyal customers who've had to deal with what feels like ten years of this kind of constant undermining of D-V's product. I know there's always going to be an element of "law of the jungle" on online forums, but as someone who's been on a lot of them since I first got on the internet in 1994, I can say that QQ is amongst the very best when it comes to community - I'm sorry you feel like you've had a bit of a rough ride in this instance, but hang in there and keep questioning the answers.

 

[fredblue]

All this time I thought SQ stood for Sony Quadrophonic, at 72 I'm still learning new things. I have the Vocalion SACD of Breakaway and enjoying the music and the mix very much. I only got as far as a SQ Prologic Decoder back in the day and was never thrilled with "surround sound" of these LP discs. I wonder if I got a "Surround Master" device is it capable of decoding my SQ LP collection into a far better "discrete" sounding effect ?_ I bought a ton of those LPs, would it also work on QS, RM LPs ? Thanks for any help, not a "tech guy" by any means. These new BD surround releases are amazing, makes my old QUAD original releases sound so primitive except for my QUAD reel to reel tapes especially the ones that run 7 1/2 ips with Dolby B encoding.

hi there!

Dave (steelydave) doesn't have a Surround Master at this time so i'll just jump in if i may!

SQ or QS will never be truly discrete like a Q8 or Q4 4-channel tape but the Surround Master is the finest modern hardware decoder for SQ LPs and QS encoded material available on the market today, plus it can effectively synthesize Surround from Stereo in 'Involve' mode. i have had a Surround Master for 9 years and it is a super little gizmo, i highly recommend it to you

 

[barfle]

Well, now my curiosity is twitching.

How would one decide the rear channels were swapped on virtually ANY quad recording, save the occasional one where an instrument was panned from back to front or the reverse?

I know symphony orchestras have a fairly standard layout, with violins on the left and cellos on the right, but with a rock or pop recording, what would make someone believe that an instrument location was wrong?

Not asking for a friend.

 

[ar surround]

Well, now my curiosity is twitching.

How would one decide the rear channels were swapped on virtually ANY quad recording, save the occasional one where an instrument was panned from back to front or the reverse?

I know symphony orchestras have a fairly standard layout, with violins on the left and cellos on the right, but with a rock or pop recording, what would make someone believe that an instrument location was wrong?

Not asking for a friend.

I know what you mean. There was much discussion about Guess Who songs, such as No Time, having swapped back channels. Reversing the channels did make the guitar pans go circularly rather than diagonally, but my reaction was 'so what.' The same thing with the AF quad Birds of Fire where the rears are claimed to swapped. Again, an even bigger 'so what.'

However, when the fronts and rears are swapped (A Space In Time, the original DTS quad reissue) or the tracks are rotated 90 degrees (Grazing in the Grass on the AF SACD The Collection)...now that is an audible mess.

 

[fredblue]

Well, now my curiosity is twitching.

How would one decide the rear channels were swapped on virtually ANY quad recording, save the occasional one where an instrument was panned from back to front or the reverse?

I know symphony orchestras have a fairly standard layout, with violins on the left and cellos on the right, but with a rock or pop recording, what would make someone believe that an instrument location was wrong?

Not asking for a friend.

it's quite tricky to ascertain definitive channel layout on any old Quad mix imho, unless one has master tape box information and even then it's a guide not a God and probably needs double-checking.

there's occasional clues and giveaways, some more glaring than others and when you scrutinise the individual channels in a mix you can sometimes pick up on things you may have missed listening to the Quad as a whole in Surround. many times, i guess it's educated guesswork combined with careful listening you might say?

we know that certain labels assigned the tracks of their 4-channel masters with a FL/FR/RL/RR arrangement (basically every imprint under the CBS umbrella) because it was believed arranging the 4 channels on the tape in Stereo pairs diminished the chances of bleed and preserving Stereo imaging and balances were of vital importance to CBS and their predominant delivery method of vinyl encoded with their SQ system.

with other labels on the other hand (incl. RCA & WEA) you may find arranged tracks on their 4-channel masters in "Side" pairs, i.e. RL/FL/FR/RR.

in that kinda scenario, without tape box channel identification information, it's easy to see why there was sometimes confusion, misinformation and misunderstanding on the subject of channel allocation over the years, especially when it came to 4-channel masters being transferred to modern day 5.1 setups with a FL/FR/C/LFE/RL/RR layout/channel assignment.

we also now know that certain labels (incl ABC/Command) sometimes produced 2 different 4-channel layouts for titles destined for Q8 consumption, 1 with a "C" prefix in the catalogue number (surmised to stand for "Car"!) and the other on a tape with an "H" prefix (suggested to have stood for "Home"!) how kooky is that!?

top men have also since sussed out, with sterling detective work by Steelydave and Mr. Dutton Vocalion, that one of Quad's notable mixing duo's (Dick Bogert & Warren Vincent) were given to mixing in a style closer to ABC's "Car" type tapes, with Bass in Rear Left and Drums in Rear Right and those mixes have their fair share of lovers and loathers! (i'm in the former camp fwiw )

certain theories, for example that diagonal pans must be erroneous because diagonals could foul the fragile SQ encode-decode process turned out to be incorrect and in some instances SQ actually benefitted from diagonal pans. CBS' own guidelines included mixing rules on diagonals, for "Room Centre" panning and 2-channel compatibility.

there's a lot to go into really and i'm conscious we're in a Poll so i should stop there but there's plenty of info on QQ and its all good clean fun!