HiRez Poll Guess Who, The - ROCKIN' & THE BEST OF THE GUESS WHO VOLUME 2 [SACD]

[ar surround]

Yet another Guess Who twofer from DV. I had never heard either of these albums until now. As with the other Guess Who quads that I'd never owned before, I find that I really like the material. The quad mixes on Rockin' are a bit variable. Running Bear is one of those Silverline type mono to surround upmixes, but I suspect it was recorded in mono purposely.

I'll give it a solid 8. (If I take value into consideration...two high-res quad and stereo albums for the cost of two 45 rpm mono singles in 1968 dollars...then my rating goes to about a 20.)

 

[Q-Eight]

AF botched nothing. They just properly delivered Vol 1's wonky, early quad mix. What exactly did AF do to botch it?

Was it Bob Vosigen that did the mastering job for Audio Fidelity? I think he posted on here that the master tape box is not labelled, so he put the channels in the location he felt were the best. When Dutton-Vocalion did the American Woman album, they were made aware (too late, by me) that there is a mastering error that effects the first program of the Q8. The first program has a channel error and effects all songs on that program. I strongly believe when the "Best Of Volume 1" Q8/Q4 was made, they (RCA) pulled the same master tapes (with the errors) and just transferred them over. So the songs "American Woman" and " "No Time" have channel errors. Audio-Fidelty then made a bad situation ever worse by changing the layout of songs that didn't need to be changed, and then NOT changing songs that actually had a channel error.

I have a Quad oscilloscope. Because of this, you can literally WATCH sound trot around the room. The best example is the song "Talisman" during which Burton's vocal is in the center of the room while two guitars just freak out and bounce all over the room. It's.... very off-putting. BUT.... change the channel layout and what you wind up getting is the amazing little steeple-chase around the room with two guitars. It's also SMOOTH.... where one guitar will be occupying Front Right then traversing to Back Right, the opposing guitar is in Back Left and moves to Front Left. When the other guitar is behind you in back center, the leading guitar is in front center. It flows around the room and makes sense. Without that channel swap, it's a guitar freakout that sounds horrible.

One of these days.... it would be nice to go all Sam Beckett on this and put right what once went wrong.