I listened to this one a lot back in the day. At that point, I had two decoders I'd play it through: Marantz SQA-2B & Sony SQD-2020. The music impresses me, but the mix never did.
Herbie Hancock - Secrets ...anyone ever seen it?
- Thread starter steelydave
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The Q8 has very good separation.
interesting.. for a while i was sure this was the real mccoy and that there was either something up with the encode or decode but steelydave assured me the Q8 was not discrete and then i started to get creeping doubts.
to me, either the Surround Master does a shit job of this one or the Tate does an amazing job of what is potentially a fudge.
why? ..well, when i check out the individual channels of the SM SQ LP decode, the odd bit of synth or effect does get hard panned into one of the Rears but those moments aside its all a pea-soup! what else is there in the Rears that's not happening in the Fronts? nothing i could discern.
add to the mix the familiar clanging reverb sound of Amigos & Festival.. and the same lack of ability at wiping out FTB bled elements when you sum the Rears to mono (you can do this on every other CBS SQ Surround Master decode apart from the Amigos, Festival & Secrets SQ LPs) and this really smacks to me of another Fred Catero fudge but i am open to persuasion. if only there were a Q8 conversion in circulation, i could never get the WAVs i have of the Q8 to play, just white noise...
I think that's a fair assessment. I noticed moments of hard-panned discrete activity and a few good around the room pans, but otherwise it all just sorta hangs there. I think it is multitrack-derived, just a very unimaginative mix. Nothing like the other three Hancock quads.
I haven't played Festival or Amigos in a while, but this strikes me as more surround-y than what I remember of either of those.
you know, it is a real head scratcher.. we know Mr. Catero was engineer of other, better Herbie Hancock Quads, namely Headhunters & Thrust.
while it is not definitive, Catero was not mentioned as Quad remix engineer on the Sextant SQ LP (the most ambitious Herbie Hancock Quad imho, its downright raucuous surround!) only David Rubinson got the Quad credit on Sextant but Catero was listed as having a hand in recording the Sextant album so he may have been involved in the Quad too but uncredited.
either way, we know Catero had the skills to pull off a decent mix, he demonstrated he could do great (really great!) Quads in 73/74 with Headhunters & Thrust, yet his 3 later Quads from 76-77 are all lacking by comparison. in addition, they all share a similar hollowed out sound and none of them resemble every other Surround Master decoded SQ CBS (non-Masterworks) Quad LP, especially wrt the summed to mono CF to Rear cancellation phenomenon thing which all the other CBS SQ LPs i have tried (and pretty sure i've tried them all now, including the SQ LPs of Headhunters and Thrust) exhibit.
the Festival and Amigos SQs both try to be surround-y in places but don't pull it off as well as Secrets.
really, i love all 3 albums and so wish the Quads were not as they are but in all the forms i've heard them so far (for Amigos the Romanotrax conversion which afaik was thru a Tate and two different pressings of the SQ, Israeli and Dutch, both decoded by the Surround Master.. for Festival the Q8 and U.S. and Israeli SQ pressings thru the SM.. and for Secrets just the SQ thru the SM) they are to me all regrettably a load of fake bollocks
I reiterate: some of those late SQ's had to be made on-the-cheap. No Quad remix engineer credited could be a big clue.
Yeah I did, and I actually prepared some analysis images sometime back, but then I got bogged down with other stuff and forgot about it.
In short it's a fake/upmix from the stereo, but it's a more elaborate con than any of the other handful of CBS' fake quads.
The usual CBS method for upmixing stereo to quad was used to form the basis of the mix - ie what I call the 'clang-clang' reverb in the rears that you find on Happy People from Earth Wind and Fire's That's The Way of The World and Sophie from Jeff Beck's Wired.
But they appear to have gone a little further than that in trying to make the quad mix seem like the genuine article. The first thing they did was (even though the rears were derived from the fronts) was put a delay on the front channels so it seems like things are emanating from the rear first. The image below shows the beginning of one of the tracks - the grey cursor line is at a peak in the front two speakers - the red arrows point to the same reverbed peak in the rears, which occurs before the sound in the front that makes it! The whole album is like this.
The other thing they've done is that when there's an unaccompanied instrument, like a guitar on its own for example, they've panned it discretely to the rear. The beginning of Doin' It is a perfect example. This song kicks off the album and I was really excited for the prospects of the mix when it kicks off, and sure enough it's anchored solidly in the right rear speaker. Imagine my disappointment when the song kicks in and it's clear they've just taken the front right channel and copied it to the surround right channel. You can see in the image below that when the full band kicks in between 2:00 and 2:05 that the FR and SR channels are identical.
The other thing they've done is thrown in some rear channel swirly-pans, usually as tracks are fading out. Take this one for example - I can't remember what song it was (Gentle Thoughts, maybe?) but they've taken a little bit of wah-wah guitar going 'wahahahahahwhwhaaa' that exists entirely in the front right channel and swirled it from surround left to surround right. I put circles around the really obvious peaks - you can see the original signal never leaves the front right speaker as the duplicate (at a louder volume) first starts in surround right (red circles) and moves to surround left (blue circles).
There are a handful of other similar moves like this throughout the album, but I couldn't find one (aside from the intro to Doin' It, which I already explained the source of) where what was happening in the rears wasn't sourced from some element in the front speakers. So my conclusion is upmix, but clever one. Especially when it comes to the SQ-encoded version, because you have the waters muddied by what the decoder itself is doing, sometimes putting stuff in the rears that shouldn't be there. The album is full of Fender Rhodes keyboard through Leslie speaker for example, a setup that's rife with its own natural phase information due to the nature of the rotating Leslie speaker.
As for the reasons for them doing this, I can only speculate, but to me everything points to the almighty dollar. By 1976 quad was effectively dead, so the audience would have been small. Doing a quad mix of Secrets from the ground up, even if it was done at the same sessions as the stereo mix, would probably have taken weeks rather than days at a time when studio time was phenomenally expensive. The quasi-quad that actually came out probably took them a day or two at most.
It's my feeling that they did the same thing with Santana's Amigos and Festival, but didn't bother with the extra fake flourishes (the stuff swirled around the rears, etc) because those two titles were never released on Q8, they were SQ LP only. I don't think any of this is related to Fred Catero's talent as an engineer - he was one of Columbia's finest, and aside from engineering the original Chicago Transit Authority album (which for my money is one of the best sounding rock records ever) he also turned in some great discrete quad mixes earlier in the format's lifetime. Like so many of us, engineers are just employees that do what their paymasters tell them to - if he turned in some fake quad mixes he was just doing as he was instructed to, or pleasing a suit who demanded a quad mix be ready in less time than was possible to complete one.
I also saved this ebay screenshot a while back to remind people not to be a sucker and pay this kind of money for the Q8 because it's not worth it. Just take the stereo version and run it through your upmixer of choice and you'll get a much higher-fidelity result for a fraction of what you'd pay for the Q8.
Love your analysis of this steelydave, great work. I see what your saying about the two Santana releases; but I've always liked what was done with the Caravanserai album, do you know anything about that one? I've always thought all the other Santana releases, including the DVD-A & dts's were not mixed in top form either.
Wow Dave, thanks so much for putting in the time to respond and give such thorough analysis.
I also noticed that on the SQ LP, when the full band kicks in that guitar melody gets quite buried in the mix when it should've stood out, likely a side-effect of the not-so-discrete master tape being encoded/decoded to SQ.
Obviously we're never gonna get the answers to what really went on behind-the-scenes at CBS in the '70s, but I wonder why some of the late CBS quads got real mixes (even obscure SQ-only titles like B.T. Express or Wild Cherry), yet we have a few of these faked oddities.
Regarding the time constraint: I recall you did some sleuthing a few months back and discovered that the quad mix of RTF's Musicmagic was done in 3-4 days, and that's a fantastic fully discrete quad mix. Perhaps that was just Chick Corea sort of embellishing the fact that it was done quickly compared to the stereo mix? That quad sounds too good to be a hasty remix job.
I spun Amigos and Festival through the Tate as well, and neither fared as well as Secrets. In fact, they were so disappointing I didn't even bother to record them in! Amigos sounds like a very narrow stereo spread upfront (I barely detected any clear left/right separation upfront- it's hard to describe but is sort of like a big wall of sound) with a time-delayed copy of it hitting the rears. Festival just sounds like double stereo. There was actually a Q8 of that one, @winopener posted about it here.
I'm actually gonna keep my Tate conversion around- though I'll consider it an upmix rather than an actual quad mix. The LP was in good shape and sounds quite clean. As you say, for a faux job it's semi-convincing in places and the decoded SQ sort of gives it a "full" or "fleshed-out" sound. It's better than some Silverline 5.1's. Though I'm tempted to try the stereo mix through various synthesizers (QS Variomatrix, Tate "surround" mode, Involve Surround Master, etc) and see how it compares.
I also noticed that on the SQ LP, when the full band kicks in that guitar melody gets quite buried in the mix when it should've stood out, likely a side-effect of the not-so-discrete master tape being encoded/decoded to SQ.
Obviously we're never gonna get the answers to what really went on behind-the-scenes at CBS in the '70s, but I wonder why some of the late CBS quads got real mixes (even obscure SQ-only titles like B.T. Express or Wild Cherry), yet we have a few of these faked oddities.
Regarding the time constraint: I recall you did some sleuthing a few months back and discovered that the quad mix of RTF's Musicmagic was done in 3-4 days, and that's a fantastic fully discrete quad mix. Perhaps that was just Chick Corea sort of embellishing the fact that it was done quickly compared to the stereo mix? That quad sounds too good to be a hasty remix job.
I spun Amigos and Festival through the Tate as well, and neither fared as well as Secrets. In fact, they were so disappointing I didn't even bother to record them in! Amigos sounds like a very narrow stereo spread upfront (I barely detected any clear left/right separation upfront- it's hard to describe but is sort of like a big wall of sound) with a time-delayed copy of it hitting the rears. Festival just sounds like double stereo. There was actually a Q8 of that one, @winopener posted about it here.
I'm actually gonna keep my Tate conversion around- though I'll consider it an upmix rather than an actual quad mix. The LP was in good shape and sounds quite clean. As you say, for a faux job it's semi-convincing in places and the decoded SQ sort of gives it a "full" or "fleshed-out" sound. It's better than some Silverline 5.1's. Though I'm tempted to try the stereo mix through various synthesizers (QS Variomatrix, Tate "surround" mode, Involve Surround Master, etc) and see how it compares.
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All the Santana quads are full-on discrete quad mixes, with three exceptions- the last two studio quads (Amigos and Festival) sound faked and the live Lotus is your typical "in the audience mix" with the band upfront and audience in the rear.. Most of them were done by Larry Keyes, one of Columbia's top quad mixers with over 40 credited remixes from 1972-77. My favorites are the first and third LP, but the "fusion trilogy" of albums (Caravanserai, Welcome, Borboletta) fares particularly well in quad as well.
I think the general consensus here is that the Abraxas quad is not quite as good a mix as the others because it's very reliant on panning and swirling gimmicks. This was likely done because it was one of the first popular quad release from Columbia, and they wanted a demo-quality mix to wow listeners even with the most basic SQ decoder.
The third album (also an early SQ release) has some of the crazy panning too. For example, in "Everybody's Everything" the Tower Of Power horns jump from speaker to speaker.
The other reason people don't seem to like the Abraxas quad is because the DTS-CD reissue is mastered poorly- very bright with little low end. The DTS-CD is the old quad mix with derived center and sub channels. I think some of the channel balances were screwed with as well.
Regarding the 5.1 releases, I've only heard Shaman which doesn't sound discrete at all. A real missed opportunity. Though I do recall the Supernatural Live DVD having a decent surround mix...
I think Caravanserai is probably the best of the Santana quads if you're weighing musical content and mix quality/fidelity on a 50/50 basis. The first 3 albums are probably better musically, but presumably coming from multitracks that were probably only 8 track, they can feel a little sparse at times. All three of those albums were done for quad by Al Lawrence and Larry Keyes, and although the first album wasn't released in quad until '74 I suspect it was probably done in '70-'71 along with the other two in anticipation of Columbia's quad rollout which finally happened in early '72. The quad mixes of the first 3 albums are a bit bass-shy, but I like them and I think Abraxas gets a bit of a bum rap, I like all the swirly pans, especially the Leslie-style rotating effect on the guitar in Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen.
Caravanserai was the first Santana quad mix done by the band's engineer, Glen Kolotkin, under the supervision of Larry Keyes. After that, Kolotkin did all the Santana quad mixes himself, including the Santana band albums Welcome and Borboletta, and the Carlos Santana solo collaboration albums Live! (with Buddy Miles), Love Devotion Surrender (with John McLaughlin) and Illuminations (with Alice Coltrane) which Vocalion released on SACD a while back. All of Kolotkin's Santana mixes are uniformly superb, helped by the fact I think that by 1973 most studios had moved to 16, 24 and 32 track recording, which meant there were a lot more elements to work with for a quad mix.
Maybe 40 years later B.T. Express and Wild Cherry seem obscure, but the distinction they share (along with RTF's Musicmagic) was that the bands were coming off hit albums, so the label probably sanctioned quad mixes in hopes that their next album(s) would fare as well. As for how long they took, different people work at different paces and the number of hours you spend on something isn't a guarantor of its quality. Maybe Fred Catero felt he couldn't do the job in the alloted time, whereas the guys that did Musicmagic (I share @fredblue 's belief that it was most likely Dick Bogert and Warren Vincent) felt they could - and with those two, that's basically all they were doing for CBS in '75 through '77. If you look at their credits in discogs they completed tons of mixes in that period, maybe they had it down to something of a science.
It is really a special "Treat" to have you share your extensive knowledge with us steelydave. I admit it's been awhile since I listened critically to some of these Santana Quads; but I do remember liking Welcome more so than Borboletta, which if I'm remembering correctly sounded a little too wet for my liking. I do own quit a few of the Dutton Vocalion releases including Illuminations; and it's safe to say the majority of the QQ'ers here love what D.V. is doing for our hobby and look forward to support their upcoming releases.
well, if steelydave reckons its fake, that for me that settles it.
the only thing that could be more definitive would be for Fred the Shred to pop by QQ and say; "hi all..
i fudged the quadro but i swear it was in self-defence!" 
something that's not definitive but just an interesting aside, the Caravanserai & Love Devotion Surrender SQ LPs were credited solely to "uncle Larry Keyes", Glen Kolonorobotic's earliest credited Quads were Sultanas live with Booger Bear (don't recall it being that great a mix?) and.... the amazing... astounding... Azteca!!
"ain't got no special woman,
ain't got no special baby,
ain't got no special woman,
ain't got no place to go.."
god i love that Azteca album in Quad, Kolotnorobotnik really nailed it with that one!!! it was Linda who first drew my attention to Azteca, now that's a special woman with a special place to go - right here at QQ!
ah it's like old times... Dave and Linda are back!
oh.. and "one more thing".. how comes Amigos, Festival and Secrets don't do the Surround Master's SQ trick where you cancel stuff out by summing the two Rear channels to mono? all the other CBS Rock & Pop SQ LPs do it (all of them! i tested them so you all don't have to!).. bizarre.. its what initially made me suspect dodgy encodes.. but hearing the Festival Q8, its clearer some jiggery-pokery was going on, such as boosting treble in double stereo'd Rears rather than mucked up SQ stuff. ah well, plenty more genuine Quad shaved fish in the surround seas of cheese! fake ahoy!
oh ps. the Dick Bogert special agent thing is intriguing.. because even though those late-era Bass RL/Drums RR mixes bear his hallmarks, Dick's earlier Quads (such as Minnie Riperton's Perfect Angel, which interestingly has drum elements in Fronts also) got credits on the SQ LPs, why not all the later ones such as Dan Fogelberg Captured Angel, Mac Davis Thunder In The Afternoon, Manhattans, Miracles, Minnie's Adventures In Paradise, Return To Forever, Tower Of Power.. which all have Bass RL/Drums RR.. (and i love 'em all..!)
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I would have never even thought Columbia would ever stoop to releasing fake Quad. Ditto for RCA with some of the Guess Who's. Mind Blown. World Shattered.
It just doesn't seem right somehow when you have complete nothing Labels like Romulus/Mega, or the single solitary release from Roulette actually trying their damnedest to put out real, discrete Quad - and here are the biggest names in the industry putting out the fake shit.
It just doesn't seem right somehow when you have complete nothing Labels like Romulus/Mega, or the single solitary release from Roulette actually trying their damnedest to put out real, discrete Quad - and here are the biggest names in the industry putting out the fake shit.
oh.. and "one more thing".. how comes Amigos, Festival and Secrets don't do the Surround Master's SQ trick where you cancel stuff out by summing the two Rear channels to mono? all the other CBS Rock & Pop SQ LPs do it (all of them! i tested them so you all don't have to!).. bizarre.. its what initially made me suspect dodgy encodes.. but hearing the Festival Q8, its clearer some jiggery-pokery was going on, such as boosting treble in double stereo'd Rears rather than mucked up SQ stuff. ah well, plenty more genuine Quad shaved fish in the surround seas of cheese! fake ahoy!
While it may not be the case in this instance, I think you're actually onto something with the faulty encodes.
One really cool feature of the Tate decoder is it has an indicator light that turns on when a mono signal appears in the front channels. In fact, the first thing you do when setting it up is play a mono LP through it and adjust the front channel balance knob until the light is solid. On the SQ albums, you can see the light flash on and off when lead vocals or instruments appear in the phantom center position. When the light is on, whatever is in the center front position is almost completely suppressed in the rear speakers. It's quite amazing.
However, I've noticed on several SQ albums that the lead vocals which I know are supposed to be hard center front fail to set off the indictor light! It seems to be more the early series of gold bordered albums that have this problem (Abraxas, Santana III, Blood Sweat & Tears, etc), rather than the later ones. It still suppresses the lead vocal in the rears, just not as well as when the light is on. Does this mean we're looking at an encoding mistake, and that the vocal is actually not encoded exactly to front center? It's very weird and I had meant to post about it elsewhere...
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You're right about Love Devotion Surrender, I mistakenly attributed that one to Kolotkin, when in fact the quad mix was done by the Al Lawrence/Larry Keyes dream team. Kolotkin did the engineering (and presumably the stereo mix) of LDS, I think that may have been why I mis-remembered it. Caravanserai, on the other hand was Kolotkin, supervised by Keyes - I dug out an image of the back cover with the quad credit at the bottom right:
I don't think it's any surprise that it's such a good quad mix with both Kolotkin and Keyes working on it - it often seems to be the case that the quad remixes that have two or more engineers credited are some of the best. There are lots of examples, but Johnny Mathis I'm Comin' Home (Keyes, Don Murray), The O'Jays Survival (Jay Mark, Joe Tarsia) and Family Reunion (Jay Mark, Arthur Stoppe) and Maynard Ferguson Conquistador (Keyes, Joe Jorgensen) are a few that come to mind.
I also got the chronology of Kolotkin's quad involvement with Santana slightly wrong - his first quad mix would have been Carlos Santana & Buddy Miles Live! in early '72 (another mix that's far better than its stereo counterpart), then Azteca in the summer, and then Caravanserai with Keyes, which came out toward the end of that year.
yikes! i need to amend the Unsung Heroes list! thanks for the correction on Caravanserai!
very interesting!! you know, i really think Involve are missing a trick with the mono vocal wipeout thing because imho it could make their unit Tate-beating with SQ material.
i don't know if anything significant changed wrt SQ LP encoding after the gold bordered artwork releases stopped or whether it was just general improvements in vinyl cutting but i've noticed CBS SQ records from '73 onwards markedly improve in fidelity over the gold border jobs, many of those earlier gold border SQ's have a grungy midrangey sound that's not apparent on the Q8s (EWG "They Only Come Out At Night" being a prime example).
couple of quick thoughts occurred..
why fake it in the first place?
did Hancock have to release it in Quad to fulfill some contractual obligation?
.. but then how could that be because they skipped Man-Child in Quad in '75, why bother faking Secrets in Quad in '76 at all if they didn't have to release it in Quad?
not sure i'm totally sold on the studio time expense angle? i have a recollection reading Catero had his own studio in San Francisco kitted out for Quad? if that was the case would there really have been greatly added expense?
there's also consideration of Catero's reputation to uphold, why would an engineer of such repute put his rep on the line and fake it and put his name to it as he did on the Secrets SQ LP which credits him as Quad Remix Engineer? half-assed fakery something to be proud of when he'd done so much great work? i think not!
also, maybe i'm being naive but i doubt CBS would've been very happy at such fakery, even though the writing was on the wall and other labels had given up the ghost, Columbia were still doing real Quad mixes throughout the following year in '77 (quite a few as we know!) and yet CBS didn't throw in the towel til the fat lady sang her Musicmagic! hmm...
something smells fishy!
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