Jethro Tull 5.1 (“Bursting Out” box set with Steven Wilson 5.1 mixes out in June 2024!)

[rtbluray]

First off, I need to congratulate Jakko for doing the impossible and syncing up the audio from a completely different performance for the first 4 songs and making it work seamlessly. Good on him for that!

However, I hate to say this, but this live surround mix does not work for me.
I don't mind the overly discrete nature of the mix so much as the issue that it's too dry!
A little bit more reverb and delay would have definitely gone a long way to making you feel a little more like you are in the room.
As the mix stands right now, it's just too unnatural for me.
I much prefer live mixes from that era like "Genesis Live at the Rainbow", "UK's Night After Night", and Steven Wilson's live surround mixes for King Crimson around the time of "Starless & Bible Black" and "Red".

The good news is that what I have heard so far on DVD 1 (in both 5.1 and 4.0) has really impressed me, but I will write more about that when I have more time to do so!




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[JohnN]

Jethro Tull: Songs From The Wood -- 40th Anniversary Edition « American Songwriter Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
https://americansongwriter.com/2017/05/jethro-tull-songs-wood-40th-anniversary-edition/

 

[JohnN]

First off, I need to congratulate Jakko for doing the impossible and syncing up the audio from a completely different performance for the first 4 songs and making it work seamlessly. Good on him for that!

However, I hate to say this, but this live surround mix does not work for me.
I don't mind the overly discrete nature of the mix so much as the issue that it's too dry!
A little bit more reverb and delay would have definitely gone a long way to making you feel a little more like you are in the room.
As the mix stands right now, it's just too unnatural for me.
I much prefer live mixes from that era like "Genesis Live at the Rainbow", "UK's Night After Night", and Steven Wilson's live surround mixes for King Crimson around the time of "Starless & Bible Black" and "Red".

The good news is that what I have heard so far on DVD 1 (in both 5.1 and 4.0) has really impressed me, but I will write more about that when I have more time to do so!




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Agree about the dry sound on the live material. I'm not a lover of live albums...won't listen to this live Tull enough to care. Steven Wilson's 5.1 mixes of the studio tracks are the most pleasing to me.

 

[gorman]

I have to say, reading the reviews so far, that it makes me happy to see that one of my favourite Tull's albums is now so dear to so many.

I remember, back when I started listening to it, it wasn't hugely considered among fans. Time has been kind to it, or so it seems. Personally, I still love it.

 

[ssully]

I have to say, reading the reviews so far, that it makes me happy to see that one of my favourite Tull's albums is now so dear to so many.

I remember, back when I started listening to it, it wasn't hugely considered among fans. Time has been kind to it, or so it seems. Personally, I still love it.

I remember it being quite popular among my prog fan friends, in 1977. It was also a 'comeback' with the public in general -- it made number #8 on the US charts (the previous one, Too Old to Rock n Roll only made it to #14). Good reviews in the press too.

 

[IanProudfoot]

I had to listen again, and yes the solo really is very quiet. I found a similar problem with SW's remix of XTC's Drums and Wires. I commented about it at the time but nobody else agreed...

 

[fluid]

This box set is amazing, when you think of the effort that's gone into the production of this, you're getting more than you could have ever hoped for and for such a small price.
I'm not going to give my own personal review of this, but I would like to mention a few things.
First off this is Tull at their peak, such a great British band when they wanted to rock they did, folky tunes they were there, whimsical and musical with a dash of prog.
Great imaginative writing and muzos of the top order.

A word to about John Galcock the bass player, he rarely gets a mention in as a top players but he would be in my top 10, the playing on SFTW is excellent and the opening bass line of Heavy horses is one that's sticks in my mind.
Sadly he passed away in 1979 but this new set to me shows how good he was, in fact all the players at this time was the best in the history of JT.
Roll on the next set, hopefully you know what.

 

[JohnN]

http://www.music-news.com/news/UK/1...eturn-to-the-top-of-the-Official-Albums-Chart
The 40th anniversary deluxe edition of Jethro Tull's Songs from the Wood sees the classic album rise the ranks once more to Number 13, two places ahead of Papa Roach's Crooked Teeth, which has its grip on Number 15.

 

[H.A.L.]

Received this on a rainy day -- how appropriate! Hot rainy, summer-ish day. (As a teacher, first day of summer vacation too! Bravo!)

Awesome. I was most looking forward to the 5.1 "Velvet Green" and it did not disappoint. Threw me a curve here and there, though. I was expecting it to open up wide in surround on the chorus, when it went up close and personal, almost mono! Hmm. SW, you are a coy genius 8').

Highly recommended. I have the MFSL gold of this, and will keep it, thank you, but doubt I will listen to it again over this!!!

Happy camper 8').

 

[rtbluray]

I knew Steven Wilson's 5.1 surround mixes of the album and additional tracks would be awesome, but I was pleasantly surprised at how good the 4 Quadraphonic mixes sounded too! I think these mixes are much better than most of the other Jethro Tull Quadraphonic mixes that have made up some of these deluxe editions.

 

[user 1679]

Mine arrived today, and it's looking like I might have the house to myself for a couple hours tomorrow afternoon - perfect time to delve into this great looking set.

 

[user 1679]

Just finished track one and I'm already grinning ear to ear.....lovin' it!

 

[fredblue]

played thru the 1st DVD tonight and i really think the 5.1 mixes are some of SW's best ever (and that's saying something isn't it) hopefully get around to DVD 2 tomorrow night. these JT sets are so so good, lovely packages with love put into them from all involved.

 

[winopener]

Seeing now that even Song from the wood had some quad mixes on the package i do wonder why TAAB was never mixed into Quad, since they did three quad mixes (minstrel, too old, wood) that remained unreleased until the 2011-onward boxed set, along with Aqualung and Warchild. Doesn't seem TAAB was a low-selling album. Anyone guess?

 

[fredblue]

And done. I've isolated the flute solo (luckily it sits pretty much *only* in the center channel), amplified it by 2.9db (the maximum reachable before clipping).

Then gone back to the original center channel content, isolated the flute solo once more, added it to the mix of both R and L channels, attenuated so as not to introduce clipping. I did this because Ian's singing is always mixed in L and R channels throughout the song, it's just the flute that gets confined to the center channel.

Exported as FLAC, played it back through my HTPC. Much closer to what I would expect from that specific passage.
Luckily I handle all of my multichannel playback through HTPC and/or Squeezebox (that can bitstream DTS encapsulated in FLAC), convenience beats any other consideration.

Happy now.

Original Waveform for the six channels:

View attachment 29388

Modified Waveform for the six channels:

View attachment 29389

Edit: This in no way at all is meant to diminish the incredible work Wilson has been doing for the multichannel scene in general or on this specific album. I preordered Songs from the Wood with no regrets after having received it and having listened to it (incredible value for the price, btw).
In Locomotive Breath's case I thought about modifying the mix just because, having access to the lossless hi-res files, I could do it with little to no risk of messing things up.

the 6 channels appear to be assigned; 1 = FL, 2 = C, 3 = FR, 4 = LFE, 5 = SL, 6 = SR?

if i were to assign them in the output bus in that way on my setup I'd get the Centre channel info coming from the Front Right speaker (Channel 2 = Front Right) and the Front Right channel info would emanate from the Centre speaker (Channel 3 = Centre)

 

[fredblue]

Seeing now that even Song from the wood had some quad mixes on the package i do wonder why TAAB was never mixed into Quad, since they did three quad mixes (minstrel, too old, wood) that remained unreleased until the 2011-onward boxed set, along with Aqualung and Warchild. Doesn't seem TAAB was a low-selling album. Anyone guess?

it would be strange if TAAB didn't get remixed in Quad., when as you say all those other Tull albums before and after it did.. that said 1972 albums are a funny one and on labels other than Chrysalis (quite a few Columbia/Epic etc artists for example) had albums in Quad from pre-72 and from 73 onwards in Quad but skipping their 72 albums, timing maybe a factor but then why go back and remix Aqualung in 1974 (an album from before TAAB) and not remix TAAB? its peculiar!

 

[rtbluray]

"War Child" was the first Jethro Tull record to be mixed in Quadraphonic because by the time Ian Anderson discovered Quadraphonic audio, "War Child" was the most recent Jethro Tull release.
I could be wrong, but I bet that mixing "Aqualung" in Quadraphonic was more of a record company decision and not one that came from Ian himself, and then of course, even though further records were mixed in Quadraphonic (right out of Ian's studio truck) none of them were released, probably because Chrysalis looked at the sales #s for the Quadraphonic releases of "Aqualung" and "War Child" and decided that it wasn't worth releasing further Quadraphonic releases until sales of the format picked up (which of course it never did) hence the likely story as to why "Thick as a Brick" was never mixed in Quadraphonic.

 

[timbre4]

^^^ I believe this is very close. I wish I could find the letter on Elektra (butterfly) letterhead when Jac Holzman (Adam's father) replied "we will begin releasing quad records this summer" (1973). War Child was new and then either the label or the artist decided Aqualung would be a logical choice. I don't know that the sales of these specific titles determined no further releases nearly as much as the 1975 WEA QUAD ALL-STOP event, when Minstrel In The Gallery and MU Best Of had catalog numbers.

It was a non-linear process as to which WEA albums appeared in quad. They wanted their current (1973-74) albums out there and then thought about catalog titles. We got Muscle of Love well before Billion Dollar Babies, Diamond Girl before Summer Breeze, etc.


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[steelydave]

Tim is basically right on this one.

WEA didn't begin releasing quad records until September 1973 - they'd done some sporadic Q8 releases at the behest of Ampex, who was their tape distributor, for about a year before that but they were on the fence about which LP encoding format to use. I think it was the improvement in CD-4 running time that finally got them to jump in - the early CD-4s from 1972 could only hold a little under 20 minutes per side, but by 1973 they'd improved the technology and were able to add another 5 minutes of play time to each side. So by September of '73 WEA finally jumped in, and took over manufacturing their own Q8's (hence why you see some early WEA tapes in both yellow ampex shells and then grey Warner shells as well) and licensed Stereotape to do quad reels around the same time.

I think what's hard to comprehend these days is just how fast the industry was moving back then, with artists releasing albums at an album-a-year pace, or even quicker. So the labels were in the business of selling 'current' product for the most part, rather than back catalog. If you see the initial list of Quadradiscs (reproduced below) it's almost all product from late '72 or 1973. Once they got their initial push of discs out, you see them going back to reissue a few catalog evergreens in '74/'75, probably the ones that sold the best. These would include Aqualung and Sabbath's Paranoid both released in '74, and The Doobie Bros. Toulouse Street which came out in '75.

I actually spoke to Mike Butcher, who did the quad remix of Paranoid and asked him if he did any other quad remix work, Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath in particular, simply because it seemed like a quad-era album and came before Sabotage, which was announced for quad. He said that Paranoid was remixed because it was Sabbath's most-well known album, but by '74 when he did it, WB had no interest in remixing Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (released '73) because it wasn't a 'current album' any more. He also said that they never did the quad mix for Sabotage, that they attempted one track and there was some sort of technical malfunction and gave up; Sabbath subsequently got involved in a massive lawsuit with their former manager and things like quad mixes fell by the wayside but that's probably going too off-topic for this thread.

So I think with Tull, they put out War Child in quad in '73, and then went back and re-did Aqualung in '74 because it was their best-selling album, but by '75 WEA was out of quad so no more albums came out in quad. There's also the issue of market saturation - how many Tull albums (stereo or quad) could WB put out a year? Maybe if WEA had continued putting out quad past mid-'75 they might have considered doing more back catalog issues.

I think the bigger mystery of these unreleased Tull quad mixes is why they continued to do them at all - I know Minstrel made it as far as a test/promo CD-4 pressing in 1975, but as to why they carried on with Too Old in '76 and parts of SFTW in '77 is a mystery to me. Especially doing the mixes in the UK, where quad was even more dead by 1975 than it was in the US.

 

[timbre4]

Thanks Dave! Yes purely baffling they still prepared ANY quad mixes after 1975 given the WEA exit status. Very Glad to have them nonetheless!


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