I've always been kind of intrigued by the UA family of quad releases - I think part of the reason is because they were almost all on Q8, so they had no credits or liner notes or anything. It's also interesting to me because they seemed to stop releasing quad almost as quickly as they started, unlike some of the other major labels like CBS or RCA who went at it for 5 years or more.
When I realised as well that Liberty (who released some early Q8's) and UA were in fact the same company I was even more interested because it meant there was a story there. UA didn't just pop up in 1973 and put out a bunch of Q8's, they actually had a few years of history previous to that as Liberty. It's actually kind of an ironic coincidence, because from what I can tell Liberty was actually the first label to release any Q8's, in November 1970, but at the same time they didn't seem very gung-ho about the idea. Vanguard had done some quad reels before that, and RCA started doing Q8's in December 1970, but Liberty beat them by a month.
In doing research for other things I stumbled across a bunch of Billboard articles about Liberty/UA's quad program, so I thought it might be interesting to reproduce them here along with a full list of their quad releases to give a fuller picture of what they did. I still don't have any real insight in to their motivations, but it's interesting nonetheless.
This is the original news item about the initial release of Liberty Q8's - the $9 price point seemed pretty steep so I plugged it in to an inflation calculator and it came up at about $55 in 2017 dollars. Audiophile market indeed!
By October 1970 (the tapes came out the following month they'd reduced the price to $7.98 ($50 in 2017 dollars). It's also interesting to note that it looks like they planned a further half-dozen tapes for Jan/Feb 1971 that never materialized.
Now called United Artists instead of Liberty/UA, their El Supremo David W. Picker (great name) already seems dubious about quad by January 1971. I guess that's why we didn't see any more Liberty Q8's.
This was just a chunk of another article from June '71 about Columbia getting in to quad, but the final paragraph is notable, calling the UA (Liberty) Q8's "simulated" quad. The only one of the Liberty tapes I ever had was Best of Buddy Rich and I remember it being kind of 'big stereo' but I assumed it was just because the music was sourced from 1960's material that was recorded on 4 or maybe 8 tracks at best. Are the other Liberty Q8's fake quad? If so, no wonder people weren't really buying them.
UA still probably (rightly) on the fence about quad in late 1971, as things didn't really take off until CBS, Ampex and GRT got in to quad in 1972. It also explains why all the UA 2 tape sets are 'Vol. 1' and 'Vol. 2' - so they could sell them seperately for $7.98 a piece, rather than $9.98 as a double-pack. Greedy bastards!
The first hint of new UA quad tapes, from July 1973, and suggesting they took the Liberty Q8's out of print.
Finally by September 1973 UA are embracing real quad! This month seems like it was kind of 'ground zero' for quad releases - WEA put out their first 25 Quadradiscs, and Stax released the majority of their quad product. I don't know if this was just coincidence but talk about a busy month! This article is also notable because it mentions a Q8 release of the Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose's 'Big Time Lover' album, which never came out.
More info from October 1973 about UA's first tape release, along with plans to release 10 more (!) Q8's in January 1974. Also confirms the deletion of the Liberty Q8's, of which it says there are 5 which would seem to verify the fact that the Canned Heat Future Blues Q8 never came out.
This was UA's big advertising splash in January, 1974 (I know Jon posted this elsewhere previously, but I can't find it). Notable because it mentions Q8's Traffic's 'John Barleycorn Must Die' and Hawkwind's 'In Search Of Space' as being released the same month, which obviously never happened. You have to assume these mixes must have been either done or close to completion if they're mention them as coming in the same month as the advertisement.
...and then that was it. There were a few more UA Q8 releases in early 1974 (War 'Live', Bobby Womack 'Lookin' For A Love Again') but they seem to have completely given up talking about, advertising or releasing any more Q8 product. I have to assume it was a financial issue - the economic climate of the mid 70's seems to have been hard on some of the medium and smaller labels, like ABC and GRT who both went bankrupt. When UA was sold to EMI in 1979, they had $32 million in debt and that presumably wasn't just racked up in a month or a year.
From the Feb. 15th 1975 issue of Billboard, an article about John Gregory's 'A Man For All Seasons' being UA UK's first (and presumably only) SQ quad release. Interesting that it was originally going to be a single-inventory quad but they changed their minds for quality reasons. Late '74/early '75 was a bit late in the day to be getting in to quad in the UK, it's no wonder no more releases followed.
and then in October 1976 there was this one US outlier, Paul Anka's 'The Painter' album, released on QS LP. I can't make any sense of where the impetus came from. The producer, engineers, studio, artist, etc. have no prior quad history. I'd love to know who put the idea in their head to put out a QS LP in late 1976. While it's not conclusive, the article also makes it pretty clear that this was most likely UA's first (and only) QS release, ruling out rumoured quads such as War's Greatest hits.
(Updated July 11th, 2018)
LIBERTY Q8 RELEASES
UNITED ARTISTS Q8 RELEASES
UNITED ARTISTS LP RELEASES
One last note about the UA Q8's: if you've heard them, you know how bad they sound. UA did it's own tape duplicating (as it says in one of the articles above) and it's not a patch on the quality of CBS, RCA, WEA, or even GRT. A decent non-Dolby Q8 should have frequency response up to (and over 10kHz) - the UA carts (both black and white) fall off a cliff after about 6kHz, and what's there is oversaturated almost to the point of distortion. I think this (aside from not doing any LP releases of their quad product) may be the biggest contributing factor to the failure of UA's quad product - it sounded like AM radio, only worse. QQ member Darrell Johnson (DarrellJ) did cut a CD-4 test pressing of one of War's UA quad albums while he was working at the JVC Cutting Center, so I guess they were looking in to LP releases at some point, but it never went anywhere.
However, there are good versions of the UA Q8 releases, but they're hard to find. In Canada, UA tapes were manufactured by RCA and they sound just as good as RCA's own quad product, which is amongst the best of the format. In fact, it appears that some time after 1975 (there are late '75 RCA Canada Q8's that are Dolby encoded as well) RCA Canada even Dolby encoded their UA Q8's, putting them on par with the Dolby encoded Columbia Q8's as the best sounding tapes of the format. Unfortunately these seem really tough to find - the non-Dolby ones turn up from time to time, but the Dolby ones seem exceedingly difficult to find. If anyone has any they want to sell/trade, I'm definitely interested!
Non-Dolby Canadian UA cart mfg. by RCA Canada:
Dolby-encoded Canadian UA cart mfg. by RCA Canada:
If you made it this far, I hope you found this interesting and/or informative. If anyone has any further info about UA and their quad releases I'd love to hear it. For the most part their quad mixes are excellent (aside from maybe too much of the lead vocal in all 4 speakers mixing style) especially for a smaller label, and they really deserve to have more light shed on them!
When I realised as well that Liberty (who released some early Q8's) and UA were in fact the same company I was even more interested because it meant there was a story there. UA didn't just pop up in 1973 and put out a bunch of Q8's, they actually had a few years of history previous to that as Liberty. It's actually kind of an ironic coincidence, because from what I can tell Liberty was actually the first label to release any Q8's, in November 1970, but at the same time they didn't seem very gung-ho about the idea. Vanguard had done some quad reels before that, and RCA started doing Q8's in December 1970, but Liberty beat them by a month.
In doing research for other things I stumbled across a bunch of Billboard articles about Liberty/UA's quad program, so I thought it might be interesting to reproduce them here along with a full list of their quad releases to give a fuller picture of what they did. I still don't have any real insight in to their motivations, but it's interesting nonetheless.
This is the original news item about the initial release of Liberty Q8's - the $9 price point seemed pretty steep so I plugged it in to an inflation calculator and it came up at about $55 in 2017 dollars. Audiophile market indeed!
By October 1970 (the tapes came out the following month they'd reduced the price to $7.98 ($50 in 2017 dollars). It's also interesting to note that it looks like they planned a further half-dozen tapes for Jan/Feb 1971 that never materialized.
Now called United Artists instead of Liberty/UA, their El Supremo David W. Picker (great name) already seems dubious about quad by January 1971. I guess that's why we didn't see any more Liberty Q8's.
This was just a chunk of another article from June '71 about Columbia getting in to quad, but the final paragraph is notable, calling the UA (Liberty) Q8's "simulated" quad. The only one of the Liberty tapes I ever had was Best of Buddy Rich and I remember it being kind of 'big stereo' but I assumed it was just because the music was sourced from 1960's material that was recorded on 4 or maybe 8 tracks at best. Are the other Liberty Q8's fake quad? If so, no wonder people weren't really buying them.
UA still probably (rightly) on the fence about quad in late 1971, as things didn't really take off until CBS, Ampex and GRT got in to quad in 1972. It also explains why all the UA 2 tape sets are 'Vol. 1' and 'Vol. 2' - so they could sell them seperately for $7.98 a piece, rather than $9.98 as a double-pack. Greedy bastards!
The first hint of new UA quad tapes, from July 1973, and suggesting they took the Liberty Q8's out of print.
Finally by September 1973 UA are embracing real quad! This month seems like it was kind of 'ground zero' for quad releases - WEA put out their first 25 Quadradiscs, and Stax released the majority of their quad product. I don't know if this was just coincidence but talk about a busy month! This article is also notable because it mentions a Q8 release of the Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose's 'Big Time Lover' album, which never came out.
More info from October 1973 about UA's first tape release, along with plans to release 10 more (!) Q8's in January 1974. Also confirms the deletion of the Liberty Q8's, of which it says there are 5 which would seem to verify the fact that the Canned Heat Future Blues Q8 never came out.
This was UA's big advertising splash in January, 1974 (I know Jon posted this elsewhere previously, but I can't find it). Notable because it mentions Q8's Traffic's 'John Barleycorn Must Die' and Hawkwind's 'In Search Of Space' as being released the same month, which obviously never happened. You have to assume these mixes must have been either done or close to completion if they're mention them as coming in the same month as the advertisement.
...and then that was it. There were a few more UA Q8 releases in early 1974 (War 'Live', Bobby Womack 'Lookin' For A Love Again') but they seem to have completely given up talking about, advertising or releasing any more Q8 product. I have to assume it was a financial issue - the economic climate of the mid 70's seems to have been hard on some of the medium and smaller labels, like ABC and GRT who both went bankrupt. When UA was sold to EMI in 1979, they had $32 million in debt and that presumably wasn't just racked up in a month or a year.
From the Feb. 15th 1975 issue of Billboard, an article about John Gregory's 'A Man For All Seasons' being UA UK's first (and presumably only) SQ quad release. Interesting that it was originally going to be a single-inventory quad but they changed their minds for quality reasons. Late '74/early '75 was a bit late in the day to be getting in to quad in the UK, it's no wonder no more releases followed.
and then in October 1976 there was this one US outlier, Paul Anka's 'The Painter' album, released on QS LP. I can't make any sense of where the impetus came from. The producer, engineers, studio, artist, etc. have no prior quad history. I'd love to know who put the idea in their head to put out a QS LP in late 1976. While it's not conclusive, the article also makes it pretty clear that this was most likely UA's first (and only) QS release, ruling out rumoured quads such as War's Greatest hits.
(Updated July 11th, 2018)
LIBERTY Q8 RELEASES
| CATALOG NUMBER | RELEASE DATE | ARTIST | TITLE | NOTES |
|---|---|---|---|---|
A-8168 | 11/1970 | Ferrante & Teicher | Midnight Cowboy | |
A-8173 | 11/1970 | Leroy Holmes | Everybody's Talkin' | |
A-8948 | 11/1970 | The Ventures | Hawaii Five-O | |
A-9007 | 11/1970 | Vicki Carr | Nashville | |
A-9025 | 11/1970 | Buddy Rich | Best Of | |
A-9060 | 11/1970 | Canned Heat | Future Blues | *ANNOUNCED, NEVER RELEASED* |
UNITED ARTISTS Q8 RELEASES
| CATALOG NUMBER | RELEASE DATE | ARTIST | TITLE | NOTES |
|---|---|---|---|---|
UA-DA043-H | 22/10/1973 | Bobby Womack | Facts Of Life | |
BN-DA047-H | 22/10/1973 | Donald Byrd | Black Byrd | BLUE NOTE |
UA-DA055-H | ??/01/1974 | Shirley Bassey | Never, Never, Never | |
BN-DA109-H | ??/01/1974 | Lou Donaldson | Sassy Soul Strut | BLUE NOTE |
UA-DA100-H | 22/10/1973 | Various Artists | Live & Let Die Soundtrack | |
UA-DA118-H | ??/01/1974 | Ferrante & Teicher | Killing Me Softly | |
UA-DA120-H | ??/??/1974 | Hawkwind | Space Ritual | ANNOUNCED, NEVER RELEASED |
UA-DA121-H | 22/10/1973 | Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose | Big Time Lover | ANNOUNCED, NEVER RELEASED |
UA-DA123-H | 22/10/1973 | Tommy Garrett | Down Mexico Way | |
UA-DA124-H | 22/10/1973 | Bobby Goldsboro | Summer (The First Time) | |
UA-DA128-H | 22/10/1973 | War | Deliver The Word | Unconfirmed QR: USTQ-128-QF |
BN-DA140-H | ??/??/1973 | Donald Byrd | Street Lady | BLUE NOTE / 1973 (p) DATE |
UA-DA178-H | 22/10/1973 | War | The World Is A Ghetto | Unconfirmed QR: USTQ-178-QF |
UA-DA199-H | ??/??/1974 | Bobby Womack | Lookin' For A Love Again | |
UA-DA202-H | ??/01/1974 | Traffic | John Barleycorn Must Die | ANNOUNCED, NEVER RELEASED |
UA-DA211-H | ??/01/1974 | Hawkwind | In Search Of Space | ANNOUNCED, NEVER RELEASED |
UA-DA339-H | ??/??/1974 | Electric Light Orchestra | Eldorado | ANNOUNCED, NEVER RELEASED |
UA-DA1111-H | 22/10/1973 | Shirley Bassey | Live at Carnegie Hall, Vol.1 | UA-DA1110-P (2 TAPE SET) |
UA-DA1112-H | 22/10/1973 | Shirley Bassey | Live at Carnegie Hall, Vol.2 | UA-DA1110-P (2 TAPE SET) |
UA-DA1471-H | 22/10/1973 | The Ventures | Only Hits, Vol.1 | UA-DA1470-P (2 TAPE SET) |
UA-DA1472-H | 22/10/1973 | The Ventures | Only Hits, Vol.2 | UA-DA1470-P (2 TAPE SET) |
UA-DA1871-H | 22/10/1973 | Ike & Tina Turner | Live at Carnegie Hall, Vol.1 | UA-DA-1870-P (2 TAPE SET) |
UA-DA1872-H | 22/10/1973 | Ike & Tina Turner | Live at Carnegie Hall, Vol.2 | 1974 (p) DATE, RELEASE MAY HAVE BEEN DELAYED |
UA-DA1931-H | ??/??/1974 | War | Live, Vol.1 | UA-DA1930-P (2 TAPE SET) |
UA-DA1932-H | ??/??/1974 | War | Live, Vol.2 | UA-DA1930-P (2 TAPE SET) |
UA-DA2321-H | ??/??/1974 | John Williams/Isaac Stern | Fiddler On the Roof Soundtrack, Vol.1 | UA-DA2320-P (2 TAPE SET) |
UA-DA2322-H | ??/??/1974 | John Williams/Isaac Stern | Fiddler On the Roof Soundtrack, Vol.2 | UA-DA2320-P (2 TAPE SET) |
UNITED ARTISTS LP RELEASES
| CATALOG NUMBER | RELEASE DATE | ARTIST | TITLE | NOTES |
|---|---|---|---|---|
4CHA (U) 9 | ??/??/1972 | Francis Lai | Live In Japan | JAPAN-ONLY QUAD REEL (KING RECORDS) |
4D-28/29 | ??/??/1974 | Shirley Bassey | Live In Japan | JAPAN-ONLY CD-4 (KING RECORDS) |
QUAG 29546 | ??/??/1974 | John Gregory | A Man For All Seasons | UK-ONLY SQ-ENCODED LP |
LZ-90001 | ??/??/1971 | The Ventures | On Stage '71 | JAPAN-ONLY QS LP |
LLZ-80003 | ??/??/1972 | The Ventures | On Stage '72 | JAPAN-ONLY QS LP |
LLZ-93001B | ??/??/1973 | The Ventures | On Stage '73 | JAPAN-ONLY QS LP |
LLZ-82004 | ??/??/1974 | The Ventures | On Stage '74 | JAPAN-ONLY QS LP |
LLZ-90008 | ??/??/1972 | Classics '72 | Renaissance Orchestral | JAPAN-ONLY QS LP |
LLZ-90009 | ??/??/1972 | Sunset Festival Orchestra | Non-Stop Bacharach | JAPAN-ONLY QS LP |
UA-LA653-G | ??/10/1976 | Paul Anka | The Painter | QS-ENCODED SINGLE-INVENTORY LP |
One last note about the UA Q8's: if you've heard them, you know how bad they sound. UA did it's own tape duplicating (as it says in one of the articles above) and it's not a patch on the quality of CBS, RCA, WEA, or even GRT. A decent non-Dolby Q8 should have frequency response up to (and over 10kHz) - the UA carts (both black and white) fall off a cliff after about 6kHz, and what's there is oversaturated almost to the point of distortion. I think this (aside from not doing any LP releases of their quad product) may be the biggest contributing factor to the failure of UA's quad product - it sounded like AM radio, only worse. QQ member Darrell Johnson (DarrellJ) did cut a CD-4 test pressing of one of War's UA quad albums while he was working at the JVC Cutting Center, so I guess they were looking in to LP releases at some point, but it never went anywhere.
However, there are good versions of the UA Q8 releases, but they're hard to find. In Canada, UA tapes were manufactured by RCA and they sound just as good as RCA's own quad product, which is amongst the best of the format. In fact, it appears that some time after 1975 (there are late '75 RCA Canada Q8's that are Dolby encoded as well) RCA Canada even Dolby encoded their UA Q8's, putting them on par with the Dolby encoded Columbia Q8's as the best sounding tapes of the format. Unfortunately these seem really tough to find - the non-Dolby ones turn up from time to time, but the Dolby ones seem exceedingly difficult to find. If anyone has any they want to sell/trade, I'm definitely interested!
Non-Dolby Canadian UA cart mfg. by RCA Canada:
Dolby-encoded Canadian UA cart mfg. by RCA Canada:
If you made it this far, I hope you found this interesting and/or informative. If anyone has any further info about UA and their quad releases I'd love to hear it. For the most part their quad mixes are excellent (aside from maybe too much of the lead vocal in all 4 speakers mixing style) especially for a smaller label, and they really deserve to have more light shed on them!
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