Looking for info on these Silverline titles

[steelydave]

I'm working on a kind of (long term) project about Silverline, trying to make sense of the mess of everything they released, who mixed what, and if the mixes are real or fake.

I've made a lot of headway on my own, between my own collection, pictures on discogs and ebay auctions, etc. but there are a number of titles I've been unable to find the information I need.

What I'm looking for for each of these is the 5.1 remix engineer credit (or if there isn't one, I need that confirmed too) and whether the mix itself is REAL or FAKE. I know even some of the real Silverline mixes can be on the non-aggressive side, so often the best way to check is if there's discrete information in the center channel. Photos of the credits in the booklets would be great too (though not essential) and commentary on the quality of mixes is of course welcomed.

I'm sure that no one here is masochistic enough to have collected everything Silverline put out (ok, well, maybe @fredblue is) but I'm hoping that between some of the old heads here like @4-earredwonder , @fizzywiggs41 , @ubertrout and the QQ hivemind collective as a whole we might be able to come up with all of these between us.

The list is in catalog number order, which is roughly chronological, starting in 2001 and finishing in 2006. Catalog numbers are for the DVD-A versions (which always follow the format 81xxx-9, 86xxx-9 or 288xxx-9) unless explicitly noted as DualDisc (which always follow the format 284xxx-2)

Silverline

The London Philharmonic Orchestra 'Classical Masters Series: Grieg' 86029-9
The London Philharmonic Orchestra 'Classical Masters Series: Mendelssohn' 86030-9
Don Jackson / The London Philharmonic Orchestra 'Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake' 86032-9
Various Artists 'Inside the Music: Classic Country' 86037-9
The London Symphony Orchestra 'Classic Christmas' 288045-9 (DVD-A) / 284021-2 (DualDisc)
Fireside 'Uomini D'onore' 288047-9
Mineral 'The Power Of Failing' 288048-9
Bobby Womack 'Soul Sensation Live' 288066-9
Ken Boothe 'Crying Over You: Anthology' 288077-9
The Dubliners The Definitive Transatlantic Collection 288078-9
Various Artists 'Ruder Than You: The Best of British Ska' 288091-9
Richard Friedman 'Sounds of the Season - Out West' 288102-9
Richard Friedman 'Sounds of the Season - Island Rhythms' 288103-9
Richard Friedman 'Sounds of the Season - Smooth Jazz' 288104-9
Richard Friedman 'Sounds of the Season - Piano Solos' 288105-9
Richard Friedman 'Sounds of the Season - Urban Grooves' 288106-9
38 Special 'A Wild-Eyed Christmas Night' 288107-9
Various Artists 'Reggae Christmas II' 288110-9
André Gagnon 'Noël' 288111-9
Various Artists 'Reggae Pulse: The Heartbeat of Jamaica' 288123-9 (DVD-A) / 284516-2 (DualDisc)
Dizzie Gillespie 'Matrix: The Perception Sessions' 288129-9
T-Bone Walker 'Back On The Scene' 288135-9
Canned Heat 'From the Front Row... Live!' 288160-9
Greg Lake 'From the Front Row... Live!' 288162-9
Kingfish 'From the Front Row... Live!' 288166-9
Jerry Lee Lewis 'From the Front Row... Live!' 288170-9
Robert Gordon 'From the Front Row... Live!' 288192-9
Stiff Little Fingers 'From the Front Row... Live!' 288193-9
April Wine 'From the Front Row... Live!' 288194-9
Maurice Abravanel / Utah Symphony Orchestra Williams: Symphony No.6 in E minor 288239-9 (DVD-A) / 284206-2 (DualDisc)
Maurice Abravanel / Utah Symphony Orchestra 'Rachmaninov: Symphony No. 3' 288242-9 (DVD-A) / 284212-2 (DualDisc)
Adrian Boult / The Philharmonic Promenade Orchestra Of London 'Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 in C Minor, Op. 67 / Leonore Overture No. 3 in C Major, Op. 72b' 288253-9 (DVD-A) / 284219-2 (DualDisc)
Adrian Boult / The Philharmonic Promenade Orchestra Of London 'Beethoven: Symphony No.3 in E Flat Major Op.55, "Eroica" & Coriolan Overture, Op.62' 288254-9 (DVD-A) / 284220-2 (DualDisc)
Maurice Abravanel / Utah Symphony Orchestra 'Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker' 284214-2 (DualDisc)
Anthony Bernard / London Chamber Orchestra 'Handel: Water Music & Music for Royal Fireworks' 284217-2 (DualDisc)
Various Artists 'Reggae Masters Vol.1' (DVD-V) 284521-2 (DualDisc)
Various Artists 'Classic Rock Masters Vol. 1' (DVD-V) 284522-2 (DualDisc)
Various Artists 'Classic Rock Masters - Current Music' (DVD-V) 284523-2 (DualDisc)
Various Artists 'Blues Masters' (DVD-V) 284526-2 (DualDisc)
Various Artists 'Heavy Metal Masters' (DVD-V) 284528-2 (DualDisc)
Various Artists 'Live Rock Masters' (DVD-V) 284533-2 (DualDisc)
Various Artists 'British Invasion Masters' (DVD-V) 284535-2 (DualDisc)
Bob Marley 'Reggae Master' (DVD-V) 284538-2 (DualDisc)
Queensrÿche / Geoff Tate 'Face to Face' (DVD-V) 284540-2 (DualDisc)
Various Artists 'Classic Rock Masters Vol. 2' (DVD-V) 284545-2 (DualDisc)
Various Artists 'Reggae Masters Vol. 2' (DVD-V) 284548-2 (DualDisc)


Immergent

Dishwalla 'Live… Greetings From the Flow State' 284117-2 (DualDisc)
Various Artists 'South Beach Sounds - Miami Music Week Vol. 1' (DVD-V) 284125-2 (DualDisc)

 

[DuncanS]

From my collection - I should have read the post after my first coffee of the day!

 

[boxhead]

Okay, I'll have a crack. The only title I have on that list is "Various Artists 'Reggae Christmas I' 288109-9". Here's some relevant info:

5.1 remix engineer credit - Rich Fowler at 5.1 Studios. 5.1 Mastering was by Charlie Watts at 5.1 Studios.

Is the mix itself is REAL or FAKE? I'd say fake. The centre channel sounds like summed FL+FR at a slightly lower level. The surrounds sound like FL+FR with added reverb. Having said all that, FL and FR sound to be almost identical. So it's almost like 5 channel narrow stereo at best.

Photos of the credits in the booklets would be great too (though not essential) - see below

 

[steelydave]

Thanks @boxhead this is exactly the kind of thing I need!

 

[Clement]

I. too, can be of (very little) service: I own Various Artists 'Punk And New Wave Masters' (DVD-V) 284524-2 (DualDisc)
5.1 Mix by Immergent Production Services
Chief Engineer: Chris Haynes
Most of the mixes are FAKE. The exceptions appear to be Blondie, "Last One In The World"; The Fixx, "Saved by Fire"; and Corrosion of Conformity, "Wise Blood" (Live). This makes sense to me, as i also own The Curse of Blondie (Blondie) and 1011 Woodland (The Fixx), both of which have decent mixes and have shown up in lists of good Silverline mixes, especially in this thread:
https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/forums/threads/silverline-dvd-a-winners-losers.1926/1011 Woodland does have a poll, albeit with only 2 votes (a 9 and an 8); despite many calls for it, no poll exists for The Curse of Blondie.
The live track from Corrosion of Conformity sounds better than the other live tracks on the disc; the center channel has "typical" live back-of-the-hall reverb and crowd noise. The other live tracks sound like summed FL+FR.
And here's a shot of the last page of the booklet:

Thanks for all you do @steelydave Stay Surrounded, Comrade!

 

[humprof]

Others can speak with way more authority on this, but I've always just assumed that all of the Utah Symphony/Maurice Abravanel discs licensed from Vanguard were engineered by Marc Aubort & Joanna Nickrenz. (But maybe not all of them?) Aubort remained an unapologetic advocate of ambient rears in classical surround mixing, but his quads were still "real" quad. Starting with this early post from the "Silverline Winners & Losers" thread, it sounds like in the conversion from 4.0 to 5.1, the center channel just summed front left & right and the sub added some bass oomph. (@Simon A's subsequent conversation with @4-earredwonder, and especially @ubertrout's report, add further details.) Donno if such derivations truly constitute a 5.1 "remix," or if the technician(s) who did them deserve a "mixing" credit?

However, @ubertrout makes it sound like the devil is in the details, title by title--a handful of these had to have been recorded in stereo, and another handful never had quad releases to begin with?--and I guess it's precisely those details you're looking for, Dave. So . . . sorry for the half-assed speculation & secondhand reporting here. Does the video tacked onto the ends of those discs help? I'll shut up now. . . .

 

[IntegraVT]

Wow, I can actually give back to the group for once! I submitted the Eddie Money Shakin' With The Money Man DVD-A 288188-9 to Discogs a few years back.

5.1 credits are listed as follows -

5.1 Mix: Gary Lux at 5.1 Studios
2nd Engineer: Ken Ramos
5.1 Mastering: Adrian Van Velsen
Chief Engineer: Chris Haynes

Is it fake? Not sure... The channels are discrete, see attached for Wanna Go Back screenshot. But as a mostly live disc, I can only hear crowd and light instrumentation from the surround channels. A more experienced ear could tell for sure.

 

[J. PUPSTER]

Wow, I can actually give back to the group for once! I submitted the Eddie Money Shakin' With The Money Man DVD-A 288188-9 to Discogs a few years back.

5.1 credits are listed as follows -

5.1 Mix: Gary Lux at 5.1 Studios
2nd Engineer: Ken Ramos
5.1 Mastering: Adrian Van Velsen
Chief Engineer: Chris Haynes

Is it fake? Not sure... The channels are discreet, see attached for Wanna Go Back screenshot. But as a mostly live disc, I can only hear crowd and light instrumentation from the surround channels. A more experienced ear could tell for sure.

Can you listen for what’s just in the Center in Audacity by closing the other channels, and report back? Oh, and be sure not to ‘Save’ or ‘Export’ etc. back to the original file name (sorry don’t know how experienced you are at working in Audacity.)

 

[IntegraVT]

Can you listen for what’s just in the Center in Audacity by closing the other channels, and report back? Oh, and be sure not to ‘Save’ or ‘Export’ etc. back to the original file name (sorry don’t know how experienced you are at working in Audacity.)

Center channel is predominantly Eddie's vocals and lead guitar on this track; not a merge of FL+FR channels. Still a lot to learn on Audacity, but followed Techmoan's recent "CD Shaving" vid to merge/invert/compare channels. FL+C+FR do not seem faked. SL+SR are meh and do have a lot of lower volume L+R with reverb and crowd. LFE barely there.

My guess is this might be a 3.0 master source stretched to 5.1.

 

[ubertrout]

I'll be home next week and can look.

 

[steelydave]

I. too, can be of (very little) service: I own Various Artists 'Punk And New Wave Masters' (DVD-V) 284524-2 (DualDisc)
5.1 Mix by Immergent Production Services
Chief Engineer: Chris Haynes
Most of the mixes are FAKE. The exceptions appear to be Blondie, "Last One In The World"; The Fixx, "Saved by Fire"; and Corrosion of Conformity, "Wise Blood" (Live). This makes sense to me, as i also own The Curse of Blondie (Blondie) and 1011 Woodland (The Fixx), both of which have decent mixes and have shown up in lists of good Silverline mixes, especially in this thread:
https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/forums/threads/silverline-dvd-a-winners-losers.1926/1011 Woodland does have a poll, albeit with only 2 votes (a 9 and an 8); despite many calls for it, no poll exists for The Curse of Blondie.
The live track from Corrosion of Conformity sounds better than the other live tracks on the disc; the center channel has "typical" live back-of-the-hall reverb and crowd noise. The other live tracks sound like summed FL+FR.
And here's a shot of the last page of the booklet:

Thanks for all you do @steelydave Stay Surrounded, Comrade!

Thanks for this @Clement - one of several reasons I'm doing this is so that when it's finished we can create a master list of 'real' mixes that are worth creating poll threads for!

Wow, I can actually give back to the group for once! I submitted the Eddie Money Shakin' With The Money Man DVD-A 288188-9 to Discogs a few years back.

5.1 credits are listed as follows -

5.1 Mix: Gary Lux at 5.1 Studios
2nd Engineer: Ken Ramos
5.1 Mastering: Adrian Van Velsen
Chief Engineer: Chris Haynes

Is it fake? Not sure... The channels are discreet, see attached for Wanna Go Back screenshot. But as a mostly live disc, I can only hear crowd and light instrumentation from the surround channels. A more experienced ear could tell for sure.

Thanks so much, super helpful!

Others can speak with way more authority on this, but I've always just assumed that all of the Utah Symphony/Maurice Abravanel discs licensed from Vanguard were engineered by Marc Aubort & Joanna Nickrenz. (But maybe not all of them?) Aubort remained an unapologetic advocate of ambient rears in classical surround mixing, but his quads were still "real" quad. Starting with this early post from the "Silverline Winners & Losers" thread, it sounds like in the conversion from 4.0 to 5.1, the center channel just summed front left & right and the sub added some bass oomph. (@Simon A's subsequent conversation with @4-earredwonder, and especially @ubertrout's report, add further details.) Donno if such derivations truly constitute a 5.1 "remix," or if the technician(s) who did them deserve a "mixing" credit?

However, @ubertrout makes it sound like the devil is in the details, title by title--a handful of these had to have been recorded in stereo, and another handful never had quad releases to begin with?--and I guess it's precisely those details you're looking for, Dave. So . . . sorry for the half-assed speculation & secondhand reporting here. Does the video tacked onto the ends of those discs help? I'll shut up now. . . .

I sort of took it for granted that Vanguard + Surround = repurposed quad, but I looked a whole bunch of these up on discogs and the very vast majority seem to be from recordings either before or after the quad era. Which, with Silverline leads you back to the question: did they just upmix the original stereo mixes or actually do a 5.1 mix?

 

[Ranasakawa]

I have a few, but none on this list above. The Donovan one is actually MONO but sounds great and the Gary Numan DVD does have a few 'surround' moments but is mostly stereo. The Humble Pie Live DVD is a great show NOT in surround. I don't understand why they put out so many DVDs that actually are not 5.1

 

[barfle]

I have the Fiddle Faddle.

It's been a while since I spun it up, but as I recall, I like it (otherwise it would be gone).

 

[barfle]

I have the Sleeping Beauty.

 

[barfle]

I have Peter & The Wolf. The narration is in the center channel, so I'm pretty sure it's really 5.1.

 

[barfle]

FWIW, I also have a Nutcracker by London Symphony and Tschaikovsky Romeo & Juliet by John Ogden/London Symphony, but since they’re not on your list, I assume you already have the information you need.

 

[steelydave]

FWIW, I also have a Nutcracker by London Symphony and Tschaikovsky Romeo & Juliet by John Ogden/London Symphony, but since they’re not on your list, I assume you already have the information you need.

I do, but if you've got pictures or scans of the booklets and an opinion on the sound, please do post them here as they'd be more than welcome. Thanks so much for all the other ones above too!

 

[humprof]

I sort of took it for granted that Vanguard + Surround = repurposed quad, but I looked a whole bunch of these up on discogs and the very vast majority seem to be from recordings either before or after the quad era. Which, with Silverline leads you back to the question: did they just upmix the original stereo mixes or actually do a 5.1 mix?

I'll wait for reports from those who, unlike yrs truly, actually own the Silverlines before veering too far off-topic again.

For now I'll just add that I was totally off about Aubort's tenure at Vanguard (1958-1965), conflating that with his subsequent stints for Nonesuch and then Vox, where he supervised plenty of fine quad recordings in the 70s, even if he was never a fan of close miking, discrete mixing, or anything beyond hall ambience in the rears. One review I read named him as the supervisor of Vanguard's Utah/Abravanel's Sibelius cycle from 1977, though; he must have come back to do that on a work-for-hire basis. But surely, like everyone else, Vanguard was done with quad by then?

So yeah: of the select Utah/Abravanel titles on your list, the Berlioz Requiem and the Mahler 3d, both from among Vanguard's first batch of 1969 quad reels, should be safe bets for "real" quad. The Mahler 5th and 6th, both from 1975, had SQ LP releases, so in principle those are "real," too, unless Silverline messed with them.

Telling you more of what you already know: the Leroy Anderson and the famous Mahler 2d are from 1967, the Brahms set (like the Sibelius) from 1977, the Nutcracker from 1961, the Rachmaninoff from 1963, and the Vaughn Williams from 1966. So unless Silverline were given multitrack masters and were moved to take the initiative and do the right thing, the odds are on "fake" for those. Ken Ramos is listed as the 5.1 mixer for the Leroy Anderson; is he still with us? (Analogue Productions also did a reissue of that one; maybe AP survivors would know something about the existence of multitracks?)

 

[Mark Anderson]

Eddie Money 'Shakin' With The Money Man' 288188-9 (DVD-A)

I do not have the disk anymore but the mix is discrete with guitars, keyboards, percussion in the rears. The rears need to be elevated by about 4 db. The center seems to be summed from left and right.

 

[Mark Anderson]

Various Artists 'Inside the Music: Classic Country' 86037-9

No disk anymore but tracks 1 & 2 are fake

1	Merle Haggard And The Strangers (5)–	Mama Tried
2	George Jones (2)–	She Thinks I Still Care

and tracks 3-11 are discrete and varies track to track in whats in the rears. The rears need to be elevated by about 3 db.

3	Jean Shepard–	Slippin' Away
4	Sonny James–	Bright Lights, Big City
5	Willie Nelson–	Crazy
6	Del Reeves–	Girl On The Billboard
7	Billie Jo Spears–	Blanket On The Ground
8	Faron Young–	Hello Walls
9	Jessi Colter–	I'm Not Lisa
10	Crystal Gayle–	Why Have You Left The One You Left Me For?
11	Merle Haggard–	Movin' On