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
Thanks Mark, you didn't keep record of who mixed the discrete tracks did you?
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?)
That's good (and interesting) info, but I think the idea that if Silverline had quad masters to use that they'd use them is a faulty premise to start with. First, it presumes that they (or Artemis, who owned the rights to Vanguard at the time) knew there were quad mixes of any of these albums, and also that they even had those tapes in their possession.
Secondly, Silverline seemed entirely averse to using repurposed quad mixes - not a single one of their other releases utilized a repurposed quad mix, and for some of them they definitely existed, as was the case with a number of those tracks on the 'Inside the Music' compilations, which were all licensed from Capitol EMI. You have to remember as well that 20 years ago there was a serious stigma surrounding quad too, because of its failure as a technology 20 years before that - the general public saw it as technical folly in the same order as Betamax VCRs and the Ford Edsel. What they didn't realise (and we know now) is that the mixes were great for the most part, it was the delivery system that was flawed - but the stench around the whole thing was so great that the vast majority of the industry just steered clear of it entirely, and who can blame them.
As you mention, a few of the Silverline releases fall within the 1969-1975 Vanugard quad window, but the vast majority seem not to, and from the report above 'Peter and the Wolf' has discrete narration in the center speaker. It seems to me that Silverline would've stuck to form with these, ie they'll either be real (but unspectacular) 5.1 mixes or stereo upmixes, but not repurposed quad. Hopefully we can get some more first-hand accounts (and even waveforms) to really nail down what they were doing!
Imagine going to all the work of releasing this disc and not even getting the composer's name right!