Once again, the photos of the master tapes in the booklet have yielded something interesting in the form of this scrawled signature on the 'Engineer' line:
On the original quad LP, there was a credit on the back cover that said 'Remixed for QuadraDisc by Tom Dowd' but it's my belief that because they only wanted to credit one person, if a producer and engineer worked on an album the more senior of the two (ie the Producer) would get the credit, whereas if it was just remixed by an engineer on his own, he'd get the credit. This is definitely the case with the self-titled Spinners album, which credits Thom Bell on the jacket, but which Arthur Stoppe told me that Joe Tarsia actually did the engineering, supervised by Bell and Linda Creed.
(Also on a related sidenote, Darrell Johnson, who cut a lot of these CD-4 LPs at the JVC Cutting Center in Hollywood, told me that Atlantic didn't want to put any quad remix credits at all on the jackets, but that Tom Dowd and himself twisted their arm and they relented - that's why the Atlantic LPs have a credit, whereas most of the Elektra and Warner quad LPs don't.)
It turns out that this scribbly signature above is of Clair D. Krepps (h/t to
@J. PUPSTER for decoding the signature for me) a veteran recording engineer of more than 30 years who was Atlantic Records chief engineer at the time.
Krepps passed away in 2017 at the ripe old age of 99, from his
obituary:
"
He served in the United States Navy in WWII specializing in early radar systems for naval aviation.
After the war Clair and his wife Leah settled in Bergenfield NJ where he served 2 terms on the Board of Education during the design and construction of the new Bergenfield High School.
A charter member and past governor of the Audio Engineering Society he helped establish recording standards for the record industry. An early pioneer of multi-track tape recording and mastering he worked at Capitol Records, MGM and others. Clair established Mayfair Recording Studios in NYC and with his brother Edgar designed and built the first 8-track recording console. After selling Mayfair to United Artists Clair served as Chief Engineer for Atlantic Records, and later taught at the Jon Miller School of Recording Arts in Bath, Pennsylvania.
Among the many industry awards he received including a Grammy for mastering Robert Flack's "Killing Me Softly With His Song", he was proudest of his historic Grammy for recording Nat King Cole's "Christmas Song" in 1946."
Krepps doesn't have any other quad engineering credits to his name (which makes this all the more interesting) but his name does come up in an article in the
March 3rd, 1973 issue of Billboard (starting on pg.1, continuing on pg.10) which announced WEA's commitment to CD-4 for their quad LP releases. They were unsatisfied with the matrix systems (SQ in particular) and spent more than 18 months doing technical analysis and evaluation, and Krepps was part of that team:
(retirement notice from the 4/13/74 issue of
Billboard)
The only curious things is that most of Krepps credits from the late '60s and early '70s are for mastering rather then engineering or mixing, so it's possible that the master tape photo in the Quadio booklet is of an EQed production or cutting master used for vinyl or tape duplication, in which case Krepps may have been the quad mastering engineer rather than the mixing engineer, but either way it's kind of cool to be able to attach yet another previously-unknown person (and one clearly involved at a high level with WEA's quad program according to the snippet above) to a quad album release.
