Wanna peek behind the curtain on this one?
So when transferring the quad master, the track "Kingfish" had severe dropouts for about the first minute. It was of a tape stock that had sticky shed, unlike the rest of the master. Odd. Baking it did not help. Had to have the first minute of the track remixed to quad and edited into the master digitally.
By Bruce Botnick!
He did a great job of matching the original mix. Thanks Bruce!
I noticed this when I was (re)mastering this album to suit my own tastes but didn't want to mention it for fear of seeming like I was nitpicking on what overall is a very good sounding release. Bruce did a good job of matching the overall tonality and quad soundfield; the only giveaway is that there's a slight loss in treble response (between 0:47 and 0:49) as the new mix crossfades into the original one.
I think this kind of thing really illustrates the unique nexus between music business and cultural preservation that releases like this serve, so kudos to both yourself and Mr. Botnick for making it happen. Sort of like the work done by fine art restoration experts, who meticulously remove old, yellowed varnish, and poor-quality overpainting from works by classical masters and then restore them using period-accurate pigments and new varnish (so they're protected and preserved for decades and centuries ahead) this kind of work ensures that the quad mix will remain in existence for as long as the capability to play music digitally exists.
There are no guarantees in life, and as we've seen over the years despite the best (or somtimes, not the best) efforts of labels, countless tape assets have been lost to theft, flood, fire and sticky-shed syndrome. Every quad master tape sitting in a vault somewhere (often right next to its own safety copy, which for quad mixes that were only released in one territory is the only backup of the master) that hasn't been reissued - or at the very least digitally archived - presents the chance of one of these calamities inadvertently befalling it. As someone with a background in library management and data archiving I've lived by the 3-2-1 data preservation mantra (3 copies of your data across at least 2 different types of media with 1 copy off-site) for more than 20 years so it's incredibly gratifying (and I'll include my work with D-V here) when another one of these mixes is issued on a physical digital disc, because the simple act of producing one of these products means there are at now at the minimum 3 different copies of the data on two different kinds of media (original master tape, raw transfer in the mastering DAW, and the final consumer product on disc) and with the consumer product spread to the four corners of the earth the odds of all of them being destroyed in a single catastrophe are approaching nil.
Another interesting footnote about this quad mix that I noticed in mastering it (which necessitates a lot of forensic headphone listening) is that folded down to stereo, the quad mix is 100% identical (with the exception of the repaired Kingfish intro for obvious reasons) to the stereo mix. I verified this as well using CurveEQ, a software VST plugin that allows you to match the EQ profiles of two different recordings. This means that the stereo mix is either a fold-down of the quad, or that the two mixes were put to tape using a console with computer mix automation (which is very early in the game for a 1974 album) with the only changes made for the quad mix were that some elements being pushed to the rear speakers, as none of the left-right placements were altered.
RCA pursued this approach of making the quad mix the "only" mix (and then either releasing it as a single-inventory CD-4 or creating stereo fold-downs from it) but quickly gave up on it because their single-inventory quads were being consigned to the quad bins of record stores instead of being stocked with the 'regular' stereo releases, and I think it's a shame because only doing one mix (it's akin to the philosophy behind Atmos these days) for everyone would've gone a long way to making quad viable back then, especially with the small numbers of product it was moving. At least in terms of WEA quad mixes that have been reissued digitally
Good Old Boys is unique in this regard (quad fold-down identical to stereo) as all of the other ones range from slightly to very different.
It's also worth noting (for me anyway) that this disc is the best-sounding one from a tonality perspective to come out of the Quadio series. There are lots of other ones with with more whizz-bang 'look at me' effects and pans, but none of them is as close to the sound of the original LP (and late '80s/early '90s first-pressing US CD, which was my basis for comparison) as this one.
