Thanks to all for the information that the quads are faked. Judging from the low-quality pictures, it seems very easy to manufacture pics of SQ and Q8 versions of both. The mixes do sound pretty good, though. The upmixer went to an awful lot of trouble to fake both Q8 and SQ versions.
I should mention that the hardcover book that came with the "Shine On" box makes mention of a quad mix of "Meddle" being prepared. If that's accurate, one exists (or existed!) in the vaults, but it's never seen the light of day.
As for Columbia House, I read online that Columbia House had a very special and very small reel-to-reel club and that Animals was offered. Columbia House did offer R2R tapes up until 1983 (I think), but members had to indicate a special preference for them to get the listings. I too was surprised when I was a member in the '80's and could not obtain Pink Floyd records from Columbia House. I probably would have remained a member longer had they been available, but my budget was very thin back then.
Columbia House, at least by the time I was old enough to be a member, didn't have a dedicated reel club, but they definitely did often make reels available and were the last and only place to get reels of new mainstream titles. 1983 sounds about right for the death. Going back into the dimmest reaches of my failing memory, I think every entry in the catalog ended with with the codes showing which format was available...I'm thinking "S" for "Record" (probably because in prior years that meant "stereo"), "C" for "Cassette", "X" for 8-track and "T" for reel (held over from the days when "tape" meant "reel"?), but I'm probably wrong. The last reel I remember buying was The Eagles' "The Long Run", but maybe I got others. Their criteria for whether or not to release something on reel often made no sense to me.
Another oddity was that even in the 1970s, every reel they sold was manufactured by Columbia House or was left over from an earlier Columbia era--during the time when you could still occasionally get reasonably new titles on reel in the stores, Columbia didn't offer them. So you could get Columbia's custom-made reel of something you couldn't buy in the stores, but you couldn't get, say, anything by Elton John, even though everything up through "Caribou" was released on reel by MCA.
Here's the reference for the Animals R2R. It's the last post on the thread.
http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/ar.../t-139264.html
Well, I certainly don't know everything...but as a very long time Pink Floyd fan, an even longer time reel fan and a member of the Columbia Record Club during the era in question, I just have a very, very, very hard time believing this. I guess it's possible that there was some extremely brief window during which CH manufactured a reel of "Animals", but I find it hard to believe for multiple reasons, mainly the otherwise complete nonexistence of Pink Floyd in the CH catalogs and the fact that I'd never heard about it until now.
Further, Columbia House's usual routine for rock/pop reels was to use 3-3/4 i.p.s. 7-1/2 i.p.s. was reserved for "serious" (i.e., classical) titles. Back in the days when you could buy reels in the stores, some Columbia pop titles were 7-1/2, but I never saw a single one from the club. So the poster's claim that he had a 7-1/2 i.p.s. reel of "Animals" is doubly difficult for me to believe.
By the way, at the time reel finally croaked, CH was actually working some pretty good magic at 3-3/4. I guess it's not that shocking given that cassettes could sound OK at half that speed, but for most of reel's life, "3-3/4" meant "probably won't sound all that great." I also remember pre-recorded cassettes finally starting to sound pretty darned good right before CDs came along, so much so that I had started buying them for the convenience...of course, if I listened to them now after years of high-quality digital, I'd probably think they were awful.
