Rhino Quadios - Batch 7 - Speculation

[Q-Eight]

I'd love to hear River Deep, Mountain High in Atmos or 5.1/quad for that matter. Bring it!
A wall of sound indeed.

Recorded at Gold Star in the Spring of '66. We would be lucky if they were 4-track by that point. Phil Spector might've even still been using 3-track for all we know. Doubt it would make for much of a surround sound mix. Even if it's 4-track, it's probably lead vocals, backing vocals, band track and one more for overdubs.

 

[Aging quadie]

Recorded at Gold Star in the Spring of '66. We would be lucky if they were 4-track by that point. Phil Spector might've even still been using 3-track for all we know. Doubt it would make for much of a surround sound mix. Even if it's 4-track, it's probably lead vocals, backing vocals, band track and one more for overdubs.

Could these tapes have been lost in the Universal fire?

 

[Q-Eight]

Could these tapes have been lost in the Universal fire?

It's my understanding - and I could be completely wrong - that the *BULK* of the items lost in the big Universal fire in '08 were a lot of production masters. You know, tapes that were sent off to places for producing commercial copies. But it was also a transfer station for items that were to be sent off to various storage places. For instance; according to Richard Carpenter himself.... the Carpenters' multitracks that were pulled for the 5.1 SACD project in the mid 2000's were sent to that location; intended to be sent back to storage.... however they did burn before they could be sent to storage. However.... he wasn't clear if they were safety copy tapes or the original multitracks from the 70's. (I would imagine they were safeties; I highly doubt the original multitracks would be used for anything even 20 years ago).... but all was not lost since they'd made digital copies of all those multitracks anyway.

It was long said that a healthy chunk of Buddy Holly's original tapes burned in the fire; only for them to show up in a video last year from inside Iron Mountain. So.... I don't know.... maybe I'm just trying to stay optimistic - but I don't think a lot of anything important went up in that fire. One report I read said that a large portion of what did burn was 2" video tape copies of TV shows and weren't music related at all.

 

[jamoke]

NYT article - free link.
The Day the Music Burned

 

[Bill_in_Cle]

Fifteen pages of speculation for Quadio batch #7. There has to be something wrong with us. @ForagingRhino must be having a ball.

@ForagingRhino seems to be having a winter nap

I doubt we'll get another War Quadio in this next batch since Rhino is releasing "WAR Live in Japan 1974" on CD and LP that day.

 

[GOS]

I'd love to see some different artists this time.

 

[ar surround]

I'd love to see some different artists this time.

So...Who's Left?

 

[GOS]

So...Who's Left?

Unfortunately, that sort of info is not in my brain cavity.

 

[H.A.L.]

I keep checking the Rhino website just in case something suddenly drops. Nothing yet on the Quadio front.

 

[steelydave]

It's my understanding - and I could be completely wrong - that the *BULK* of the items lost in the big Universal fire in '08 were a lot of production masters. You know, tapes that were sent off to places for producing commercial copies. But it was also a transfer station for items that were to be sent off to various storage places. For instance; according to Richard Carpenter himself.... the Carpenters' multitracks that were pulled for the 5.1 SACD project in the mid 2000's were sent to that location; intended to be sent back to storage.... however they did burn before they could be sent to storage. However.... he wasn't clear if they were safety copy tapes or the original multitracks from the 70's. (I would imagine they were safeties; I highly doubt the original multitracks would be used for anything even 20 years ago).... but all was not lost since they'd made digital copies of all those multitracks anyway.

It was long said that a healthy chunk of Buddy Holly's original tapes burned in the fire; only for them to show up in a video last year from inside Iron Mountain. So.... I don't know.... maybe I'm just trying to stay optimistic - but I don't think a lot of anything important went up in that fire. One report I read said that a large portion of what did burn was 2" video tape copies of TV shows and weren't music related at all.

Sorry to burst your bubble but tons of actual "master" masters burned. I think you can intuit from the fact that there's never been a single digital reissue of an A&M or ABC (or any of their subsidiaries like Command, Chess, Cadet, DOT, etc.) quad mix that those tapes are amongst the incinerated.

Thankfully A&M did 15ips analog safety copies of most (or all) of their stereo masters in the '90s, and everything since the fire has been struck from those (Intervention Records, who do stereo SACD reissues have posted pictures of some of these tapes on their website) but it seems that they didn't bother doing this with their quad library since there was no probably thought of them ever being useful again in 1996. Some of this stuff will have existed in foreign vaults (King Japan, A&M Canada, Precision Tapes UK) but whether any of it still does is questionable at best - Mike Dutton told me that when he worked for Pye in the '80s (parent company of Precision Tapes) he went to the facility where all these tapes were being held and they were all outside, "covered in bird shit" and are probably in a landfill now so I wouldn't have much hope.

Apparently the multitracks for these labels were held elsewhere (there's an atmos remix of Chaka Khan & Rufus' 'Tell Me Something Good' on streaming for example) so new masters could be created - this is what Soundgarden had to do because their stereo masters are gone - but is any major label in 2025 really going to pay to have the tapes for the more obscure ABC and A&M artists located, digitized and remixed in stereo, let alone quad or Atmos?