Can't find the quad master for New and Improved, ding dang it.
Wow, what a shame - I'm wondering, as someone with many years of experience with these kinds of things, could you give us any insight (even if you can't speak about this album particularly) into the most likely or common reasons for this kind of thing happening?
To me this is a particularly unusual situation, because the three Spinners albums released by Atlantic were done in consecutive years ('73, '74, '75), at the same studio (Sigma Sound) and the last two (
New and Improved and
Pick of the Litter) were both mastered by the same guy (Tom Dwyer) at the same cutting facility ("CD-4 Cutting Room at the Columbia Recording Studio, New York, N.Y") so how does the middle one in the series vanish? I have some recollection that when the Quadio box was being assembled, some of the Chicago quad masters were found in the CBS NY vault - is there any chance
New and Improved is there too?
It's also my understanding from speaking to Sigma veteran Arthur Stoppe that safety copies of every completed mix (both stereo and quad) were made after the sessions were complete, and retained in the Sigma vault until/unless the label requested them. When Sigma closed in the '90s all of these tapes were returned to the labels with the exception of about 6,000 tapes where ownership couldn't be established that were donated to Drexel University, where they're now housed. If both sets of tapes are missing, could this indicate someone pulled them for a project and then subsequently misfiled them?
Do you have any record of having the tapes at all? I'm not sure how far back the Warners digital asset management system reaches, but I guess the optimist in me is hoping that it's more a case of "we can't find them at the moment" because an asset control barcode sticker fell off or they're in a storage facility waiting to be cataloged, rather than a "they definitely don't exist" scenario due to being thrown away or stolen or something. As someone with a deep interest in the history of the format, not to mention a desire to be in this kind of work, your perspective would be really valuable.