When I was looking up all the Silverline credits for the Notable Multichannel engineers thread (my contributions start here) I noticed a bit of a pattern. All of their mixes were done by a company called 5.1 Entertainment Services, who didn't seem to realize that by agreeing to upmix mono and stereo material to 5.1, they were undercutting the importance of doing real 5.1 mixes in the first place. However, there does seem to have been a bit of a heirarchy:
Real Mixes
Ken Caillat
Chris Haynes
Gary Lux
James Stone
I believe Caillat was one of the owners of the company - both he and Lux did 5.1 remix work for Warner's DVD-A program (Caillat did the Fleetwood Macs, and Lux did Alice Cooper for example) and they get a lot of the best material, along with Chris Haynes, who referred to himself as 5.1 Ent's "Chief Engineer" in a tweet about the Motorhead's Ace of Spades 5.1 mix somewhat recently, and the James Stone seems to get the majority of the remainder of "real" 5.1 remix work.
Mixed Bag (most discs with 'Live' in the title are fake)
Rich Fowler
Ken Ramos
Claus Trelby
When you think of "bad Silverline," Fowler is responsible for the great majority of it - a lot of the 'From the Front Row...Live' discs are him, as well as various other live, greatest hits and anthology type releases upmixed from mono or stereo. Ramos and Trelby seem to be variously credited on other releases for both mastering and DVD authoring so I'm guessing they were basically junior level people at 5.1 Ent that got pressed into service when they needed something upmixed that no one else wanted to risk their reputation for. But by the same token both seem to have done a "real" 5.1 mix: Ramos did rf 'interno' and Trelby did a few as well.
Definitely Fake
Anything that only credits "5.1 Entertainment Services"
Yeah I almost laughed out loud when I came across these - I'm not sure how many there are, maybe 10 or 20? Where there's no specific credit other than a vague "surround mix prepared by 5.1 Entertainment Services" - proof to me anyway, that they knew that what they were doing wasn't the right thing.
So yeah, that's it really - there are definitely some exceptions to these tiers, but if you're blind buying any of these discs you have some idea of what you're gonna get based on who mixed them. I think the vast majority of it is pretty underwhelming, both from a surround and content perspective, but there are probably more "real" 5.1 mixes amongst all the crap than people give Silverline credit for.
Oh, and just from my personal experience, Corrosion of Conformity's America's Volume Dealer, despite someone earlier in this thread saying was a real 5.1 mix, is definitely an upmix, albeit a pretty decent one for the time. It's a real shame, because it's a very good album (although maybe not on par with their two previous major label releases, 1994's Deliverance and 1996's Wiseblood) and could've easily been a great discrete 5.1 hard rock mix in the vein of the Foo Fighters' One by One. For my money, CoC might be the most underrated hard rock/heavy metal band of the late '90s - the three albums I mentioned take everything I love about vintage hard rock and heavy metal from the '70s and bring it into the modern era with a fresh twist.
Real Mixes
Ken Caillat
Chris Haynes
Gary Lux
James Stone
I believe Caillat was one of the owners of the company - both he and Lux did 5.1 remix work for Warner's DVD-A program (Caillat did the Fleetwood Macs, and Lux did Alice Cooper for example) and they get a lot of the best material, along with Chris Haynes, who referred to himself as 5.1 Ent's "Chief Engineer" in a tweet about the Motorhead's Ace of Spades 5.1 mix somewhat recently, and the James Stone seems to get the majority of the remainder of "real" 5.1 remix work.
Mixed Bag (most discs with 'Live' in the title are fake)
Rich Fowler
Ken Ramos
Claus Trelby
When you think of "bad Silverline," Fowler is responsible for the great majority of it - a lot of the 'From the Front Row...Live' discs are him, as well as various other live, greatest hits and anthology type releases upmixed from mono or stereo. Ramos and Trelby seem to be variously credited on other releases for both mastering and DVD authoring so I'm guessing they were basically junior level people at 5.1 Ent that got pressed into service when they needed something upmixed that no one else wanted to risk their reputation for. But by the same token both seem to have done a "real" 5.1 mix: Ramos did rf 'interno' and Trelby did a few as well.
Definitely Fake
Anything that only credits "5.1 Entertainment Services"
Yeah I almost laughed out loud when I came across these - I'm not sure how many there are, maybe 10 or 20? Where there's no specific credit other than a vague "surround mix prepared by 5.1 Entertainment Services" - proof to me anyway, that they knew that what they were doing wasn't the right thing.
So yeah, that's it really - there are definitely some exceptions to these tiers, but if you're blind buying any of these discs you have some idea of what you're gonna get based on who mixed them. I think the vast majority of it is pretty underwhelming, both from a surround and content perspective, but there are probably more "real" 5.1 mixes amongst all the crap than people give Silverline credit for.
Oh, and just from my personal experience, Corrosion of Conformity's America's Volume Dealer, despite someone earlier in this thread saying was a real 5.1 mix, is definitely an upmix, albeit a pretty decent one for the time. It's a real shame, because it's a very good album (although maybe not on par with their two previous major label releases, 1994's Deliverance and 1996's Wiseblood) and could've easily been a great discrete 5.1 hard rock mix in the vein of the Foo Fighters' One by One. For my money, CoC might be the most underrated hard rock/heavy metal band of the late '90s - the three albums I mentioned take everything I love about vintage hard rock and heavy metal from the '70s and bring it into the modern era with a fresh twist.