HiRez Poll Spinners, The - SPINNERS [Blu-Ray Audio]

[fredblue]

For those of us that don't have the CD-4 or the Q8 versions, would it be possible for you to make a list of your recommended channel level adjustments, track by track, to get the Blu-ray closer to the balances of the old versions? Only if it's not too much trouble, and if you were kind of headed in that direction anyways.
Thanks,
Mark

i'm far from expert in these matters but i will certainly try my best and proffer some possible suggestions. it's no trouble at all, it's a pleasure

at least with this new Blu-ray it appears to be more a matter of simply adjusting what are already great sounding individual channels, whereas working on the old Quad tape and CD-4 LP was like putting lipstick on a pig!!

i should qualify that last remark by saying that, in all fairness to these Quadio Blu-ray's and to really put things in perspective, the WEA Quads on the formats offered in the 70's, despite having solid Surround mixes and having some really great music among them, had more than their fair set of issues back in the day.

for example, a number of the WEA Quad 8-track tapes had their channels wrongly assigned. although WEA were not alone in this its still less than ideal and as for WEA's CD-4 LP pressings they were seldom that great. case in point, it took 4 Quad LP pressings and 2 Quad tapes of the Average White Band's AWB before i got what i felt was a truly satisfactory outcome for that album from either of those formats and even then i just know a Quadio Blu-ray would trounce all of them in a heartbeat.

 

[J. PUPSTER]

I can't speak to that, having never hear the quad LP.

But I can say with almost complete certainty that the music on the tracks sounds balanced while the vocals do not.

Check for yourself on "Don't Let The Green Grass", which has big-band horns in stereo across the front. They sound balanced to me while the vocal does not. See if you hear it the same or not.

I'm sorry, but I'm not hearing it that way. I made some adjustments just as a trial run and came up with adjusting this one +6dbs in the Front Left and adding some +EQ from around 400hz-1000hz with most at around 500hz. (to help boost the vocals a bit) and then another 1db increase to the Fronts. This sounds really great to me and Centers the vocals. There is a very prominent guitar in the Front Left throughout. The horns are both in the rears and the fronts.

Every song seems to need something a little different IMO.

These Rhinos, are in dire need of professional Mastering IMO. I consider them "Unmastered"
(*Don't let the unmastered version Fool You...)

(Freddy's got a Cadillac - but the singer always drives a Nash)

It may be awhile before I can vote on this one, lots of work to do yet

Here's what my corrected (test) file looks like.

 

[ogrequad]

I haven't read through all these comments, but it's reassuring (and disappointing) to hear that others are having the same experience with this disc. I'm not a techie when it comes to my listening, so I don't analyze waveforms and such, but I could hear right away that the quality of this release was a step down from the others in this current Quadio batch. What is frustrating is the wild inconsistencies from one song to the next, not just in mix but also in volume levels. It's really weird. That said, the big hits sound great here, especially "Could It Be I'm Falling In Love", which is a near reference mix for me. That song alone gets a "10" from me, but alas, I can only give the full album a "7" due to the aforementioned inconsistencies.

 

[fredblue]

I'm sorry, but I'm not hearing it that way. I made some adjustments just as a trial run and came up with adjusting this one +6dbs in the Front Left and adding some +EQ from around 400hz-1000hz with most at around 500hz. (to help boost the vocals a bit) and then another 1db increase to the Fronts. This sounds really great to me and Centers the vocals. There is a very prominent guitar in the Front Left throughout. The horns are both in the rears and the fronts.

Every song seems to need something a little different IMO.

These Rhinos, are in dire need of professional Mastering IMO. I consider them "Unmastered"
(*Don't let the unmastered version Fool You...)

(Freddy's got a Cadillac - but the singer always drives a Nash)

It may be awhile before I can vote on this one, lots of work to do yet

Here's what my corrected (test) file looks like.

View attachment 97489

bravo, Mister Pupster! very similar looking to the old CD-4, i reckon!

a fun wee difference i can spot is the level of separation in the front channels of the Quadio Blu-ray where they fall pretty much silent right after the initial trumpet blast intro! (around 7-16 seconds in) you don't get that kinda front to back (or rather in this case, back to front!) wipeout with the CD-4 but it made a pretty good fist of it

 

[4-earredwonder]

IMO, without the support of a SOLID phantom center channel like I hear DISTINCTLY on all my Dutton Vocalion QUAD SACDs, it seems something was seriously amiss in the mastering process when replicating SPINNERS for QUAD BD~A!

And NOT all of us are Do it your selfers and adept at properly balancing the channels for correct playback and we shouldn't have to.

The question arises .... did Rhino access the absolute QUAD master tapes ..... and/or were there 'issues' with that 50 year old magnetic master tape?

Once RHINO becomes aware of these issues, hopefully they're rectify it and reissue replacement discs.

For the 'average' consumer purchasing this disc ..... I think in all fairness that is the ONLY option!

 

[LuvMyQuad]

IMO, without the support of a SOLID phantom center channel like I hear DISTINCTLY on all my Dutton Vocalion QUAD SACDs, it seems something was seriously amiss in the mastering process when replicating SPINNERS for QUAD BD~A!

And NOT all of us are Do it your selfers and adept at properly balancing the channels for correct playback and we shouldn't have to.

The question arises .... did Rhino access the absolute QUAD master tapes ..... and/or were there 'issues' with that 50 year old magnetic master tape?

Once RHINO becomes aware of these issues, hopefully they're rectify it and reissue replacement discs.

For the 'average' consumer purchasing this disc ..... I think in all fairness that is the ONLY option!

I haven't received my Quadio shipment yet, but judging from all the comments here, I have to agree with Ralphie on this. I purchased this release as part of the bundle. I don't care for the genera but I figured I'd try to support the cause. All good deeds...

This could have been caught so easily, and apparently it was, and for whatever reason, it was allowed to proceed forward anyway. Is anyone critically listening to these at Rhino? I'm just glad the issue didn't happen to the other three releases I do care about.

 

[quicksrt]

i'm far from expert in these matters but i will certainly try my best and proffer some possible suggestions. it's no trouble at all, it's a pleasure

at least with this new Blu-ray it appears to be more a matter of simply adjusting what are already great sounding individual channels, whereas working on the old Quad tape and CD-4 LP was like putting lipstick on a pig!!

i should qualify that last remark by saying that, in all fairness to these Quadio Blu-ray's and to really put things in perspective, the WEA Quads on the formats offered in the 70's, despite having solid Surround mixes and having some really great music among them, had more than their fair set of issues back in the day.

for example, a number of the WEA Quad 8-track tapes had their channels wrongly assigned. although WEA were not alone in this its still less than ideal and as for WEA's CD-4 LP pressings they were seldom that great. case in point, it took 4 Quad LP pressings and 2 Quad tapes of the Average White Band's AWB before i got what i felt was a truly satisfactory outcome for that album from either of those formats and even then i just know a Quadio Blu-ray would trounce all of them in a heartbeat.

Great work and a lot of effort on your part. But I wish someone was working with and comparing the CD-4 and the Q4 reel rather than the Q8. I think of Q8 as "the little toy cartridge that could." But not really ideal for use in benchmark comparisons. Did you have a chance to hear a Q4 conversion of this title?

 

[Tres Discrete]

fret ye not! i think it's very much salvageable with some level adjustments and perhaps a sprinkling of EQ to suit one's taste? certainly going through the channels with a fine-toothed comb i could tell the sound quality within each one of those channels is leaps and bounds ahead of what's on the old Quad tape and LP

Hmmm…sounds like a volume boost to the front left is in order?

 

[fredblue]

Great work and a lot of effort on your part. But I wish someone was working with and comparing the CD-4 and the Q4 reel rather than the Q8. I think of Q8 as "the little toy cartridge that could." But not really ideal for use in benchmark comparisons. Did you have a chance to hear a Q4 conversion of this title?

sorry, i'm not setup for Q4 and really only trust my own discs and tapes and setup thereof; you never know what someone else might have done in order to arrive at a conversion with regard to altering EQ, changing channel level balances, etc.

 

[fredblue]

Hmmm…sounds like a volume boost to the front left is in order?

that's the major adjustment, yes!
i was finding an overall boost of +5dB in the Front Left got most of the tracks much closer to the original.

 

[esimms86]

Makes wonder what people in attendance at the recent Rhino event in Cali thought of this one. I know that audio memory is fleeting, plus listening to sound put out by those Klipsch Jubilees has to also be a confounding factor. Still, I’m curious to find out if any of those folks experienced any buyers remorse when they had a chance to listen to the Spinners on their home systems.

 

[Dynamic Editor]

as you can see, the Rear Right is considerably louder on the Blu-ray than on the CD-4 and the Front Left's way too low again (as it is on every track).

(pics depict the channels in order from top to bottom; Front Left, Front Right, Rear Left, Rear Right)

CD-4:

View attachment 97471

Quadio Blu-ray:

View attachment 97472

I actually wonder how much of these differences are caused by mastering choices after mixing on the CD-4. From what I could gather using a Mid-Side Encoder-Decoder Plugin (which I primarily used to figure out how loud the vocals were), I noticed that the bass is mixed in the center of either the front or back channels across the runtime.

Despite the differences in the two versions of "One of a Kind (Love Affair)", I actually believe the blu-ray is more faithful to how the back channels were made during mixing, as the bass is centered between the back channels on the Rhino release version. (I can't speak for how it sounds on the CD-4, but I imagine it's panned slightly to the left if the waveform is anything to go by.)

This clashes a bit with my belief that the back right channel ought to be quieter to make the mix sound better (as that cymbal, kick, and snare being panned so heavily towards a single channel is mighty distracting), but if we're talking about how the back channels of "One of a Kind (Love Affair)" were meant to sound by the mixing engineer, I think that the blu-ray gets it more correct.

As for what the mixing engineer intended with the front channels, I still think Rhino's blu-ray release is incorrect. Apart from the vocals, there's an interplay between the strings that's entirely missing from "Just You and Me Baby" if the front left channel isn't made significantly louder than it is on the disc.

(On a separate note, I realized I completely forgot to check the front channels of track 10, and I think the front left channel of that song needs to be amplified by 3dB, which I edited into post #4 of this thread: HiRez Poll - Spinners, The - SPINNERS [Blu-Ray Audio])

For those curious about the mid-side encoder-decoder plugin, this is how it looks (and it's free, if anyone else wants to toy around with it):

 

[Dynamic Editor]

Gonna avoid voting on this one for a while, as I find my judgement too attached to the idea that there are errors in how the front left channel is presented on the disc. I am however leaning towards a 5 or 4.

The audio quality is great, but I found myself unimpressed as a whole, both for the apparent issue I noticed and the fact that the use of hard panning between the front and back sets of channels was jarring. It made the elements of the mix feel more disparate than they ought to be, especially when the backing vocals appeared at the exact opposite plane of the lead vocals.

 

[SmcAustin]

Fortunately for me, the HEOS app makes it easy to adjust channel levels as I listen with my Denon receiver. I just kept increasing level until the lead vocal was where I wanted it in the center, +8 according to the display for the first song.

Philosophically, I have sympathy for the Rhino decision makers. Presenting the recording as found is defensible philosophically compared to the slippery slope of intervention. I wonder how tight the budget is if the cost of adjusting levels were a concern. OTOH, we take intervention for granted when we trust the mastering engineer/producer, ie, Dutton, etc.

Still, it's great to have this available and I found the mix a delight, with lots of interesting side and back content. I give it an 8.

 

[key_wiz]

Fortunately for me, the HEOS app makes it easy to adjust channel levels as I listen with my Denon receiver. I just kept increasing level until the lead vocal was where I wanted it in the center, +8 according to the display for the first song.

Philosophically, I have sympathy for the Rhino decision makers. Presenting the recording as found is defensible philosophically compared to the slippery slope of intervention. I wonder how tight the budget is if the cost of adjusting levels were a concern. OTOH, we take intervention for granted when we trust the mastering engineer/producer, ie, Dutton, etc.

Still, it's great to have this available and I found the mix a delight, with lots of interesting side and back content. I give it an 8.

Side content?

 

[key_wiz]

Well, I take back most of what I said earlier about the fronts being balanced other than the lead vocals. Upon repeated listening, the front left is clearly too quiet. And simply raising the volume on that channel to the point where the lead vocal is centered seems to resolve most all the problems with the mix.

 

[SmcAustin]

Side content?

Only for me! That's where the "back speakers" are in my 7.1 system. I hear phantom side placement rather than four quad corners.

 

[Greg Z]

I'll start by saying I have always been happy with Rhino's products and have never had any shipping problems either.
I love all of the Quadio releases so far except for this one. I'm the guy that gave it a 4 rating. I just don't understand how
the people at Rhino could know about the problems with the levels and do nothing. How the levels could be correct for
the old quad releases and wrong on the original master tapes doesn't make any sense at all.
The cost couldn't be much of an issue because adjusting the levels after the tapes have been digitized is pretty simple especially
for a professional engineer. I ended up adjusting the levels myself.
I used DVD Audio Extractor to extract and decode the quad audio tracks to mono tracks in WAV format.
I opened the tracks in Sound Forge 14 and adjusted the levels. Unfortunately, I don't have software to re-encode the tracks
back to DTS-HD Master audio so I had to make do with LPCM 4.0 WAV files. Here are settings I ended up using if anyone is
interested

 

[Greg Z]

 

[quicksrt]

For those curious about the mid-side encoder-decoder plugin, this is how it looks (and it's free, if anyone else wants to toy around with it):View attachment 97507

Maybe it's just me, but it looks like on my screen that channel 1 of track three (Green Grass) as shown above it a bit too loud, and that the correction should be a slightly less than a correction, no? 1db less, or .5 db less? May as well nail it perfect while we are at it?