Suggestions for Dutton Vocalion Multichannel SACD Releases

[steelydave]

My feeling is that Reeves did mix everything he claimed he did, it was just that CBS seems to have done multiple quad mixes of some of those early releases, possibly because they hadn't settle on SQ as their LP delivery format of choice and had to go back and make them compliant. Thanks to the Robin reels and the AF SACD release of Laura Nyro's Eli and the Thirteenth Confession album, we know that there are at least 3 quad mixes of this album, with the early ones (the Robin reels) having material mixed center-back (a SQ no-no) and the later version (the AF release) having the rear speaker elements pushed hard left and hard right.

Also take for example that John Cale (formerly of the Velvet Underground) was hired to oversee quad mixes for CBS for a while in the early days, and he only ended up with one quad supervisor credit: Poco's Deliverin' album. I find it hard to believe that he only showed up to do that one mix. What else did he work on?

I don't have the article to hand, but I recently found a story in a Billboard magazine from 1972 where a CBS rep said they'd mixed lots of stuff in quad starting in 1968, but "deliberately held it back from release" until they found (what they thought was) an acceptable LP delivery system in SQ. These releases didn't happen until January of 1972, so I think there was a lot of stockpiling going on. In addition to the Robin reels, and other unreleased things mentioned in advertisements and other print media, there were also samplers that had tracks from Al Kooper's I Stand Alone album, a Mongo Santamaria track from an album he did for CBS before he left for Atlantic, and many others. I feel like these were from full albums mixed for quad rather than tracks just mixed for quad from samplers. Whether I'm right or not, and even if these things could even be found or not remain to be seen, but the prospect is tantalising to say the very least.

 

[4-earredwonder]

My feeling is that Reeves did mix everything he claimed he did, it was just that CBS seems to have done multiple quad mixes of some of those early releases, possibly because they hadn't settle on SQ as their LP delivery format of choice and had to go back and make them compliant. Thanks to the Robin reels and the AF SACD release of Laura Nyro's Eli and the Thirteenth Confession album, we know that there are at least 3 quad mixes of this album, with the early ones (the Robin reels) having material mixed center-back (a SQ no-no) and the later version (the AF release) having the rear speaker elements pushed hard left and hard right.

Also take for example that John Cale (formerly of the Velvet Underground) was hired to oversee quad mixes for CBS for a while in the early days, and he only ended up with one quad supervisor credit: Poco's Deliverin' album. I find it hard to believe that he only showed up to do that one mix. What else did he work on?

I don't have the article to hand, but I recently found a story in a Billboard magazine from 1972 where a CBS rep said they'd mixed lots of stuff in quad starting in 1968, but "deliberately held it back from release" until they found (what they thought was) an acceptable LP delivery system in SQ. These releases didn't happen until January of 1972, so I think there was a lot of stockpiling going on. In addition to the Robin reels, and other unreleased things mentioned in advertisements and other print media, there were also samplers that had tracks from Al Kooper's I Stand Alone album, a Mongo Santamaria track from an album he did for CBS before he left for Atlantic, and many others. I feel like these were from full albums mixed for quad rather than tracks just mixed for quad from samplers. Whether I'm right or not, and even if these things could even be found or not remain to be seen, but the prospect is tantalising to say the very least.

So, in effect Dave, there are 'potentially' dozens of unreleased QUAD mixes dating from 1968. Wonder if Columbia ever archived a listing for future SQ Vinyl/Q8 release. Can ONLY imagine what treasures exist and who in 2021 could ever finally unearth them and deliver them from extinction?

Wonder if 1970's Marrying Maiden IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY with White Bird was ever remixed into QUAD? If not, would be a GREAT Stereo SACD for D~V to consider!

 

[van1]

My feeling is that Reeves did mix everything he claimed he did, it was just that CBS seems to have done multiple quad mixes of some of those early releases, possibly because they hadn't settle on SQ as their LP delivery format of choice and had to go back and make them compliant. Thanks to the Robin reels and the AF SACD release of Laura Nyro's Eli and the Thirteenth Confession album, we know that there are at least 3 quad mixes of this album, with the early ones (the Robin reels) having material mixed center-back (a SQ no-no) and the later version (the AF release) having the rear speaker elements pushed hard left and hard right.

Also take for example that John Cale (formerly of the Velvet Underground) was hired to oversee quad mixes for CBS for a while in the early days, and he only ended up with one quad supervisor credit: Poco's Deliverin' album. I find it hard to believe that he only showed up to do that one mix. What else did he work on?

I have John Cale'a 'what's welsh for zen' bio so will have a quick look. I don't recall him talking about this but will see. Hopefully he liked quad enough to try it on his subsequent solo albums

 

[gvl_guy]

Has DV released anything in quad that was not actually already available in some kind of quad format way back when? (Meaning they were able to get their hands on some stuff from the vaults that never made it to LP or tape?)

 

[steelydave]

I have John Cale'a 'what's welsh for zen' bio so will have a quick look. I don't recall him talking about this but will see. Hopefully he liked quad enough to try it on his subsequent solo albums

https://werksman.home.xs4all.nl/cale/bio/1970.html
"Record label CBS/Columbia hires Cale to remix the classical Masterworks catalogue for quadrophonic sound. Quad however, is a short-lived hype. He remixes albums by Barbra Streisand and Paul Revere & the Raiders. "

https://www.soundonsound.com/people/john-cale
"With one eye always on the bleeding edge of technology, back in 1970, Cale was employed by CBS Records in New York to do quad mixes of their back catalogue, including records by Laura Nyro and Simon & Garfunkel. "Clive [Davis, CBS boss] had a relationship with one of the Japanese companies who offered him several million dollars to develop catalogue for quad. People got hip to all of this, this new format. It was very interesting. The problem was: how do you go from stereo to quad without screwing around with the image?

"The mixing board was very simplistic. This was when CBS Studios was run by the audio engineers' union and it was very powerful. It was like 'Don't touch the board, sonny.' But it was a question of 'How do you get pristine images?' You put the vocal on all four. One of the great tricks that we came up with was with an eight-track machine, we'd run delay from one to two, two to three, three to four. Then you bring each of these tracks up on different speakers and it'd cross the room. That was when you really got an idea of what could happen — when you had a delay that went across the room quickly, it was startling. You got this real vivid aural experience.

"We also ran into the engineering department's attempts to go over to 16-track, which was a plate that you attached and joined two eight-tracks together. It was primitive but it worked. The string section that they put on Simon & Garfunkel's 'Fakin' It' [from 1968's Bookends] was on a separate eight-track tape. The way they were sync'ed was with wax pencil marks on the tape, so you lined them up and pressed Play on both of them simultaneously and then everything would come together."

Why does he reckon quad didn't take off at the time? "I don't know. I was roped into a meeting with Warner Brothers film executives because Kubrick had just done a new movie [A Clockwork Orange] and he wanted the soundtrack in quad, which was the beginning of surround sound in film. All the heads of the departments were at this meeting and the issue was were they going to spend the millions of dollars necessary to rewire the entire chain of Warner film theatres to accommodate the new Kubrick film? I brought my quad mixes in and played some and they were seriously considering doing it. Obviously now it's got easy.""


https://werksman.home.xs4all.nl/cale/bio/1971.html
"After the Quadrophonic project for rival record label Columbia fails to take off, Cale joins Warners as a staff producer. He moves from New York to Los Angeles.

Warners hopes to make a quadrophonic version of A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick. The costs of refitting the theatres for the new sound is too high to make it happen."


https://www.walesonline.co.uk/lifestyle/showbiz/john-cale-says-time-right-2069993
"“I was employed by CBS to oversee their quadraphonic re-mastering program,” he explains.

“It was my job to make sure that all of these records they were putting out in the new quadraphonic format would sound OK even if you played them back through a normal system.

“Essentially the job involved messing around with the equipment in an apartment in New York and they’d bring in these great black boxes to test out the phonographs and their output.

“These guys were engineers, just back from Panama [where the CIA were collaborating with dictator Manuel Noriega during the 1950s through to the ’80s], where they’d spent their time dodging around, trying not to get hit by lightning.

“To meet them in New York where they were working on all this electrical stuff was very interesting to say the least.


“The whole time was very instructive to me actually. I was getting to play around with the master tapes of CBS’s big-name acts, Simon and Garfunkel, Laura Nyro and so on and we’d have to take them down to the basement, these 16-track masters, to play them on a special machine that was essentially two 8-track machines jammed together.

“You’d be listening and trying to align these two machines and suddenly all these extra tracks would appear from nowhere.”"


(and so on..)

 

[sjcorne]

Has DV released anything in quad that was not actually already available in some kind of quad format way back when? (Meaning they were able to get their hands on some stuff from the vaults that never made it to LP or tape?)

Yes, Paul Revere & The Raiders' Hard 'n' Heavy album was never officially released on SQ LP or Q8.

 

[4-earredwonder]

Was it also true that the Columbia QUAD engineers at the time employed superior Pro versions of SQ decoders with improved 'steering' properties to the frankly inferior ones released to the public?

It appears that Chucky's Surround Master would be closer to what those engineers heard at the studio when playing SQ encoded discs than what we, the public, 'endured' in those inferior SQ/QS compatible receivers of the early to mid 70's.

 

[van1]

https://werksman.home.xs4all.nl/cale/bio/1970.html
"Record label CBS/Columbia hires Cale to remix the classical Masterworks catalogue for quadrophonic sound. Quad however, is a short-lived hype. He remixes albums by Barbra Streisand and Paul Revere & the Raiders. "

Have you seen or heard anything to support john Cale as an active hands on quad remixer, or was he more likely overseeing / executive producing the Columbia quad program ?

Also, do you have a strong idea as to who produced the Hard 'n' Heavy (with marshmallow) & Indian Reservation quads?

 

[sjcorne]

Also, do you have a strong idea as to who produced the Hard 'n' Heavy (with marshmallow) & Indian Reservation quads?

Larry Keyes & Al Lawrence did Indian Reservation, and Jim Reeves mixed nine tracks from Hard 'n' Heavy. The two missing songs ("Mr. Sun, Mr. Moon" and "Without You") were newly remixed to quad in 2019 by Mark Wilder.

 

[humprof]

My feeling is that Reeves did mix everything he claimed he did, it was just that CBS seems to have done multiple quad mixes of some of those early releases, possibly because they hadn't settle on SQ as their LP delivery format of choice and had to go back and make them compliant. Thanks to the Robin reels and the AF SACD release of Laura Nyro's Eli and the Thirteenth Confession album, we know that there are at least 3 quad mixes of this album, with the early ones (the Robin reels) having material mixed center-back (a SQ no-no) and the later version (the AF release) having the rear speaker elements pushed hard left and hard right.

Also take for example that John Cale (formerly of the Velvet Underground) was hired to oversee quad mixes for CBS for a while in the early days, and he only ended up with one quad supervisor credit: Poco's Deliverin' album. I find it hard to believe that he only showed up to do that one mix. What else did he work on?

I don't have the article to hand, but I recently found a story in a Billboard magazine from 1972 where a CBS rep said they'd mixed lots of stuff in quad starting in 1968, but "deliberately held it back from release" until they found (what they thought was) an acceptable LP delivery system in SQ. These releases didn't happen until January of 1972, so I think there was a lot of stockpiling going on. In addition to the Robin reels, and other unreleased things mentioned in advertisements and other print media, there were also samplers that had tracks from Al Kooper's I Stand Alone album, a Mongo Santamaria track from an album he did for CBS before he left for Atlantic, and many others. I feel like these were from full albums mixed for quad rather than tracks just mixed for quad from samplers. Whether I'm right or not, and even if these things could even be found or not remain to be seen, but the prospect is tantalising to say the very least.

I keep thinking that you need to collect all of this kind of stuff into a book, Dave.

 

[4-earredwonder]

I keep thinking that you need to collect all of this kind of stuff into a book, Dave.

I was thinking the very same thing, humprof, but who will write the liner notes FORWARD?

 

[steelydave]

Have you seen or heard anything to support john Cale as an active hands on quad remixer, or was he more likely overseeing / executive producing the Columbia quad program ?

Also, do you have a strong idea as to who produced the Hard 'n' Heavy (with marshmallow) & Indian Reservation quads?

I don't have any inside information aside from what's out there in the form of credits and interviews, but it seems like he was maybe doing some of both - the interview snippets seem to suggest he was mixing, but then the credits on the Poco Deliverin' album credit him with Quadraphonic Sound Supervision and Don Young as the Quadraphonic Remix Engineer.

It's also possible that they always worked in teams of two that were kind of equals, and the guy that pushed the 'record' button on the tape deck was the Engineer, and the other guy was the 'Supervisor'. I don't know really.

Cale was certainly there at the same time as Jim Reeves though, so it's possible that they worked together as a team - this photo from Mr. Reeves' website shows Cale sitting in the quadraphonic editing room at CBS NY:

Mr. Reeves actually posted here at QQ once in 2017 in the poll thread for the 2nd Blood Sweat & Tears album, where he relayed some interesting info about those early days at CBS:

"Thanks for the 8. When they asked me at CBS to mix in quad, I was reluctant. But they bugged the hell out of me and I thought maybe I could be the Quad pioneer mix engineer, I made the first demo for the format wars with a Paul Revere and The Raiders in CBS' SQ and pulled out all the stops and it won. But then quad was poo-poo'd by the critics. Roy Hallee, the producer and engineer of the BS&T stereo album was an amazing talent to try and match. I was thrown into a new quad mixing room at 49 East 52nd street. I felt a responsibility to the artist to be as accurate as possible (although in most cases, they weren't even advised of these remixes...When I asked Jeff Beck how he liked my quad mixes, he said, "What's quad?"), but on the other hand, there was an opportunity to have some surprises which I occasionally took advantage of. Don't forget, as engineer, I was not necessarily a fan of the artist that I had to produce in this scenario. Wally would bring all the multi-tracks up from the vault and I'd put them up on the 16 track machine and have at it. I would submit the final mix to my boss, John McClure and he'd approve it and then on to the next. CBS was just trying to build a new library of existing product for quadraphonic. There were about two other guys doing it as well. Until a couple of years ago a quad fan contacted me and enlightened me about the world of quadraphonic that had developed. I was told it failed misrably and vendors were trying to pass off their quad products as dual stereo systems. One output for the bedroom and one for the living room kind of thing. Anyway, I still have some of my 4 track copies. I spent a lot of time on Bookends and loved it but I don't have a copy and am not sure the original producer allowed it out. Anyway, 8 is good. Thanks Ed. Jim"

Unfortunately he hasn't been back since he wrote that post, which is a real shame - I bet he'd be a fountain of interesting info and he'd surely remember what Cale's participation was. Maybe someone can reach out to him via his website and ask him if he might return.

 

[steelydave]

Was it also true that the Columbia QUAD engineers at the time employed superior Pro versions of SQ decoders with improved 'steering' properties to the frankly inferior ones released to the public?

It appears that Chucky's Surround Master would be closer to what those engineers heard at the studio when playing SQ encoded discs than what we, the public, 'endured' in those inferior SQ/QS compatible receivers of the early to mid 70's.

I've never seen any evidence of that, but who knows. This picture of Columbia Masterworks producer Andrew Kazdin taken during the quad era clearly shows a run-of-the-mill Sony SQD-2010 or 2020 on top of the equipment stack behind him.

CBS and Sony were doing their damnedest at the time to sell SQ as the premier quadraphonic LP format, it doesn't make sense to me that they'd hold back better decoders from the public if they existed.

 

[steelydave]

I keep thinking that you need to collect all of this kind of stuff into a book, Dave.

As soon as Random House caves in to my demands for Scarlett Johansson to read the audiobook version, my masterwork will be unleashed upon the world, but not a moment sooner!

(In all seriousness, if I could turn being an internet know-it-all into a full-time paid gig I would, but I don't have the first clue about where to start.)

 

[rustyandi]

I've never seen any evidence of that, but who knows. This picture of Columbia Masterworks producer Andrew Kazdin taken during the quad era clearly shows a run-of-the-mill Sony SQD-2010 or 2020 on top of the equipment stack behind him.

View attachment 64756

CBS and Sony were doing their damnedest at the time to sell SQ as the premier quadraphonic LP format, it doesn't make sense to me that they'd hold back better decoders from the public if they existed.

on top of the 2020 looks like a CBS 400 decoder

 

[J. PUPSTER]

As soon as Random House caves in to my demands for Scarlett Johansson to read the audiobook version, my masterwork will be unleashed upon the world, but not a moment sooner!

(In all seriousness, if I could turn being an internet know-it-all into a full-time paid gig I would, but I don't have the first clue about where to start.)

This is hilarious- ScarJo handling some steelydave the imagination runs wild!

 

[humprof]

As soon as Random House caves in to my demands for Scarlett Johansson to read the audiobook version, my masterwork will be unleashed upon the world, but not a moment sooner!

(In all seriousness, if I could turn being an internet know-it-all into a full-time paid gig I would, but I don't have the first clue about where to start.)

I can't help you with the full-time gig, unfortunately--let alone with Scarlett Johannson, who's a happily married woman! Still, in terms of a one-off book: you could go the Dr. Aix route and get subscribers to fund it ahead of time. I bet you could scare up 100 subscribers here on QQ alone, and maybe Mike would sell it on the Dutton site, too. (Synergy!)

 

[fredblue]

i wonder how QQ member Tamsin Darke went about getting their Quad book published?

https://www.lulu.com/shop/tamsin-da...cord-and-tape/paperback/product-24084241.html

 

[4-earredwonder]

While we're breathlessly awaiting D~V's next batch of QUAD SACDs, one VERY overlooked label which AFAIK never released an album in surround is the renowned WINDHAM HILL LABEL which went from an independent label specializing in acoustic, folk, new age, jazz and an eclectic assortment of music to now being controlled by SONY!

IMO, Windham Hill's records/CDs were exceptionally audiophile in nature and its roster of artists was stellar.

Before Audio Fidelity's demise, they did manage to release a single Stereo SACD by Windham Hill Artist Michael Hedges which is the only Stereo SACD of Windham Hill music in existence.

Since Michael Dutton has been releasing exceptional Stereo SACDs from the GRP catalogue, wonder if he'd ever consider dipping into Windham Hill's exceptional back catalogue. It would certainly satisfy his loyal base and IMO, some gorgeous music would be liberated from Windham Hill's vaults.

Windham Hill Records - Wikipedia [List of artists from the Windham Hill Catalogue included under ROSTER]

 

[JediJoker]

While we're breathlessly awaiting D~V's next batch of QUAD SACDs, one VERY overlooked label which AFAIK never released an album in surround is the renowned WINDHAM HILL LABEL which went from an independent label specializing in acoustic, folk, new age, jazz and an eclectic assortment of music to now being controlled by SONY!

IMO, Windham Hill's records/CDs were exceptionally audiophile in nature and its roster of artists was stellar.

Some of my favorite acoustic music was released by Windham Hill: Montreux and its splinter groups (Chiaroscuro is a masterpiece), Michael Hedges, Turtle Island String Quartet, label founder Will Ackerman... Right up there with ECM in terms of consistent quality and unique style. I don't think any of their releases need remastering, though; they already sound stellar. They just need to be re-pressed.