Supertramp - CRIME OF THE CENTURY - Where is it?!

[Bob Romano]

Personally, I'm not interested in live performances...

I have this show on Blu-ray and the performances are really great. Very faithful to the originals.

 

[steelydave]

There were no quad mixes done while I was there (until 1979). I'm sure the Trident A-Range mix console was capable, but there were no 4 track tape machines setup, at least during my time there. When I was doing much of my work at Farmyard Studios in the '80s, when I started there was a Trident desk, but even when they upgraded to an early SSL which would have been quad capable, there was no demand for quad at that time.

So I never mixed anything in quad, my first surround experiences were from the early 2000's - at that time mostly mixing to accompany video for DVD etc....

SWT

Very interesting indeed - it seems like even though quad was a relatively quick failure in the '70s, nearly every major (and often, minor) studio upgraded their hardware and monitoring "just in case" and then subsequently had little or no use for it (he says weeping, as a lover of quad mixes). It sort of reminds me of an anecdote I once read about the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s - very few people actually became wealthy from striking gold, and instead the entities that did well were the outfitters who provided pickaxes, sieves and other equipment to the hopeful prospectors. I think if anyone did well off quad it was the equipment manufacturers, not only on the professional but consumer side too - if you want proof of that look no further than eBay, where it seems like there are more four-channel reel-to-reel decks available for sale than there are desirable tapes. We may occasionally complain about the quality of multichannel mixes today, but we certainly can't say we're not spoiled for choice.

What you've said also echoes what some other engineers have told me - Mike Butcher, who did the brilliant quad mix of Black Sabbath's Paranoid at Morgan Brussels (on a beautiful CADAC console) said he'd only ever done one other quad mix ("of some French accordion music") and when I asked Stuart Epps about Gus Dudgeon's Mill Studios being quad-equipped, he told me they'd built it with the intention of remixing all of Elton's albums in quad, but by the time it was done quad was so dead that it never happened, and that the only "catalog" type of remix ever done at the studio was the stereo remixes for the Superior Sound of Elton John compilation nearly ten years later.

I do appreciate your weighing in here too (even if my pipe-iest pipe dream hopes of a Mahavishnu Orchestra Lost Trident Sessions quad mix now lay in smithereens) because there are so many of your colleagues from the short "golden era" of quad that I'd love to question but who are no longer around to tell us how and why they did things. I think we take for granted that knowledge is always available, but my experience in researching a niche subject like quad says that the answers to some questions are lost forever, so the simple act of writing things down can mean that information (sometimes the importance of which we don't even realise) can endure in perpetuity.

 

[inspclouseau]

Very interesting indeed - it seems like even though quad was a relatively quick failure in the '70s, nearly every major (and often, minor) studio upgraded their hardware and monitoring "just in case" and then subsequently had little or no use for it (he says weeping, as a lover of quad mixes). It sort of reminds me of an anecdote I once read about the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s - very few people actually became wealthy from striking gold, and instead the entities that did well were the outfitters who provided pickaxes, sieves and other equipment to the hopeful prospectors. I think if anyone did well off quad it was the equipment manufacturers, not only on the professional but consumer side too - if you want proof of that look no further than eBay, where it seems like there are more four-channel reel-to-reel decks available for sale than there are desirable tapes. We may occasionally complain about the quality of multichannel mixes today, but we certainly can't say we're not spoiled for choice.

What you've said also echoes what some other engineers have told me - Mike Butcher, who did the brilliant quad mix of Black Sabbath's Paranoid at Morgan Brussels (on a beautiful CADAC console) said he'd only ever done one other quad mix ("of some French accordion music") and when I asked Stuart Epps about Gus Dudgeon's Mill Studios being quad-equipped, he told me they'd built it with the intention of remixing all of Elton's albums in quad, but by the time it was done quad was so dead that it never happened, and that the only "catalog" type of remix ever done at the studio was the stereo remixes for the Superior Sound of Elton John compilation nearly ten years later.

I do appreciate your weighing in here too (even if my pipe-iest pipe dream hopes of a Mahavishnu Orchestra Lost Trident Sessions quad mix now lay in smithereens) because there are so many of your colleagues from the short "golden era" of quad that I'd love to question but who are no longer around to tell us how and why they did things. I think we take for granted that knowledge is always available, but my experience in researching a niche subject like quad says that the answers to some questions are lost forever, so the simple act of writing things down can mean that information (sometimes the importance of which we don't even realise) can endure in perpetuity.

Well written Dave~

Black Sabbath ~ War Pigs​

 

[JediJoker]

...even though quad was a relatively quick failure in the '70s, nearly every major (and often, minor) studio upgraded their hardware and monitoring "just in case" and then subsequently had little or no use for it...

SSL were still making quad-capable, music-focused consoles as late as the early '90s with the 4000G+ series. I suppose that was more for LCRS mixing?