I know on another thread there were a few people myself included who thought the Dutton masterings were too bright. However these complaints were only for the stereo portion, not the multichannel. At the time I only owned one Dutton disc, Rheinberger Organ Concertos, which I find much too bright. I recently acquired an older Dutton CD from 1997, Beethoven Symphony 3 conducted by Barbirolli. Unfortunately, this disc is also extremely bright and boosted in the treble. I am done buying discs mastered by Dutton, I do not care for the jacked up high end he seems to favor.
Thank you for the nice big pictures. Does Charlie Rich's "Most Beautiful Girl" sound really nice in quad?
Some young guys would (eventually) have cracked it open like an Easter Egg, and cut the code like a hot knife through butter anyway (he screamed out in a last second plead), and devoured the contents like a kid in a candy store regardless of any tragic accident a doomed executive had on the way to a meeting with the great unknown in the promise land.
BUT!- would they have had such a readily-available platform to do it on...? My first impression is Sony, running around like Barney Fife upon finding their "Perfect Sound Forever 2.0" cracked by their own chefs, screaming, "Nip it, Andy! In...the...bud!"
I don't have the titles you mention, but I found most of the recent pop-rock quad SACDs that he mastered don't sound too bright. I am talking about both the stereo and quad mixes. A lot of them are the definitive digital masterings for the stereo mixes.
not yet, i'll be adding them to a future order since i didn't want to get an uneven number of discs (based on reports on QQ, i thought there might be a greater likelihood of some cracked jewel cases with 7 discs rather than 4 with the packing method DV use!)
It was on the Hard and Heavy Robin reel as an additional track, along with Get It Yourself. So now, those 2 cuts are orphans.
As I consider myself to be sensitive to bright recordings I'm inclined to weigh in on this as well as I do not find the Dutton-Vocalion releases to be bright either.
Really nice mastering on the stereo mixes of the new Guess Who Twofer (American Woman, Share the Land). Warm, dynamic, nicely balanced. Highly recommended for fans of the albums. Haven't listened to the quad mixes yet, but worth buying just for the stereo mastering IMO.
Arrived in 12 days, same as always. Scared the crap out of me when it defaulted to stereo, and short of ejecting the disc, and reloading, couldn't get the remote to switch to " 5.1 ." Whoa ! Just experienced the back-and-forth across my head of American Woman...might've gone right through via my ears ! Far out.
I've perused the SACD insert, I've Googled the question, I've searched the thread, all to no avail. Who did the quad mix for these two albums please ? I'm not through running my mouth yet. Recent talk about this label's SACDs being *bright*...if you think this one is bright, either your subwoofer's broken, or your ears are. Sorry. Garry's drums have never sounded better, and I own the Cisco vinyl !!!!
Unfortunately there were no credits on the quad master tape boxes, or we would have included them in the credits. In stark contrast to the Columbia quad master tapes (which you can see examples of in the new D-V Paul Revere two-fer) which have meticulously typed track sheets that include recording dates, run-times, engineer/producer credits etc. the RCA quad master tapes have very little - just the album title and tracks/runtimes are scribbled by hand on the box along with the quad track assignments. We thought about including these in the booklet, but with the length of my liner note there just wasn't room unless we reduced the already-small font size by half a point or more, so given that, and the relative lack of information on the boxes we elected to leave them out. It was the same case with the quad tape boxes for Rockin' (the Best of The Guess Who, Vol. II tapes were much neater and had Brian Christian's initials on them) and #10, which had the same kind of hastily scribbled album title/track names/no engineer credits type of boxes as American Woman and Share the Land. The handwriting on the American Woman and Share the Land boxes looks like it was done by two different people, so I can only presume that this was standard operating procedure at RCA at the time, rather than it being the work of one lazy engineer who couldn't be bothered to do a more complete job. It's also possible that RCA held more detailed separate paperwork on these quad tapes that's been lost with the passage of time, whereas the Columbia tapes had their track sheets taped to the boxes, which has kept them together over the course of various vault moves/ownership regimes etc. The only clue I could find on any of these boxes was on the master tape for side 1 of American Woman, in the upper right hand corner there's a marking that looks like 'ER / THBQ' - the first part is definitely ER but the second is a little less clear, it could possibly be 'A+BQ', 'THB9' or any combination of these, or something else entirely that I haven't thought of. In any event, I'm not sure if that's the intials of someone who worked on the quad mix (I did some searching, but couldn't find an RCA engineer of that era with the initials ER before the disc went to print), a technical annotation, or some kind of library filing code from the time, but maybe it's a starting point for figuring out who did these quad mixes. Unlike CBS, who printed 'quadraphonic remix engineer' and 'quadraphonic sound supervision' credits on most of their quad LP releases, RCA's first 75 or so quad releases were Q8 only (so no credits at all) and when they started releasing quad LPs in 1972 they didn't include specific quad remix credits, so if they're not on the master tape boxes, they're effectively impossible to figure out.
@bodhisattva - thanks. Well, I've already sent Randy Bachman a message asking, but I guess we may never know. Did a helluva job though. I'm enjoying the quiet right now, like when you disembark off a rollercoaster. Wow doesn't quite cover it. I am VERY pleased. Great liner notes too.