A History of Project-3 Quadraphonic Record Albums

The Project 3 label was founded by Enoch Light, who named it "Project 3" as it was his third label. After selling the Command label to ABC, Enoch took his ideas for spectacular sound recordings, as well as a few of his former Command recording artists, and created Project 3. His goal was to create highly spatial stereo recordings without the gimmicky effects of some of the early stereo product. When quadraphonics first emerged as a recording possibility, Enoch Light and his Project 3 label were one of the first on the bandwagon.

Since most of the early Project 3 recording sessions were his own, remixing them for 4 Channel sound was only a matter of time, as the masters were all his. Many of these early high definition easily lent themselves to the new surround medium. In fact, Enoch was so early on the quadraphonic scene that the only system for encoding to LP available at the time was the EV "Electro-Voice" system. These early quad releases on Project 3 are hard to distinguish from the later releases of the same title in the Sansui QS format, as they are all identified as "QD". However some of these LP jackets have a sticker proclaiming them to be in the "new" stereo. (See Below)

These EV only releases include two samplers (PR 700 & PR 900). The last recording that used this early recording matrix system was PR 5051 QD. After this release, the three major recording formats were used, many times on the same title!

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While A&M used QS, SQ, and finally settled on CD-4, Project 3 used all three and then settled with SQ for their final quad releases. Buyers of Project 3 quad albums would sometimes not even know what format they would find when they opened the album. Many of these discs only stated "QD" on the label number printed on the album cover. The buyer could actually end up with EV, QS, SQ, or in some cases CD-4 records and not even know it! In some cases, EV, CD-4, QS and SQ stickers were used to indicate the format when it was not printed on the jacket artwork. (See sticker example graphics below)