Rick Wakeman - Six Wives and Arthur

[JonUrban]

I finally received my two discs from Amazon UK today in the mail. I put the scans in the poll section threads.

I haven't listened to these yet, remember, I am not a huge fan of these titles and never really played them much in the old SQ/CD-4 days. That being said, the packaging is totally bizarre.

Although they look like the standard Universal "Deluxe Edition" packaging, they do not have the plastic over-sleeve with the white bottom border labeled "DELUXE EDITION" around the digipack. Instead, there is a sticker band taped to the bottom of the packaging. When you remove the shrink wrap, you have to cut this "tape" to get the digipack open. Very strange.

The discs themselves have nice looking A&M labels of the era, but the DVD-A's are not labeled as such. In fact, the "Myths and Legends" DVD just has a DVD Logo without comment, while the "Six Wives" DVD disc has the DVD Logo with "video" under it. No mention on either disc that they are DVD-Audio discs. Looking at them with Windows Explorer clearly shows that the AUDIO_TS folder does indeed have information in it, so they are true DVD-Audio discs.

The description on the back of both packages labels the DVD discs as having a DTX 96/24 Quad Mix. WTF?

So, these are indeed a strange breed of a release. Most of what I've posted above has been mentioned earlier in the thread by others, but I figured I'd get it all here in one place. Not really sure what to think of all of this.

Anyway, on to listen to these. I will start with "Six Wives" and see if I notice LP noise and stuff................@:

 

[ArmyOfQuad]

For a detailed analysis of the different sources of The Six Wives of Henry VIII, check out the first episode of my new youtube channel, the quadcast, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1OA81R41_0

 

[Clint Eastwood]

For a detailed analysis of the different sources of The Six Wives of Henry VIII, check out the first episode of my new youtube channel, the quadcast, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1OA81R41_0

Outstanding video...thanks for posting..

 

[privateuniverse]

Although they look like the standard Universal "Deluxe Edition" packaging, they do not have the plastic over-sleeve with the white bottom border labeled "DELUXE EDITION" around the digipack. Instead, there is a sticker band taped to the bottom of the packaging. When you remove the shrink wrap, you have to cut this "tape" to get the digipack open. Very strange.

I've seen this on a few other recent Universal titles. I don't particularly care for it.

 

[Cheezmo]

Not only do they not know the source of what they released, they don't know what kind of disc it is on or the name of the format it was encoded in. Hopeless.

 

[himey]

Not only do they not know the source of what they released, they don't know what kind of disc it is on or the name of the format it was encoded in. Hopeless.

It's the thought that counts

 

[EMB]

Not that it has to do with anything else, but SIX WIVES was first issued in 1973 on A&M's ochre label; that dreadful dot-matrix-like label began to surface in early 1974, so the disc uses a 2nd press label.

ED

 

[Circular Vibes]

Not that it has to do with anything else, but SIX WIVES was first issued in 1973 on A&M's ochre label; that dreadful dot-matrix-like label began to surface in early 1974, so the disc uses a 2nd press label.

ED

Since I have never seen a quad copy on ochre, I'd give them the credit for using the "dot matrix" label for surround as it might be slightly more correct....

 

[0tto]

Not only do they not know the source of what they released, they don't know what kind of disc it is on or the name of the format it was encoded in. Hopeless.

i guess Quality Control department at UM was outsourced to India.

 

[fredblue]

Whosoever cutteth this cheap-ass plastic ribbon and readeth this bullshit legend of DTX and LPCDM shall have the power to gain fulsome recompense from those of the big river that dodgeth tax..

 

[Which_One_Is_Pink]

Sad, I was really looking forward to the Henry VIII release but as I already have a web conversion version that sounds pretty good to me I will have to pass *SIGH*

 

[colsky]

This description of these releases has recently been put on Rick Wakeman's own website:

We've had a number of questions about the new reissues from A&M Records, specifically asking about the source of the recordings and the remastering processes used. We'd like to be as transparent as we can, so this is the information we've received to date about each of the releases. The information has been kindly supplied by Neil Wilkes of Opus Productions.


Production Notes - Six Wives of Henry VII

Assets Supplied:

Abbey Road Studios:
24-bit 96kHz Stereo Remaster of the original mix by Andrew Walters
24-bit 96kHz & 24-bit 48kHz remasters of the original Quad mix by Andrew Walters
All these were from the original tapes, newly transferred & remastered at Abbey Road

Universal Music Video Archives
"Catherine Parr" from "The Old Grey Whistle Test" - PAL ProRes

The Stereo & Quad mixes were aligned in Nuendo and rendered out as 5.1 with empty Centre & LFE channels - this was done because initial tests with straight Quad AC3 & DTS streams did not play back correctly on all player/amplifier combinations that were tested so the additional channels were added as silent channels, which fixed the issue.
AC3 stream encoded from 24/48 downsample of the 24/96 source in the Nuendo Dolby Digital Encoder.
DTS stream encoded to padded (.dts) form of DTS 9624 using the DTS Pro Series encoder.
MLP Lossless encoded with SurCode MLP Lossless encoder.

Onscreen look was designed by Opus Productions, and visual file accompanying the AC3/DTS/PCM streams was encoded using CinemaCraft CCE-SP3 encoder at 29.97FPS NTSC at 3Mb/sec CBR multi-pass.
The "Catherine Parr" video was standards converted to NTSC and used multi-pass VBR encoding (again using CinemaCraft CCE-SP3) with a peak rate of 9800kbps and an average or target of 5000kbps

Video_TS portion of the final DVD authored with Scenarist SD 3.4.3
Audio_TS authored with Sonic DVD-Audio Creator 3.0 (11)

Disc QC by Jon Urban, Bob Romano, Bob Squires Jnr, Tim McDonnell, Adam-Blue Buckley, John Kimber
and Wayne Smith



Production Notes - "Myths & Legends of King Arthur..."

Assets Supplied

Abbey Road Studios:
24-bit 96kHz Stereo Remaster of the original mix by Andrew Walters
24-bit 96kHz transfer from an unknown source remastered by Andrew Walters

However, the initial Quad version supplied was not used on the final disc because sonically it was nowhere near the stereo version and its quality was found to be generally lacking when the first build of the disc went into QC stage - it was replaced by a CD-4 vinyl transfer (CD-4 is a discrete Quad system requiring a special type of cartridge & demodulator) from a source known as "UnderMyWheels" because it matched the stereo remaster a lot better than the one originally supplied. There is no known original tape source for the Quad version.

The Stereo & Quad mixes were aligned in Nuendo and rendered out as 5.1 with empty Centre & LFE channels - this was done because initial tests with straight Quad AC3 & DTS streams did not play back correctly on all player/amplifier combinations that were tested so the additional channels were added as silent channels, which fixed the issue.
AC3 stream encoded from 24/48 downsample of the 24/96 source in the Nuendo Dolby Digital Encoder.
DTS stream encoded to padded (.dts) form of DTS 9624 using the DTS Pro Series encoder.
MLP Lossless encoded with SurCode MLP Lossless encoder.

Video_TS portion of the final DVD authored with Scenarist SD 3.4.3
Audio_TS authored with Sonic DVD-Audio Creator 3.0 (11)

Disc QC by Jon Urban, Bob Romano, Bob Squires Jnr, Tim McDonnell, Adam-Blue Buckley, John Kimber
and Wayne Smith

 

[Owen Smith]

Rubbish. The Six Wives quad is clearly an SQ software decode as shown rather nicely by ArmyOfQuad in his Quadcast. It also has vinyl surface noise if you listen.

 

[fredblue]

 

[ssully]

The Stereo & Quad mixes were aligned in Nuendo and rendered out as 5.1 with empty Centre & LFE channels

Can someone explain why the Stereo mix would be involved in this step at all?

 

[steelydave]

It's just used as a reference for length, so to speak. The various audio streams on the DVD share the same chapter breaks, so the audio on the stereo and quad versions has to be the same length. The stereo mix is presumably the 'definitive' version so you match everything else to that, either by altering the pitch of the quad version (either longer or shorter) or if the pitch is correct already, editing/shortening songs or fading out sooner to match the stereo versions, if necessary.

Pink Floyd did a similar thing on the Wish You Were Here Immersion BluRay - they deleted 30 seconds or so of noodling at the end of one side of the album that was put there to make the Q8 equal length on both sides, because when you laid it out alongside the stereo mix it offset all the track starts after the 30 seconds of noodling so they no longer happened at the same time as their stereo counterparts.

 

[LizardKing]

It's just used as a reference for length, so to speak. The various audio streams on the DVD share the same chapter breaks, so the audio on the stereo and quad versions has to be the same length. The stereo mix is presumably the 'definitive' version so you match everything else to that, either by altering the pitch of the quad version (either longer or shorter) or if the pitch is correct already, editing/shortening songs or fading out sooner to match the stereo versions, if necessary.

Pink Floyd did a similar thing on the Wish You Were Here Immersion BluRay - they deleted 30 seconds or so of noodling at the end of one side of the album that was put there to make the Q8 equal length on both sides, because when you laid it out alongside the stereo mix it offset all the track starts after the 30 seconds of noodling so they no longer happened at the same time as their stereo counterparts.

The quad is longer than the Stereo or 5.1- on the Wish You Were Here Blu-ray - IIRC..

 

[Owen Smith]

Have you watched the ArmyOfQuad quadcast on this subject? If not I suggest you do before making further comments.

 

[fredblue]

Have you watched the ArmyOfQuad quadcast on this subject? If not I suggest you do before making further comments.

Yes, I've watched it. I don't need suggestions from you thanks, back off.

 

[atrocity]

Pink Floyd did a similar thing on the Wish You Were Here Immersion BluRay - they deleted 30 seconds or so of noodling at the end of one side of the album that was put there to make the Q8 equal length on both sides, because when you laid it out alongside the stereo mix it offset all the track starts after the 30 seconds of noodling so they no longer happened at the same time as their stereo counterparts.

I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing, but the cut I'm aware of on the quad Blu-ray is frustrating to me. The few extra seconds of music on side two that didn't exist on the stereo mix was always one of the cool parts of the quad version to me even before I could play it in quad. I had assumed it got cut because it was actually a 30 year old mistake that someone decided to "fix", but your point about chapters/tracks makes sense, too.