ABBA - The Singles - The First Ten Years UK EPIC 2-tape set

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ndiamone

600 Club - QQ All-Star
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Jun 13, 2008
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Silicon Valley (but I don't own it)
What fool do you know would fall for a UK Epic double-Q8 set of ABBA - The Singles - The First Ten Years?

Now before you start laughing TOO loud - understand a few things:

1. England was the LAST country to make Q8's - til `82*
2. Epic = Columbia (nevermind that it's part of EMI)
3. It had two tapes of two programs each so no mistaking that,
4. The UK Epic catalog numbers matched the numbers that would have been used for a UK Q8 if one had ever been made. (The Q8 catalog numbers are completely different from the LP so it wasn't an issue of just replacing a QT in front of an LP number.)

Meaning - some guy had to go to a LOT of trouble to fab this up in the days before digital recording and high resolution art scanning.

*Granted a number of their later STEREO 8-track titles were housed inside of Q8 shells in order to use them up - and they were sent out with little plastic slugs in the quad notches - but this wasn't that either.

In the ``rears'' you hear mostly backing track and overdubbed background voices just as if you'd played the LP through a QS decoder like the ``Q8'' of the Star Wars soundtrack that some people have been trying to offload forever as the real thing

I have a German DMM of the title, a UK Epic and an original Polar pressing. The Epic is flat and pinched, like the US release. The DMM is brittle and harsh, and even though the grooves are deep (for a DMM) it decodes INCREDIBLY well through either QS or Dynaquad. Not as good of a separation as that which can be found on the ``Q8'S'' though.

The Polar on the other hand, when decoded in the above fashion, sounds exactly like the ``Q8'', warm and full bodied with a nice presence to it.

But I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. I have ``Q8's'' of the Chess Concept Double Album that way in addition to the Star Wars soundtrack. But at least with those, somebody GAVE them to me in a box of stuff so I didn't have to buy it.

The tape on all three titles is either cobalt in the case of the Star Wars or else it's EE/Chrome loop tape in the case of the ABBA and Chess, so they sound pretty good for an 8-track.

But then it WAS four o clock in the morning at the swapmeet and it WAS a new vendor nobody'd ever heard of before and there HAD been a shortage of coffee all night long and.......

But for my hundred dollars that I spent, I also got several single-album stereo mis-dubs i.e. the resulting 8-track contains twice as much tape and plays at 7-1/2 IPS
(Fast Forward on most decks).

Patsy Cline's Greatest Hits
Carole King - Tapestry
Uriah Heep - Live
War - Live
Con Funk Shun - Best of
Beatles `62-66 and 67-70 (four tapes each - looks like two copies of Tape 1 and two copies of Tape 2 - but you play them and...
Beach Boys - Endless Summer (2 tapes - again - looks like two copies of the same tape but it's not.

And several others nobody's ever heard of.

So either some dubbing plant is run by idiots or else some Joe Schmo has WAY too much time on his hands to be fabbing these up.
 
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