It's sort of an interesting development that Sony is providing their old digital transfers of quad masters (this, Jeff Beck Blow By Blow and the upcoming Beck, Bogert & Appice SACD in Japan) to companies licensing the stereo mixes.
At least some of these transfers were done in the DTS CD era on ADAT machines which means they're either 16bit/44.1kHz or 20bit/48kHz PCM, so they're perhaps not ideal for hi-rez release. But if the option is either that or no multichannel layer on a SACD, I'll gladly take the 'mid-resolution' PCM transfer. Even at that, the upgrade in quality from the circa-late 90's DTS codec to uncompressed DSD is a relatively large leap - sort of like the difference between 256kbps mp3 and CD quality PCM.
Just to give you an idea of how good one of these 'not quite hi-res' transfers can sound, listen to the quad mix of Blow By Blow that's on the various SACDs that have been released (the original Sony, the Japanese Sony, the recent AP). If you look at the spectral analysis in this post I made a while back, you can see there's a hard cutoff in the frequency response right around 22kHz which is the telltale signature of a 44.1kHz transfer.
I'm sure quadtrade could chime in here because he worked for HDS at the time, but it was my understanding that aside from all the quad titles that HDS did release on DTS CD, there were plenty of others that never got that far because the ADAT tapes Sony provided them were unusable, either because of digital dropouts/static or other mistakes like having one side of the album provided twice instead of A & B sides etc.
Just thinking out loud here, but perhaps we could work up a list of quad titles that were released on DTS CD (and if Tad knows of others that were transferred but never released even better) and then Brian Moura could reach out to some of the labels like AP that might do multichannel but don't want to pay for quad transfers/mastering, and make them aware that Sony has these digital transfers in their archives. That way, they can at least be aware they exist so they can ask Sony about the quad mixes in the same breath if they're asking about the stereo versions and hopefully cut down on the number of stereo-only 'quadblocking' SACDs that are released in the future.
At least some of these transfers were done in the DTS CD era on ADAT machines which means they're either 16bit/44.1kHz or 20bit/48kHz PCM, so they're perhaps not ideal for hi-rez release. But if the option is either that or no multichannel layer on a SACD, I'll gladly take the 'mid-resolution' PCM transfer. Even at that, the upgrade in quality from the circa-late 90's DTS codec to uncompressed DSD is a relatively large leap - sort of like the difference between 256kbps mp3 and CD quality PCM.
Just to give you an idea of how good one of these 'not quite hi-res' transfers can sound, listen to the quad mix of Blow By Blow that's on the various SACDs that have been released (the original Sony, the Japanese Sony, the recent AP). If you look at the spectral analysis in this post I made a while back, you can see there's a hard cutoff in the frequency response right around 22kHz which is the telltale signature of a 44.1kHz transfer.
I'm sure quadtrade could chime in here because he worked for HDS at the time, but it was my understanding that aside from all the quad titles that HDS did release on DTS CD, there were plenty of others that never got that far because the ADAT tapes Sony provided them were unusable, either because of digital dropouts/static or other mistakes like having one side of the album provided twice instead of A & B sides etc.
Just thinking out loud here, but perhaps we could work up a list of quad titles that were released on DTS CD (and if Tad knows of others that were transferred but never released even better) and then Brian Moura could reach out to some of the labels like AP that might do multichannel but don't want to pay for quad transfers/mastering, and make them aware that Sony has these digital transfers in their archives. That way, they can at least be aware they exist so they can ask Sony about the quad mixes in the same breath if they're asking about the stereo versions and hopefully cut down on the number of stereo-only 'quadblocking' SACDs that are released in the future.