Herbie Hancock's "Head Hunters" Multichannel SACD reissue on AP

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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.
 
The Collection most surely helped with the sales of Herbie Hancock Head Hunters for Analogue Productions. It's been sold out on Music Direct for weeks now.

I've owned SONY's wonderful original (and OOP) mch SACD of Headhunters for years and will not replace it with AP's newer version unless I learn down the road (like Blow by Blow) that it's out of phase....or something. Doubtful The Collection had anything to do with AP's sold out status of Headhunters.

What The Collection did inspire, however, is the urgent need to release Bitches Brew, Blue Oyster Cult, Nashville Skyline and Harry Nilsson on QUAD SACD. Now, yer talkin'
 
I've had a DTS CD made from the old Sony edition for awhile but I always wanted an actual hi Rez copy, so I ordered this thinking it's just a repress of the old one but it's definitely different. This is straight up 4.0: no fake center (I'm not sure if there's a sub channel or not since I don't have one connected at the time). It actually sounds a little more discrete than the old version to my ears.

Does anyone know if it's the old version minus the center/sub or if it's actually a second transfer from the analogue tapes by AP?

Sounds great though...hoping for More quad reissues from AP since AF pretty much gave up
 
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