I wonder if what AF has been doing with quads is catching the attention of others in the music world...
I'm not sure if the impetus was external (ie AF's recent quad reissues) or internal but it seems like whoever's in charge of the catalog division at Sony (who own all this RCA stuff as well) has finally realised that mining their catalog a little more deeply and broadly than they have in the past is basically like 'money for old rope' to use a British expression. Maybe they finally reached the saturation point (sales wise) with reissues of Kind Of Blue and Take 5 and decided they were going to look a little deeper in to the vault.
I really hope these discs are successful for Vocalion because there are a ton of titles they could do between the RCA and Sony catalogs - they've hit most of the major RCA artists with this initial release, but both Mancini and Montenegro have tons of other quad releases and a lot of them are great fun. Yeah, it's not as cool and doesn't rock like some of the stuff that AF has put out, but the sound quality and surround mixes are impeccable. One of the fun things for me about getting in to quad was finding (and enjoying) a lot of artists that were never on my radar and the Mancini and Montenegro quads definitely fall in to that category. I especially love Mancini's 'Symphonic Soul' album from 1975 so I hope Vocalion can at least get to that one. I'm not sure what their access to the Sony easy listening catalog is like, but there are plenty on that side too including Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis, Percy Faith, and Ray Conniff amongst others - between those 4 artists alone I wouldn't be surprised if there are near enough 40 quad mixes.