Suggestions for Dutton Vocalion Multichannel SACD Releases

bmoura said:

There is a John Denver album on RCA (Poems, Prayers & Promises) that was released as a Q8 only (no CD-4 disc) Quad release.
That would be a D/V reissue candidate. Included it on my last list of suggested titles to D/V.

Time will tell if it makes it to a D/V Surround SACD.

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GOS said:

If the very next DV release were a Johnny Mathis...I think my jaw would drop to the floor. I would buy it so fast that...well...you know. :yikes
Or, John Denver? :yikes:yikes Another winner for the GOS catalog.

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rustyandi said:

Did you know that Johnny Mathis
Had a DTS 5.1 release?

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GOS said:

How bout Johnny Mathis? I'm Coming Home would be a homerun. Well, in my house it would.

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steelydave said:

Popular refers to anything non-classical, which includes pop, rock, jazz, R&B, soul, etc.

Vocalion and Epoch have made their reputation (and a good one at that, look at the happy customers on their facebook page) over the last 20 years primarily releasing classical, soundtrack, and easy listening music, including the artists you appear to be turning your nose up at in your post. They'd be foolish to neglect their core demographic going forward as that's what got them to where they are today.

By the same token, they'd be foolish to ignore easy money making opportunities (ie reissuing rock quads on SACD) if they were available, just because they had some stylistic preference for non-rock music. This isn't the case at all. As I said some months ago on this thread, Michael Dutton told me himself that he's not averse to releasing rock quads - hell, he cut his teeth working at Morgan studios in London as a tea boy when Jethro Tull was cutting Songs From The Wood there.

The thing is, when you get in to reissuing rock and pop quad titles, you're overlapping with one of the most desirable periods for titles (1969-1977) that reissue companies go after. So that means that when Vocalion is trying to get anything rock/pop/jazz/soul/R&B from the 70's they're going up against all the other UK CD reissue labels, which include some heavy hittlers like BGO, BBR, Cherry Red, Expansion, Ace as well as loads of other smaller ones. When any of these labels license a title for reissue it can take it out of circulation for other potential licensees for 3-5 years, or even more - some of the BGO titles that are licensed from Sony they've had in print for more than 10 years.

Between the email requests D-V get, posts on their facebook page, requests here (they do check in from time to time) and suggestions from myself they have a very good idea of what people are after. They're not living in some alternate universe where they're scoffing at the quality of Aerosmith and the Winter brothers whilst simultaneously plotting to release the complete quadraphonic oeuvre of Ray Conniff. They're filling a gap in the market that other labels aren't covering, and also expanding their horizons to try and offer a broader selection of titles. I think when they released their first issue of 5 or 6 quad SACDs at the end of 2015, they didn't entirely realise that there was a network of people like us who were looking for all sorts of different music in quad - they just added the SACD quad layer as an extra to boost sales in their core customer base, and because Mike Dutton is a fan of surround sound himself. Now that they know how much was produced during the quad era, and what people are after, they're doing their best to connect you the customer with what's sitting in the major label vaults.

If you want to know what's available to them, a little research goes a long way. Take a look at Aerosmth for example - look up their three albums that were released in quad on discogs for example and you'll see that they've never been reissued by anyone other than Columbia/Sony. In fact, the stereo versions of the albums that are on CD currently appear to be the same ones that were released in the early 90's, which would suggest to me that there's a financial or contractual issue preventing re-release - surely someone like MoFi would have had a go by now if it was possible. As for the Winter brothers, you can look them up on amazon UK, you'll see that the majority of their albums have been reissued in the last few years by either BGO or Music On CD. This is what D-V faces when it gets in to the arena of reissuing rock quads, as I'm sure all CD reissue labels do. It just burns us more, obviously, because when they reissue something on CD in stereo we lose the ability to get it in quad. That isn't to say there's nothing available - as licenses expire, new things become re-available on a yearly basis, but you have to work with what those things are, not to mention compete with other labels to get them.

On top of that, even for titles that they do manage to secure licensing for, locating quad master tapes that haven't been touched since Watergate isn't as simple as phoning up Iron Mountain and saying 'send it over!'. Vault searches can take (and have taken) months or even longer, and spanned continents and still not turned up things. For all the quad things that D-V have released so far, there are just as many that are either on hold or not happening because they couldn't find the tapes.

I haven't even touched on the time and money involved in all of this, but suffice it to say that paying an upfront guarantee to a major label, legal and contractual costs, along with the costs of stereo and quad tape transfers, stereo and quad SACD mastering, stereo CD mastering, hybrid SACD authoring, disc replication, artwork, printing and packaging aren't cheap. I think if D-V were in a position to choose at will what they'd release, they'd give us everything we wanted - they're not avoiding it or holding it back out of a perverse desire to make Danny Davis an international sensation 40 years after the fact. I think when you consider all the hoops a label like D-V (or AF when they were doing quad) have to jump through to get even one quad SACD out it starts to seem like more of a minor miracle than anything. They might not be releasing exactly what you want, or on the timescale you want, but they are trying hard to unearth stuff from the major label vaults that would presumably never see the light of day otherwise.

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bmoura said:

Yes, that is the Johnny Mathis Quad Album I requested.
It would be a winner in SACD Surround with all of the production by Thom Bell on that Quad mix !

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GOS said:

Thom Bell knows what he's doing...

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Simon A said:

His work with The Stylistics was also superb.

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steelydave said:

Thom Bell is a bit of an unsung hero of quad soul - in addition to the Johnny Mathis 'I'm Coming Home' quad mix, he also did the quad mix for the first (and best) Spinners album for Atlantic, and presumably had a hand in some of the 7 Stylistics quad mixes that were released in Japan. The engineers at Sigma sound in Philadelphia (who also did all the PIR quad mixes including Billy Paul, O'Jays, Harold Melvin, etc.) also deserve a lot of recognition for the sound quality and mix quality too.

The Stylistics master rights are owned by Amherst Records out of Buffalo, NY. In addition to the 7 Stylistics quads, there are also two Van McCoy albums (Disco Baby & Love Is The Answer) and a Louis Armstrong album (Country Western) from the AVCO catalog. Whether or not Amherst still have the quad master tapes is anyone's guess, really.

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quicksrt said:

The Stylistics quad masters are likely sitting on a shelf in Japan, waiting for their high-res resurrection, just waiting to be claimed.

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steelydave said:

Well they managed to find the quad master for Diana Ross' 'Last Time I Saw Him' for inclusion as a stereo fold-down on the 2CD Hip-O reissue in 2008 so I'd say stranger things could happen.

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steelydave said:

Thom Bell is a bit of an unsung hero of quad soul - in addition to the Johnny Mathis 'I'm Coming Home' quad mix, he also did the quad mix for the first (and best) Spinners album for Atlantic, and presumably had a hand in some of the 7 Stylistics quad mixes that were released in Japan. The engineers at Sigma sound in Philadelphia (who also did all the PIR quad mixes including Billy Paul, O'Jays, Harold Melvin, etc.) also deserve a lot of recognition for the sound quality and mix quality too.

The Stylistics master rights are owned by Amherst Records out of Buffalo, NY. In addition to the 7 Stylistics quads, there are also two Van McCoy albums (Disco Baby & Love Is The Answer) and a Louis Armstrong album (Country Western) from the AVCO catalog. Whether or not Amherst still have the quad master tapes is anyone's guess, really.

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fredblue said:

Family Reunion - O'Jays

:banana:

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DuncanS said:

I wonder if Dutton-Vocalion could release the O'Jay Quads?

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britmarc said:

Many of the Decca quads 'Phase 4' were recorded in England so the multi masters are probably not in the Universal US vaults ....
The same could probably be said of Philips and Polydor titles ( in Dutch // German vaults)
Thoughts...????

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ubertrout said:

Not to sidetrack too much, but I thought that Phase 4 was stereo, not quad. Wikipedia agrees: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_4_Stereo


I feel like its not a productive exercise to speculate about all the things Dutton could in theory do. Let's let them focus on the niche where they've gotten access and already have experience - there's still a lot more to mine in the Sony vaults.

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fizzywiggs41 said:

Phase 4 recordings are indeed stereo , and pre-date quad matrix.

But they (London Phase 4)had a handful of Discrete Quads much later in the 70's, don't ask me which ones ,I was never really was impressed with the offer of the artists they issued .

I remember seeing the distinct Phase 4 logo on a few Q8'S offered by London Records Canada .

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