HiRez Poll Nektar - REMEMBER THE FUTURE [SACD]

IMachine said:

Hey Dennis... i gave it a 7 at first but only because I ate some really bad brautwurst and I was kinda dizzy. When I got better I realized my mistake and I gave it the 10 it deserves.

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My good man. What on Earth are you talking about?@:

Maybe we lose something in the English - German translation???


Glad to see you back in action here. Have you ordered Quadrophenia yet?

@Jon: Oops, I forgot I am in a voting thread. I will post no more nonsense no matter how much iMachine taunts me!

DennisMoore Jr. said:

I saw the Nektar reunion in Camden in 2004 at Near-Fest.

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I was there too! Although I believe it was 2002. Great weekend - Steve Hackett, Caravan, Miriodor...

blue.monk said:

I was there too! Although I believe it was 2002. Great weekend - Steve Hackett, Caravan, Miriodor...

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I was there too - long trip from Alberta Canada. Still have the T-Shirt and it was indeed 2002. Went to alot of Nearfest's afterwards - sad that they decided to stop. Caravan and Nektar both made DVD's of their respective concerts and cool that I can spot myself in the crowd...although it reminds me how much better shape I was in back then!

I have this on now. The music is sublime! Truly great! I just can't stand the vocal mix. I would love SW to remix the Nektar catalog. Part one has the lead vocal in fronts and rears but right rear is more dominant; very annoying. Part 2 has lead vocals in rear left. I prefer lead vocal in center with no 'bleeds' into rear, if you know what I mean. Either that or moving around every few lines.

keenly said:

I have this on now. The music is sublime! Truly great! I just can't stand the vocal mix. I would love SW to remix the Nektar catalog. Part one has the lead vocal in fronts and rears but right rear is more dominant; very annoying. Part 2 has lead vocals in rear left. I prefer lead vocal in center with no 'bleeds' into rear, if you know what I mean. Either that or moving around every few lines.

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Just so people know:

This SACD was sourced from the original quad mix from 1973ish... and upmixed to 5.1. This is not a discrete 5.1 mix from the original multi-tracks. Think of it as a quad mix, mostly.

@Good Sir Keenly: Welcome to the Nektar Club!

DennisMoore Jr. said:

Just so people know:

This SACD was sourced from the original quad mix from 1973ish... and upmixed to 5.1. This is not a discrete 5.1 mix from the original multi-tracks. Think of it as a quad mix, mostly.

@Good Sir Keenly: Welcome to the Nektar Club!

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Yes I know. I still don't like the vocal placement.

The music on the other hand;:banana:

The 4.0 -->5.1 on this is particularly clumsy. The center channel appears to be mostly reverb, and the subwoofer channel contains the whole mix (all 4 quad channels), brought way down in level. I suspect both the center and .1 channels are superfluous and could be deleted , restoring the mix to 4.0 with no loss in quality (and perhaps an improvement). Worth a try....

FWIW, I tried it, it sounds fine. Its now my 'official' version for playback.

So muting the center and LFE - how can that be done? Audacity?

Yes. If your system can play 4.0 files, just export the files from Audacity without the LFE and C channels. Otherwise mute those channels in Audacity before export, or export as 4.0 and add them back in as silent channels , using Music Media Helper.

Someone on Facebook is telling me that 1) the PCM layer is SQ encoded and 2) when decoded, the guitars are in front.

Does that makes sense ? what was the instrument placement on the quad (SQ) LP?

No one here knows what the quad LP sounds like?

ssully said:

No one here knows what the quad LP sounds like?

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Bump-

With a new 5.1 mix coming, I’m also curious about how the SQ Quad mix sounds.

Is there a Poll for the old SQ album?

Surely @fredblue has got one?

J. PUPSTER said:

Bump-

With a new 5.1 mix coming, I’m also curious about how the SQ Quad mix sounds.

Is there a Poll for the old SQ album?

Surely @fredblue has got one?

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i never picked up the SQ LP because i already had the SACD, sorry Mister P.

I listened to this with the fronts and rears reversed after @ssully 's post and I think it's entirely possible that the fronts and rears are reversed, though swapping them doesn't make a night-and-day kind of change that you'd get if, say, you did the same on one of the Columbia quad mixes for example.

Apologies for being vague on details, because I did this 6 months or a year ago and then forgot about it because I couldn't get MMH to do the channel swap on the SACD .dsf files (maybe because as two side-long tracks they exceed 2gb each and hit some kind of file-size limit?) but I based this conclusion on the fact that while the lead vocals are in all four speakers for most of the album, there's an extended passage where they're in the rear speakers only. Meanwhile the drums are in the front channels exclusively on the SACD - as we know, it was quite common for drums to be in the rears on quad mixes, but you can entirely imagine a modern mastering engineer getting a four-channel file and thinking that the drums must be in the front - look at what happened to the EMI DVD of Ten Years After's A Space in Time for example.

I'm pretty sure that all the Bellaphon albums of this era ('73-'75) were single-inventory quad (whether marked or not) so the stereo layer on this disc should be quad encoded, as should any stereo release that hasn't had it's SQ encoding wrecked by channel blending or other phase manipulation during mastering. Decoding any one of these using an SQ decoder should tell you pretty quickly what the channel assignment should be based on whether the drums are in the front or rear - or at least it'll tell you the channel assignment fed to the SQ encoder back in 1973, which you can at least presume is correct.

Bass would also be in entirely the rears if channels in 4.0 are flipped. Was that common in the quad days?

I don't think I have an SQ decoder unfortunately (though I think FreeSurround foobar plugin claims to be one?) Maybe someone with a Surround Master could run the CD/SACD stereo version through it.

(Though IIRC, those two stereo masterings actually have somewhat different EQ)

I never really like Drums or Bass in the rears, except maybe for accent or special effects type stuff.

I checked discogs for a NM Bellaphon LP copy (rarely go for less); but they're all around $50 and up, too rich for my blood. Also, I don't trust CD's to always have the unmolested encoding in tact.

I'll put it on my watch list, and if I can snag one at a reasonable price I'll run it through the trusty old SMv2 and report back. I'm just curious now, as to what's in there.

Maybe I can get Jonathan or other Mod. to create an LP/SQ Poll, if I do.

Too bad about this SACD if the Center and LFE are just unnecessary garbage, that merely muddies up the whole thing IMO.

I don't have the LP but I have somebody's quad DVD-A conversion of both RTF and DTE in one file. On the title track/intro of RTF, the vocals are 100% isolated in the front speakers. I tried decoding from a different source and got different results. I assumed what I have is a software SQ decode but not sure after reading this thread.?

On the SACD 5.1 mix (which is the original quad mix with inconsequential low level center and LFE derived from it) , for the first verse (Take a trip/back in time/ etc) there are two singers in harmony

Front left has a blend of both high and low harmonies, with reverb
Front right has only the low harmony with a hint of high harmony, with reverb
Rear Left has only the low harmony, much drier
Rear Right has the high harmony prominent, much drier, with the low harmony blended in

In the "revolution/evolution" chorus after the first verses the only channels with vocals are

front left -- both voices blended, wet
rear right -- low harmony prominent and dry, with high harmony blended



Quite strange.

furui_suterioo said:

I don't have the LP but I have somebody's quad DVD-A conversion of both RTF and DTE in one file. On the title track/intro of RTF, the vocals are 100% isolated in the front speakers. I tried decoding from a different source and got different results. I assumed what I have is a software SQ decode but not sure after reading this thread.?

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Correction: It was drums and bass that were isolated not vocals, just relistening right now.