Really excited that these are finally coming out! I spent most of the end of last year working on the liner notes for the two Garfunkel titles and they were the most challenging assignments I've had to date - I hope the effort is reflected in the end product. The Simon & Garfunkel story is probably one of the most told and re-told music stories of the last 50 years so I did my best to try and find some fresh perspective on it, but also not to spend too much time on it as these albums are really about Art's first forays as a solo artist. I also did my best to have as little overlap between the liner notes for the two albums, so you get an interesting, unique story for each one, including information about their recording along with discussion about the musicians involved and of course the quad mixes.
Both of these albums should be real demo material on SACD. Angel Clare was (as far as I can tell) one of the first albums recorded using two 16-track 2-inch tape machines synced together. I found an interview with Roy Halee where he discussed the recording, and said he could have used two 24-track 2-inch machines, but that the extra headroom on the 16-track machines resulted in a better sounding recording. The quad masters for this album are 30ips and from what I understand sound phenomenal.
Breakaway is also a really interesting quad mix, which I think has been discussed before on QQ. Producer Richard Perry and engineer Bill Schnee did most of their quad mixing in CD-4 (Carly Simon etc.) so they were used to being able to have things like vocals in 'quad center', ie coming out of all four speakers. Obviously you can't do this with SQ due to the 'no common content in the rear speakers' limitation, so the workaround is to have things panned diagonally, ie in the front right and rear left, or front left and rear right. As a result, Breakaway has more diagonal pans than any 'mixed for SQ' release that I know of - almost every track features one, and some of the tracks have pans on both diagonal axes. Mike Dutton also has something of a personal connection to this album - Benny Gallagher's (one of the co-writers of the title track) son runs D-V's classical mobile recording unit.
I've also seen the artwork proofs for both of these albums and they look fantastic - if the printed versions come out looking as nice, these could be the new benchmark for quality from D-V.
I also wrote the (somewhat shorter) liner notes for the Lynn Anderson 2fer, and I know country music isn't to everyone's taste but I hope people will give this one a chance as well. It's worth noting as well that the two tracks from Rose Garden (Rose Garden and Nothing Between Us) that appear on Greatest Hits are different mixes - Charlie Bragg did the quad mix of the original Rose Garden album, and then Lou Bradley re-mixed them for the Greatest Hits album a year later. As far as I know these are both the first quad mixes from CBS' Nashville studio to see modern digital release, and the first Columbia or Epic country title to share the same distinction.
All these new SACDs are in stock as of today so they should start shipping immediately. To paraphrase what they say about voting in Chicago, "order early, order often!"
