May I ask if you are any relation to Dave Vaccaro?Well, here I am seventeen plus years later with an update. My apologies but I was way off base about what these tapes are. I recently pulled them off the shelf and took another stab at researching the labels and catalog #’s with the Google results popping out almost immediately (what a difference seventeen years makes). The labels come from the collaboration of CBS Columbia and 3M and their short lived M2 Stereo Tape Cartridges circa 1964. Interestingly each RMQ XXX catalog number corresponds directly to an MQ XXX 4-Track tape catalog number. (How did I miss that before?) Simultaneously it dawned on me that these tapes are not quadraphonic at all but rather 2-track stereo (as was suggested way back then on this forum) although I have not been able to cross reference these titles to 2-Track catalog numbers. My interest renewed I contacted the proprietor of a local repair shop that deals in vintage audio systems and in turn was introduced to a young audiophile technician who very graciously volunteered to help me evaluate what I have. Luckily, I happen to have the 4-Track version of the Scheherazade release (CBS MQ 388) and what we concluded, based on a side-by-side playback comparison on his very high-end system, is that the 2 Track version sounds outstanding (considering the original production standards) and has an even lower noise floor than the also wonderful sounding 4-Track version. This was important to me because in the back of my mind I wondered if maybe someone, for whatever reason, had simply copied the 1 7/8 ips M2 cartridges to 7 ½ ips 2-Track and transferred the labels. As my new friend put it, if they were copies of the cartridge tapes, he would expect to hear playback induced machine noise typical with such low-speed cartridge systems and nowhere near the apparent frequency range. I still don’t know how these tapes came to be, but my inkling is that they were copied from master material to the 2-Track format and the associated labeling applied as part of some kind of marketing effort either in house (CBS or 3M) or perhaps for distribution to radio stations? One additional point to consider is that five of the seven tapes lead off with about a ten second 1 kHz tone that I can only assume was intended for playback calibration and that I highly doubt was present on the cartridge tapes. Your thoughts?
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