This description of these releases has recently been put on Rick Wakeman's own website:
We've had a number of questions about the new reissues from A&M Records, specifically asking about the source of the recordings and the remastering processes used. We'd like to be as transparent as we can, so this is the information we've received to date about each of the releases. The information has been kindly supplied by Neil Wilkes of Opus Productions.
Production Notes - Six Wives of Henry VII
Assets Supplied:
Abbey Road Studios:
24-bit 96kHz Stereo Remaster of the original mix by Andrew Walters
24-bit 96kHz & 24-bit 48kHz remasters of the original Quad mix by Andrew Walters
All these were from the original tapes, newly transferred & remastered at Abbey Road
Universal Music Video Archives
"Catherine Parr" from "The Old Grey Whistle Test" - PAL ProRes
The Stereo & Quad mixes were aligned in Nuendo and rendered out as 5.1 with empty Centre & LFE channels - this was done because initial tests with straight Quad AC3 & DTS streams did not play back correctly on all player/amplifier combinations that were tested so the additional channels were added as silent channels, which fixed the issue.
AC3 stream encoded from 24/48 downsample of the 24/96 source in the Nuendo Dolby Digital Encoder.
DTS stream encoded to padded (.dts) form of DTS 9624 using the DTS Pro Series encoder.
MLP Lossless encoded with SurCode MLP Lossless encoder.
Onscreen look was designed by Opus Productions, and visual file accompanying the AC3/DTS/PCM streams was encoded using CinemaCraft CCE-SP3 encoder at 29.97FPS NTSC at 3Mb/sec CBR multi-pass.
The "Catherine Parr" video was standards converted to NTSC and used multi-pass VBR encoding (again using CinemaCraft CCE-SP3) with a peak rate of 9800kbps and an average or target of 5000kbps
Video_TS portion of the final DVD authored with Scenarist SD 3.4.3
Audio_TS authored with Sonic DVD-Audio Creator 3.0 (11)
Disc QC by Jon Urban, Bob Romano, Bob Squires Jnr, Tim McDonnell, Adam-Blue Buckley, John Kimber
and Wayne Smith
Production Notes - "Myths & Legends of King Arthur..."
Assets Supplied
Abbey Road Studios:
24-bit 96kHz Stereo Remaster of the original mix by Andrew Walters
24-bit 96kHz transfer from an unknown source remastered by Andrew Walters
However, the initial Quad version supplied was not used on the final disc because sonically it was nowhere near the stereo version and its quality was found to be generally lacking when the first build of the disc went into QC stage - it was replaced by a CD-4 vinyl transfer (CD-4 is a discrete Quad system requiring a special type of cartridge & demodulator) from a source known as "UnderMyWheels" because it matched the stereo remaster a lot better than the one originally supplied. There is no known original tape source for the Quad version.
The Stereo & Quad mixes were aligned in Nuendo and rendered out as 5.1 with empty Centre & LFE channels - this was done because initial tests with straight Quad AC3 & DTS streams did not play back correctly on all player/amplifier combinations that were tested so the additional channels were added as silent channels, which fixed the issue.
AC3 stream encoded from 24/48 downsample of the 24/96 source in the Nuendo Dolby Digital Encoder.
DTS stream encoded to padded (.dts) form of DTS 9624 using the DTS Pro Series encoder.
MLP Lossless encoded with SurCode MLP Lossless encoder.
Video_TS portion of the final DVD authored with Scenarist SD 3.4.3
Audio_TS authored with Sonic DVD-Audio Creator 3.0 (11)
Disc QC by Jon Urban, Bob Romano, Bob Squires Jnr, Tim McDonnell, Adam-Blue Buckley, John Kimber
and Wayne Smith