Suggestions for Dutton Vocalion Multichannel SACD Releases

[fredblue]

Now, I am waiting to see what that sale is all about starting Fen 1st. No hurry really I have lots 'o stuff to listen to.

marvellous!
doubt any of the latest stuff will be on sale but who knows.. and everyone loves a bargain!

listening to now in surround;

MFSB "Cheaper To Keep Her"..
fingers crossed DV can secure the MFSB Quads someday!

 

[bmoura]

listening to now in surround;
MFSB "Cheaper To Keep Her"..
fingers crossed DV can secure the MFSB Quads someday!

Keep those request emails flowing to DV.
I've certainly asked them about the MFSB albums on Surround SACD.

In the meantime, the new Hangin' Out Surround SACD on DV does have Henry Mancini's version of TSOP.
Not the original, but a start.....

 

[JonUrban]

I seem to remember seeing a list like that for Sony somewhere on this forum about a year ago And it was very thin!

https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/Columbia.htm

 

[fredblue]

Keep those request emails flowing to DV.
I've certainly asked them about the MFSB albums on Surround SACD.

In the meantime, the new Hangin' Out Surround SACD on DV does have Henry Mancini's version of TSOP.
Not the original, but a start.....

thanks for putting in the MFSB request with DV, Mr.B!

you know, i'm really enjoying Hangin' Out with Henry M.! any album that ends with The Stripper in surround gets my vote!!

 

[sperezmore]

Yes, we all want,

MFSB "Love Is The Message" album In glorious SACD QUAD

Regards,

 

[sjcorne]

Yes, we all want,

MFSB "Deep Grooves" album In glorious SACD QUAD

Regards,

Only two MFSB albums were released in quad- Love Is The Message and Philadelphia Freedom.

 

[privateuniverse]

How about the two Earth Wind & Fire quads that Audio Fidelity didn't get to? Those could be a real treat.

 

[sperezmore]

Only two MFSB albums were released in quad- Love Is The Message and Philadelphia Freedom.

You are right, my bad.

Regards,

 

[fredblue]

How about the two Earth Wind & Fire quads that Audio Fidelity didn't get to? Those could be a real treat.

ohhh.. just seeing that Spirit Q8 makes me all of a-quiver.. what a difference a year makes when you're talking old Quad tapes.. That's The Way Of The World from '75 is pretty common (after getting sucked in to an initial rookie error of buying a Stereo reissue in Quad sleeve i found the TTWOTW SQ LP in nice shape with little difficulty and i've seen it around fairly regularly in the last few years.. and have since acquired not one but two TTWOTW Q8 tapes.. the Spirit SQ LP in nice nick was no major sweat to get either) but the Spirit Q8, that damned Spirit Q8, from '76, is so stupidly scarce.. and i wannt it baaaaaaad gurrrrrl...

 

[privateuniverse]

Total combined time of Spirit and That's The Way of The World is 75 minutes. Could be a real sweet 2-fer. But if DV wanted to issue them separately and charge AP prices, I'd happily hand my money over!

 

[sjcorne]

...but the Spirit Q8, that damned Spirit Q8, from '76, is so stupidly scarce.. and i wannt it baaaaaaad gurrrrrl...

It's true! For a while I wasn't even sure it actually existed. There is a conversion out there, but unfortunately (and I'm sure this is more the fault of the tape than the converter) it's pretty stepped on. Right from the opening of "Getaway" it's full of dropouts

Great mix though, like the other EWF quads. I still haven't located an SQ myself...

 

[J. PUPSTER]

https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/Columbia.htm

Everyone, please calm down already!
Please note that my post was a direct reaction to Ralphie's post here:
https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/fo...annel-sacd-releases.22962/page-49#post-407676

Also, I already paid repentance (to my delight actually) here:
https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/fo...ion-in-january-2019.25796/page-10#post-407993

I still remember a "thin" Sony list, I just don't remember where I saw it (maybe not this forum.) If I ever do re-find the list I'll post it. The other Sony list pointed out by Adam is 20 years old. The real question relates back to what Ralphie said about why certain albums (say Paul Simon's Quads) aren't being released by D-V. Many reasons that would reduce the original released Quads.

Anyway, this is all tuckering out an old dog, I need to put on one of my favs "The Nightfly" and make myself a Cuban Breeze to cool off.
Here's my own take on that- (Blend together: Coconut Rum, Fresh lime juice, La Lechera Dulce de leche & crushed ice)
Cheers

 

[The Rang]

MFSB would be awesome, bring on as much as PIR as possible

 

[fredblue]

It's true! For a while I wasn't even sure it actually existed. There is a conversion out there, but unfortunately (and I'm sure this is more the fault of the tape than the converter) it's pretty stepped on. Right from the opening of "Getaway" it's full of dropouts

Great mix though, like the other EWF quads. I still haven't located an SQ myself...

something about the EW&F Quads i find interesting, is they're all solid surround, yet they were mixed by different engineers with different styles and pedigrees.. not something that happened too often with Quads of the same band/artist mixed by different people, take the Santana's, most are great but a couple are crap (Head To The Sky mixed by Don Young, Open Our Eyes mixed by Bruce Botnick & Spirit mixed by Larry Keyes) but where things get even more interesting is that the TTWOTW SQ LP is unmarked and does not identify the Quad remix engineer and in turn it is the main one of their Quads that has major differences from the Stereo.. hmm.. wonder whodunnit! if anyone can solve the riddle it's the Wizard of Watford!

 

[J. PUPSTER]

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.

bump- for steelydave
Just found this great post for the first time; believe this to be required reading for this thread and forum overall.
Fantastic post, we need you here more than ever steelydave!

 

[4-earredwonder]

bump- for steelydave
Just found this great post for the first time; believe this to be required reading for this thread and forum overall.
Fantastic post, we need you here more than ever steelydave!

JP, MANY thanks for resurrecting Steelydave's SOBERING Post! As voracious collectors of ANYTHING QUAD, we do seem to forget that these QUAD masters, some of which are 'pushing' 50 have also changed hands many times. In the 70's RCA was a US based company before becoming German~owned BMG and later Japanese owned SONY and Universal [UMG] didn't exist at that time but was split into independent factions......i.e.: A&M was [Herb] Alpert & [Jerry] Moss, independently owned before it changed hands, VERVE was independent, ABC Dunhill as well and the list could go on and on but as ownership by mega conglomerates transpired, so did the shifting of ALL their intellectual properties [read MUSIC MASTER TAPES] from vault to vault and as we all know, a lot of them were lost, stolen or perished in fires.

And in that time, a lot of artists have gained control of their Master Tapes [The Zappa estate, the Sinatra Estate, the Jimi Hendrix estates, etc.] and are NO longer controlled by the major conglomerates.

In essence, Bmoura and Steelydave are sobering reminders that it's sometimes impossible to ever hope for a slew [MORE than we know] of QUAD titles that will NEVER see the light of day. And sometimes all that remains is the QUAD VINYL, Q8s and QRs that, while significant, still fail to fully represent the shimmering beauty of those ORIGINAL masters!

And of course the ensuing frustration to us neophytes is NOT knowing what's available and what's not either due to contractural agreements with the artists or unavailability or unusability of those QUAD masters. And of course one of our most egregious frustrations is ever knowing whether ALL those titles announced for release on either DVD~A or SACD in the early 00's were ACTUALLY REMIXED TO 5.1 IN THE FIRST PLACE....and then scrapped!

Most Importantly, what's SIGNIFICANT to US QUADDIES, a decidedly NICHE MARKET is hardly pre~eminent in the minds of the Major Conglomerates ...... so in essence, let's be truly thankful that we are getting QUAD/5.1/Atmos releases in A.D. 2019!

AMEN Brothers and Sister [Quad Linda]!

 

[van1]

bump- for steelydave
Just found this great post for the first time; believe this to be required reading for this thread and forum overall.
Fantastic post, we need you here more than ever steelydave!

Most enlightening, thanks for the re-post on this very well written piece. I appreciate Steelydave's tone; informative, enlightening and humorous without being condescending or insulting. He should write some more of those word things, maybe in liner notes - when he's ready

"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."

I will have to check out this 'Aerosmith' band that Steelydave speaks of

In all seriousness, he may be onto something with the contractual angle. From what i've read, they re-signed with Columbia/Sony in the mid '90's for big money and have only released 2 (?) albums of original material in that time so are likely 'beholden' to Sony still, not sure how that impacts re-issues. I'm guessing it may be that the Aerosmith albums haven't gone out of print.

I do think that any chance of an Aerosmith quad set would go to Sony Japan or Rhino given their work with Chicago and maybe the Doobie Brothers, Jay and Stash

 

[key_wiz]

Most enlightening, thanks for the re-post on this very well written piece. I appreciate Steelydave's tone; informative, enlightening and humorous without being condescending or insulting. He should write some more of those word things, maybe in liner notes - when he's ready

"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."

I will have to check out this 'Aerosmith' band that Steelydave speaks of

In all seriousness, he may be onto something with the contractual angle. From what i've read, they re-signed with Columbia/Sony in the mid '90's for big money and have only released 2 (?) albums of original material in that time so are likely 'beholden' to Sony still, not sure how that impacts re-issues. I'm guessing it may be that the Aerosmith albums haven't gone out of print.

I do think that any chance of an Aerosmith quad set would go to Sony Japan or Rhino given their work with Chicago and maybe the Doobie Brothers, Jay and Stash

Sony Japan makes sense. But I don’t recall Sony ever giving any of their titles to Rhino for release?

 

[van1]

Sony Japan makes sense. But I don’t recall Sony ever giving any of their titles to Rhino for release?

I thought Chicago (as with Aerosmith) were on cbs / columbia and rhino released their quadio set

 

[steelydave]

I thought Chicago (as with Aerosmith) were on cbs / columbia and rhino released their quadio set

Chicago may have fallen out with their producer/manager James William Guercio and parted company with him in 1978 because they felt he was too controlling and not paying enough attention to them, but he did one very smart thing for the band. When they signed with Columbia in 1969, their contract said that ownership of all their recordings would revert back to them in 25 years. So in the mid 90's Columbia lost the rights to all of Chicago's material, and they started their own label, Chicago Records, and re-released all of their albums up to Chicago 15 on that imprint - the CDs were straight ports of the old Columbia masterings.

The Chicago Records thing was either too much work, or not making enough money for the band so some time in the late 90s or early 00s they shut down Chicago Records and signed a distribution deal with Warner Bros. - after that you started seeing the deluxe edition CDs (with the really loud compressed masterings and bonus tracks), the box sets, and more recently, the Quadio set which is on Rhino, WB's reissue subsidiary. I don't know if Chicago sold their catalog outright to WB, or if they're just in some kind of joint venture where Chicago retains ownership of their masters, but Warners now controls everything the band did because the albums from 16 onward were recorded for Reprise, which is a WB subsidiary.

Aerosmith is still firmly with Sony as far as I know, so if there were any reissues of their albums it would be through Sony Legacy (their catalog division, the equivalent of WB's Rhino) or Sony Japan, if they were going to go down the 7" quad SACD route.