@fredblue 's said a lot about these releases already, but allow me to add a couple of things:
The Isley Brothers - The Heat is On & Harvest for the World As some of my favourite quad mixes, I've been after Mike to do these since I first started writing for D-V in 2016, keeping track of these albums' licensing and reissue status through various releases on other labels and box sets issued by Sony themselves. This releases is another one of the titles that we've had to sit on for ages because of the pandemic - I checked my notes and we worked on the artwork in June of 2020 (!) - so to say I'm glad it's coming out is an understatement.
Despite showing up in release lists and catalogs,
The Heat is On was never released in quad, and I think now we can definitively say why: a discrete four-channel master was never prepared - instead they apparently chose to mix directly to two-track tape through an SQ encoder, unlike CBS and almost every other studio who either did the discrete and matrix mixes simultaneously, or created the discrete master and then played it back through an encoder to create the SQ version. If you've listened to the quad mix on Apple Music, what you're hearing is a vintage (circa 1975) matrix decode of that SQ mix, and a poor one at that. Given that the Fosgate Tate 101A SQ decoder was more than a year away at that point, it was probably done with a Sony SQD-2020 or similar, and it certainly sounds like it - the front/rear separation is incredibly poor, the surround image never feels "fixed" (classic hallmarks of bad SQ) and the cymbals especially are sibilant and phasey. It may have been for that very reason (not to mention the lack of a discrete four-channel master would mean no Q8 release) that CBS declined to release this mix back in 1975 despite having paid for it to be done at an outside studio, Kendun Recorders. Mike certainly felt this mix was unreleasable as-is from that pseudo-four-channel master, so he went back to the original SQ master and this release employs a proprietary SQ decoding process that frankly knocks the Apple version in the dirt, and is likely the best you will ever hear the quad mix sounding despite the inherent limitations of an SQ encode. It's also interesting to note that the quad mix was done by a staff engineer at Kendun, Rick Heenan, who'd previously only been associated with some of the Impulse! quad mixes like Keith Jarrett's
Fort Yawuh and
Treasure Island, and Gary Saracho's
En Medio.
Harvest for the World, on the other hand, to paraphase Seinfeld, is real (discrete quad) and it is spectacular. While it isn't my very favourite Isley Bros album (the ones just before and just after are slightly stronger musically) it still comes right in the middle of the golden era of their "3 + 3" lineup, and sonically it's a stunner. I can confidently say this is one of the best quad mixes ever done, and you'd be hard pressed to tell it apart from a Scheiner or Wilson 5.1 mix aside from the lack of center speaker usage. Coming in 1976, this is one of those quad mixes like the Sigma Sound quads (O'Jays, Harold Melvin etc.) that show the format and mixing philosophy reaching full maturity just as the format was ironically in its death throes. This is another quad where the only release was an SQ LP, and quad mix is so close to the stereo mix in terms of tonality and instrument balance that we've been arguing about whether the quad mix was real or not here on QQ since the site's inception because of the combination of that and the poor separation of the SQ decoding process. Before the discrete master appeared on Apple and Tidal, I was pretty sure it was fake quad, but Fredblue always maintained it was real, and after having heard the discrete mix I couldn't be happier to admit I was wrong. The quad mix is also noteworthy because it contains an extended version of track 6 'Let Me Down Easy' which runs nearly 30 seconds longer than it's stereo counterpart. Also, I know it's not a major point of interest here, but
Harvest for the World has never had a good digital stereo mastering - the only uncompressed mastering was released in Japan in the mid-'90s and sounds to be a flat transfer with way too much bass, whereas all the domestic releases starting with the 2001 remaster have better tonality but single-digit DR numbers.
The O'Jays Ship Ahoy, Message in the Music and Live in London This was also a pandemic casualty, but in this case something great came out of it - originally this release was only going to be
Message in the Music and
Live in London, but in the interim
Ship Ahoy became available and Mike felt that despite the fact it had already been released on SACD by Sony 20 years ago that it was worth adding to the package, and I couldn't agree more. Go have a look on eBay and you'll see that the last copy of that SACD sold for $66, which just shows you how insane of a bargain this set is at three albums for 24 quid. As I mentioned above, the Sigma Sound quad mixes are what I consider to be the pinnacle of quad mixing, and
Message in the Music, their final one (done at the tail end of 1976) is the best of the best. I know R&B isn't everyone's cup of tea but this set is so chock full of great music I hope that even the fence sitters will give it a chance - even the live album (which is a fantastic performance) is discrete, with guitar, keyboards, the crowd - and even sometimes horns - in the rear speakers.
Henry Mancini Best of Vol. 1, Best of Vol. 2, The Concert Sound Of and Mancini Salutes Sousa The release of these four albums mean that D-V have now reissued all of Mancini's studio quad mixes (only
Live in Japan remains) and they've saved some of the best for last, both musically and sonically. The two best-of volumes contain all his classic TV and film theme hits from the '60s (Pink Panther, Peter Gunn, and many more) none of which are available elsewhere in quad - if you're one of those people who've watched D-V release countless Mancini quads over the last few years and thought "I don't know any of this stuff, I want the hits!" then this is the release for you.
The Concert Sound Of is another interesting album, and despite the name it's actually a studio album, albeit one that replicates Mancini's concert repertoire at the time. Recorded at the Goldwyn scoring stage in Hollywood (where a lot of soundtracks of the previous couple of decades were done) with a 70-piece orchestra, the album is split into four suites, two primarily dedicated to Mancini's work, and one-apiece tributes to Golden Age composers Victor Young and David Rose. Rounding out the set is
Mancini Salutes Sousa, an album that doesn't need any musical explanation, but is noteworthy for being the first album that Mancini recorded expressly with quad in mind, and he makes great use of it with lots of whizz-bang panning and other "show off your system" type effects a-la-Hugo Montenegro.
Enoch Light Beatles Classics and Serendipity and
Tony Mottola Tony & Strings and Close to You These releases are a long time in the making, and I'm proud to say I played a small part, playing detective and helping Mike untangle the web of ownership of the Project 3 catalog, which has changed hands several times since Enoch Light's death in 1978. I have to admit, up until I got on the trail of this stuff 5 or 6 years ago I thought Light was just kind of a "schlock merchant" pumping out easy listening covers for your parents' parents but after investigating him more deeply and writing some liner notes (I'm not sure if they've made these first couple of releases or not) I came to discover that there's so much more to him. I don't have enough time or space to do it here, but he led a fascinating life: effectively a child prodigy on violin, by the time he was a teenager he was leading a renowned big band that found itself in Paris for more than three years starting in the late 1920s, during the first wave of popular jazz. From there he went on to study classical composition with some of the masters in Germany, but most importantly to us here, after a car crash during WW2 that left him immobile for a large part of the 1940s, he started his first record label and arguably became the world's first audiophile. With the advent of the long-playing stereo LP in the late '50s, Light hooked up with Robert Fine (known for his work recording the Mercury Living Presence classical albums) and released the first smash hit stereo LP,
Persuasive Percussion, in 1960. Light and Fine continued to work together for more than a decade after that, and in that time Light pioneered or popularized a lot of innovations in both recording and packaging (his albums were some of the first to have gatefold sleeves with liner notes inside) that persist to this day. Light was also extremely particular about sound quality - with Fine he was at the vanguard of sound quality, recording on 35mm magnetic film until 2" tape matured enough to be viable, and he was also one of the earliest quad adopters, arranging and recording his albums with quad release in mind starting in late 1967, even though none of them would come out until nearly three years later in 1970 as part of a distribution agreement with the reel-to-reel arm of Vanguard records. Project 3 also employed many of the best studio musicians of the late '60s and early '70s - players who appeared on many New York studio sessions from labels like A&M, RCA and CTI amongst many others - and usually credited them individually in the liner notes at a time when most major labels kept them anonymous. Light believed strongly not just in quad, but that if an album wasn't conceived in quad from the ground up that it was a fraud on the consumer, so everything he released on his own Project 3 label from its inception in 1967 until his death was recorded that way.
Just briefly about these albums: the two Enoch Light records are sort of aytpical for him,
Beatles Classics takes a bunch of their hits and reimagines them sort of as chamber music (there's no bass or drums or "modern" keyboard or guitar sounds), in what felt like it was taking inspiration from the kind of slightly madcap or whimsical string arrangements that George Martin did on the original recordings as inspiration, and
Serendipity is a kind of "greatest hits" of Light's other classical excursions from albums recorded between 1969 and 1974, newly remixed in quad for this comp in 1975. Tony Mottola was a guitarist and Light's right-hand man, recording solo albums for Light's labels dating back to his Command days in the late 1950s. Mottola was also the guitarist in the
Tonight Show band for almost 20 years up until 1972, and after Light died he went on to be Sinatra's guitarist for several years until his retirement in the late '80s. Mottola is an incredibly tasteful jazz guitarist, with that big, rich semi-hollowbody guitar sound - his albums (
Tony & Strings and
Close to You included) remind me a lot of Wes Montgomery's later work (especially his A&M albums of the late '60s before his death) in that they're often covers of popular songs of the time, played in a small jazz combo with elaborate string and horn arrangements added later. Is there a bit of a cheese factor at work here? Sure, but boy the playing and sound quality more than makes up for it I think.
It's stating the obvious to say that none of the Project 3 catalog has been reissued in surround, but I think it's worth mentioning that almost none of this music (which represents nearly 100 albums worth of original recordings) has been reissued digitally in any format, physical or streaming. These first couple of releases represent a "trial balloon" of sorts for D-V with the Project 3 catalog - I hope they prove popular enough, and that people will take financial chances where they can, so that the series can continue because there's plenty more to mine from that particular vault.
ETA after reading a few of the comments that were writtten while I was penning all this nonsense: all of these releases feature new tape transfers and new (recent) masterings that I'm pretty sure don't appear on any streaming releases of these albums.
unfortunately the vast majority of us have no way of decoding the 360 Reality Audio and so have never heard them in proper Multichannel when using Tidal. 
