An Evening with Barry

[Bill Brent]

This Monday, July 22 at 10pm NYC time we have a special treat on the LP lounge – During his early career Barry Manilow released 3 LPs in what we now call surround sound. These were offered to the public using the CD-4 system on LP. As those who were around back then, and some who have come into the hobby more recently will tell you; each consumer surround, or quadraphonic system had its own set of issues. The CD-4 system had the best separation between channels, sounds could be placed anywhere in the room, phase shifting was not a concern – but – the system used a FM subcarrier to tell the playback equipment which signals were meant to go to the front, and which were meant to go to the rear. This subcarrier was quite delicate – unless the playback stylus was in perfect shape, and tracked very lightly – it could be damaged. Also – as humans can only hear up to about 17khz – LPs were not designed to accommodate such a subcarrier – which required accurate playback of frequencies up to 45khz. – And the vinyl used for the LPs needed to be perfect – while most stereo LPs were pressed on recycled material. As a result; quad, especially CD-4, demanded a higher level of quality control and more specialized playback equipment.

I told you that, to tell you this; Manilow’s label, Arista (formally Bell) – was never big on quality control of any kind. Fortunately, Manilow II and “Trying to Get the Feeling” turned out to be generally superior. “This One’s For You” however, not so much. I went through 3 copies of that LP when it came out (~50 years ago) and each had it’s own set of problems. Over the years, whenever I found another copy – I’d buy it (ever hopeful). But none would play (and decode) all the way through, without distortion at some point.

The best I could do was to get 10 of the 11 tracks migrated over to the digital domain – using elements from each of those 3 original shrink wrapped LPs.

It should be noted that this LP was released at the tail end of the quad experiment of the 1970s, and was considered a throw-away by the label (there was no corresponding tape release).

A few weeks back I was given a digital copy of a decoded LP – and as it turned out – the one track I could never get to play properly – was near perfect. So I did a comparison with all the versions I have and have put together the entire LP from the best sources.

Finally – this Monday I’ll be able to offer all three Manilow quad LPs – properly converted form needle drops of the CD-4 LPs (which we can’t play quadraphonicly) into a mix you can playback through your Pro-logic II home theatre system and get a pretty good idea of what these LPs were meant to sound like.

It all starts on Monday at 10pm on RadioMaxMusic.com….

http://radiomaxmusic.com/popup.html