ANALOG Fredventures In Second Guessing The Quad Engineer... Neil Diamond's Serenade SQ Quad

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fredblue

Surroundophile Extraordinaire
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Well I've had my suspicions about this SQ record for a while.. and it turns out from a quick check with the first track that Rear Right is incorrectly mapped to Front Right and vice versa..

In short, if you swap Rear Right for Front Right.. you get the correct mix. Try it on your copy and see what you think :)
 
Screen Shot 2015-11-14 at 11.24.10.jpg
 
Here you can just about see (apologies for poor quality of screen grab, I'm working on it) where I've correctly relabelled the channels, when first recorded in Front Right (bottom stem) was 3rd from the top and vice versa.. you might just be able to see at this resolution that there are two obvious pairs of channels - the two in the middle (lets call them 2 & 3) are the rears with reverbed lead vocals and the others (1 & 4) are the Front pair with dry lead vocals and most of the instrumentation.

I'll keep you posted on how the other tracks fare on the SQ pressing of this album...
 
The waveforms definitely have that look of swapped channels, so it looks like you're right. What is the instrument/vocal layout in the front and rear speakers?
 
Swapped on SQ Vinyl? :confused: So they'd have to have swapped the source channels when encoding to SQ?
 
The waveforms definitely have that look of swapped channels, so it looks like you're right. What is the instrument/vocal layout in the front and rear speakers?

I've only done the first song (I got distracted.. :eek: ) and that track in particular doesn't seem to have too active a mix, strings are everywhere for most of it and there's a lot of front to back duplication which makes it hard thru the SQ soup to work out exactly what is happening.. but the channes I relabelled as rears are more muted and have more reverb than the other two..

..the telltale sign that got me second guessing in the first place ( ;) ) was originally his vocal was skewed seriously to the front left.. which figures with the dry vocal of the actual front left and the muted reverbed vocal of the actual rear right in the original channel mapping appearing wrongly in front right.. and of course the vocals try to cancel out when you playback both of the rear channels together when you reassign them (in that funky old SQ way..) I mean when you swap original FR for original RR then the new RR and old RL all but cancel out Neil leaving just fainter reverb of his vocal..

Oh fuck it I'll PM you, it'll be quicker ;)
 
Swapped on SQ Vinyl? :confused: So they'd have to have swapped the source channels when encoding to SQ?

I think so.. and I don't think it is the only SQ LP that the little Surround Master will show up for being screwed up when they first SQ encoded the discrete 4-channel tape in order to squeeze it into 2 helically cut grooves back in the nineteen seventiessssss... :eek:
 
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