(1973-11) High Fidelity mag - Single Inventory Quad Discs

[kfbkfb]

https://worldradiohistory.com/Archi...idelity/70s/High-Fidelity-1973-11.pdf#page=75^^^
An RCA executive says his company hopes to have nearly everything new
out on Quadradiscs by the end of 1974


Puzzling, these same record stores were able to place both Mono and Stereo LPs
in the same bin just a few years before the Quad era.


Kirk Bayne

 

[steelydave]

There was another article in Billboard that year stating that RCA had abandoned their single-inventory approach pretty quickly (it started with Hugo Montenegro's Godfather, APD1-0001, and ended I think with Jose Feliciano's Compartments, APD1-0141) because retailers were filing the LPs in a dedicated quad section instead of mixing them in with the stereo LPs as RCA had intended.

I think RCA would've had more luck with this approach if they'd had a more subtle sleeve design (maybe like Ovation, which buried mention of the QS encoding on their single-inventory LPs at the bottom of the back cover) instead of the dark black border with the big red and yellow 'quadradisc' logo at the top, which looks like anything but a single-inventory design.

I don't think what RCA was saying about becoming a single-inventory label was just lip service either, I think they were fully pursuing that aim. Since they owned all their own studios and forced their artists to use them (and their producers/engineers) as part of their recording contracts, they could implement this kind of workflow where most other labels couldn't. It was actually the smart/cost-effective way to do things, because they were only doing (and paying for) one mix, the quad mix.

As a result of pursuing this single-inventory approach, I have a feeling that a lot of what RCA put out in stereo in the 1972/1973 era were actually fold-downs from discrete quad mixes, and only came out in stereo when it became clear that this strategy wasn't working. Who knows how many of these tapes survive, but if they do, there should be a bunch of unreleased quad mixes in the RCA vaults.

 

[4-earredwonder]

There was another article in Billboard that year stating that RCA had abandoned their single-inventory approach pretty quickly (it started with Hugo Montenegro's Godfather, APD1-0001, and ended I think with Jose Feliciano's Compartments, APD1-0141) because retailers were filing the LPs in a dedicated quad section instead of mixing them in with the stereo LPs as RCA had intended.

I think RCA would've had more luck with this approach if they'd had a more subtle sleeve design (maybe like Ovation, which buried mention of the QS encoding on their single-inventory LPs at the bottom of the back cover) instead of the dark black border with the big red and yellow 'quadradisc' logo at the top, which looks like anything but a single-inventory design.

I don't think what RCA was saying about becoming a single-inventory label was just lip service either, I think they were fully pursuing that aim. Since they owned all their own studios and forced their artists to use them (and their producers/engineers) as part of their recording contracts, they could implement this kind of workflow where most other labels couldn't. It was actually the smart/cost-effective way to do things, because they were only doing (and paying for) one mix, the quad mix.

As a result of pursuing this single-inventory approach, I have a feeling that a lot of what RCA put out in stereo in the 1972/1973 era were actually fold-downs from discrete quad mixes, and only came out in stereo when it became clear that this strategy wasn't working. Who knows how many of these tapes survive, but if they do, there should be a bunch of unreleased quad mixes in the RCA vaults.

SONY made a similar promise with the introduction of the hybrid SACD .....that ALL future releases would be HYBRID SACDs .... backward compatible with all existing CD players.

Would've been nice but alas, never reached fruition!

 

[JonUrban]

Well, the RCA single-inventory discs, I don't believe were the ones with the big black border and the huge quadradisc logo in the top center. Most of the ones I recall were like the "Elvis, Aloha" disc, with a small quadradisc logo somewhere on the front and back. The dual inventory discs had the big black borders.

Still, it did create a quandary, as if the record store saw that they were quad, boom! They went into the quad bin. But remember, for some reason the Elvis and the Doors (WB) discs did live in the stereo bins, and were big sellers, so in some respects it was not always the case.

I remember the big stores like Tracks and Peaches had decent quad sections, but the skilled quad collector would always browse the stereo LP sections of artists that we knew had quad releases because many times a release would be misfiled or returned to the store and put into the stereo bins. This went on way past the end of 1976 when you could still find a stray quad in the stereo bins from time to time.

In many ways, the DVD-A and SACD bins suffered the same fate as the quad racks of the '70s in that they sprang up with great fanfare, the choice titles were plucked from their midst and rarely replaced, leaving them cluttered with undesirable titles. In the case of the quads there would always be stuff like "Sounds of the '70s Orchestra" instead of "Machine Head" and "DSOTM".

It's very hard to bring a new format to the market when there is no massive program. I think BluRay did it correctly, but only after the money changed hands to get HD-DVD out of the way. Without the back door dealings, both formats may have gone the way of SACD and DVD-A, leaving DVD as the medium.

In fact, today, DVD still survives while BluRay movies are almost forgotten to the streaming public

 

[kfbkfb]

I special ordered APD1-0001 from Musicland in 1973-02
(mistakenly ordered APT1-0001, then called the next day
to change it), the LP arrived in a few days, I recall picking
it up and looking it over carefully to be sure it was Quad
(I hadn't seen a picture of the album cover, I was sort of
expecting something dramatic, like what Columbia was
doing with the gold border SQ discs)

I went right in to Team Electronics in the same Mall to play
it, but they didn't have CD-4 in their Quad demo system.

I didn't hear it in Quad until 1992-12, when I finally got
an SH-400 demodulator.


Kirk Bayne