Oddly, this is one of those DVD-A's with a full range LFE. The LFE contains the bass and the drums!! I pulled the LFE into a stereo file then played it on the PC through the front speakers. Yep, it's drums and bass. I don't understand why they do this. Never did.
The quad reel sounds a bit more natural, but the DVD-A has a much newer sound and the mix is not bad at all. They are basically two flavors on a classic sound. Each, IMHO, worthy of tracking down - if you still can.
I may be able to shed some light on the odd or unusual mixing decisions with this title. Even though I have neither this DVD, nor the Q8; I
DO have a digital copy of the multitrack for the song "Let's Stay Together". Now, I'm not the biggest Al Green fan, not too hip to his history, but boy was I surprised to learn that for a 1970 hit song, it lives on an eight-track multi. From the looks and sounds of things, they had to do some track bouncing to get it all to fit, too.
On "Let's Stay Together", three tracks alone are dedicated to vocals! One lead and two backing for a lovely stereo pair. One track is horn overdub, another for a string session overdub. That leaves only THREE tracks for the whole band. How'd they do it? Well, I'm going to assume the original tracking session used 5 tracks live: Drums, Bass, Guitar, Organ, and the conga (maybe). My wild stab in the dark is they realized they didn't have enough space after the session for the horns, strings and better vocal overdubs. So they bounced the guitar, the organ and the conga to a SINGLE, MONO track. Since at least SOME of those instruments were recorded live at the initial session, that track also features a healthy background of drum and bass bleed as well. I suppose they left the bass and drum separated for better control? More often than not, I've seen bass and drum bounced to a single track, but that didn't happen here. So, those three instruments can't be positioned around the room. They're all stuck on one track.
After doing some digging, I can't find a whole lot of info on Hi Records. The studio they had in 1970 appears to be a former movie theatre. It wouldn't be unheard of for a smaller studio in 1970 to still have only an eight-track machine. Heck, LOTS of other - even more popular independent studios had eight-track much later than that. Usually, a fella can make some pretty convincing Quad with only 8 tracks, but with that one bounce.... they didn't leave a mixer a whole lot of options. It also doesn't help that the backing vocal tracks and even the horns are silent for a lot of the song.
So, if this song features some bouncing of instruments, I think we can safely assume some of the other songs from this era and studio feature the same. Makes a person want to invent a time machine and gift them a nice, new Ampex MM1000 (2" 16-track).
