Neil Diamonds' "Serenade" Album SQ quad mix on CD?

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Edit: Ignore the inversion(s) altogether, I'm Evil Fredna for suggesting it and willothewisp is quite right, no inversion necessary.

...but (but but but!) the Right channels are swapped for sure when you decode them.. very odd..

as it is the mix is pretty meh (referring to the discrete version on the Q8) so whether you leave it as decoded or fiddle about with it the SQ makes it more interesting (and sounds a HELL of a lot better than the tape!!)
 
Edit: Ignore the inversion(s) altogether, I'm Evil Fredna for suggesting it and willothewisp is quite right, no inversion necessary.

...but (but but but!) the Right channels are swapped for sure when you decode them.. very odd..

as it is the mix is pretty meh (referring to the discrete version on the Q8) so whether you leave it as decoded or fiddle about with it the SQ makes it more interesting (and sounds a HELL of a lot better than the tape!!)


have not heard the q8, so are you saying the corrected sq decode is the same as or better than it.
 
have not heard the q8, so are you saying the corrected sq decode is the same as or better than it.

the mix in Q8 form is not very active, a lot of the time its pretty much double stereo with the Rears lower volume than the Fronts.. with the SQ decode there's leakage of elements such as drums and bass etc to the Rears at higher level than on the Q8 which makes things more pleasingly surround-y to me on the decoded SQ, when the Right hand channels are swapped, yes.
 
thanks for the description

one pleasant thing about the correction is the mix makes much more sense. the bass is clearly on the rears and i am sure i am hearing a little instrumentation that i had not noticed before.

a thank you for time you spent figuring out why this pressing of the album sounded so messy
 
thanks for the description

one pleasant thing about the correction is the mix makes much more sense. the bass is clearly on the rears and i am sure i am hearing a little instrumentation that i had not noticed before.

a thank you for time you spent figuring out why this pressing of the album sounded so messy

you're welcome, its a pleasure, glad you're enjoying it after the swap.

sometimes my ears & brain get tricked by the phase stuff of SQ and I thought this disc had phase problems because something was definitely awry but turns out its "just" a case of it decoding the right hand channels the wrong way around.. since the Serenade Q8 doesn't suffer any channel assignment problems, I'm guessing the SQ LP was initially encoded incorrectly with Front Right and Rear Right swapped on the inputs of the SQ encoder?

I'm still curious if the domestic/U.S.A. SQ LP of Serenade is the same as my old Dutch SQ (i.e. screwy!)?

there are other CBS SQ LPs I've had issues with and I'm still unsure about exactly what's wrong with them, including Santana's Amigos, Herbie Hancock's Secrets & Paul Simon's Still Crazy After All These Years.. Amigos & Secrets are said to be faked, they both try to do Quad panning stuff, Secrets more successfully than Amigos but I'm sure there are problems with the encodes as the decoded rears on those two don't cancel out info leaked from the CF when you sum the rears to mono, as they should... one of these days I'll revisit them also and see if I can try and fathom any of it out with fresh ears/brain!
 
I think a true test of the quad matrix mix should also include the "stereo" album.


(Just thinking out loud)
The stereo and quad mixes don't always correlate. I've played the SQ album through the SM, and I think the mix is fine. Why do you think playing the stereo version through a decoder is warranted? Just curious...
 
Well for the obvious reason that it was mentioned that the stereo version was SQ encoded and a quad matrix test that includes that vinyl album would be conclusive.
👨‍🔬
 
Well for the obvious reason that it was mentioned that the stereo version was SQ encoded and a quad matrix test that includes that vinyl album would be conclusive.
👨‍🔬
The stereo version is not SQ-encoded. I have this album in both formats, and have played them through the SM. One of the most noticeable differences is in the intro of "Rosemary's Wine". Just before the drums come in, on the SQ mix, there's a slide guitar heard, which doesn't show up in the stereo mix.
 
The stereo version is not SQ-encoded. I have this album in both formats, and have played them through the SM. One of the most noticeable differences is in the intro of "Rosemary's Wine". Just before the drums come in, on the SQ mix, there's a slide guitar heard, which doesn't show up in the stereo mix.


Great.

Thankyou for finally clarifying this.
 
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