Q8s that were butchered by the fine folks at Columbia Records

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ArmyOfQuad

2K Club - QQ Super Nova
Since 2002/2003
Joined
Apr 22, 2002
Messages
2,320
Location
Attleboro, MA
So, I've made a disappointing discovery. For a long time I've had an SQ lp of The Carmina Burana on Columbia, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the Cleveland Orchestra. Through the muddiness that is SQ, there is a great quad mix in there somewhere, and so I sought out the Q8 of it, and finally obtained one.

As I'm looking over the tape, I notice in small print on the label it notes that "Due to mechanical limitations, this tape cartridge program has been edited to a slightly shorter length than the disc version."


WTF!?!?!?!


And sure enough, 10 minutes are gone. Just gone. Complete verses just edited right out. Carl Orff must have been rolling in his grave as some jerk with a razor blade edited down a classic work of music just to avoid making a 2 tape set.

I really don't get some of the jackassery that these guys pulled off. Chicago got 2 tape sets. Leonard Bernstein's Mass got a 3 tape set, and even got a nice box to hold them. But Company and The Carmina Burana? Nah, just slice and dice it, no one will notice. Bitches Brew and Tears of Joy? Nah, don't bother, just slap in on an SQ and call it good.

I don't get why some releases were deemed fit for multi-tape release, while at other times they avoided going beyond a single tape at all costs, even to the point of butchering classical music.

I wonder what other butchering jobs the guys at Columbia did.
 
Must have been a sales decision and the pricing of a two tape set. Still I share your disgust with the decision. I have that sq lp I'll have to listen to it again.
 
When the 8-Track format died I was glad because I thought we'd never have to put up with stuff like that again - then I got the first issue of Prince 1999 on CD and D.M.S.R. is completely missing, the CD's Long Box even has a notice about it, stating that they've cut the song to enable a 'single disc release.' Yet if they had included the track, the entire album would have only been 63 minutes or so! And this wasn't at the very beginning of the format either, when the 2 existing CD plants in Japan and England were struggling with 60% defect rates that worsened the longer the playing time - this was 1985, when 70 minute CD's had already been released and independent companies like Disctronics were doing custom mastering via the early DRAW masters invented by MCA DiscoVision! And Warner had a DRAW system already up and running in PA that could produce a 72 minute disc (they mastered the Lady Sings The Blues soundtrack CD that runs 72 min)
 
I mentioned the song order on Johnny Cash's San Quentin Q8 a long while back. That Q8 got the hatchet put to it something fierce! I'm sure most of these atrocities come down to a financial decision. It's the same reason why a lot of things are the way they are. My personal favorite is the Smart Car. No oil drain plug.
 
San Quentin has been resequenced for make even the two programs, and that was common pratice in 8-tracks - lots of examples; the only other i can think about cutting off songs is "Johnny Mathis in person", which was a double LP and in quad was a single cart.
 
there are also quite alot of just plain stereo cd releases that are missing tracks from their double lp counterpart...
Jazz at the pawnshop is one that springs to mind and some pressings of Belafonte At Carnegie Hall.
 
there are also quite alot of just plain stereo cd releases that are missing tracks from their double lp counterpart...
Jazz at the pawnshop is one that springs to mind and some pressings of Belafonte At Carnegie Hall.

I have a Peggy Lee CD that was recommended to me by Martin Willcocks as being one of the most realistic recordings ever when played in surround. Even though the album wasn't recorded in surround, they used a mic technique that picked up the ambience of the small club and you can hear patrons all around you, their glasses clinking softly - all while Peggy Lee sings - it's absolutely uncanny in its realism, and it sounds that way on pretty much any logic-based surround decoder. When Martin Willcocks hosted a weekend FM radio show dedicated to quad in the early 80's he often played the Peggy Lee album and never told listeners it wasn't an encoded recording. Anyway, the CD has been reissued and whoever re-mastered it out to be shot - it's been COMPLETELY RUINED because they sent it though massive amounts of filtering and NR to remove ALL TRACES of the audience! Then added synthetic reverb over the now-too-dry sound... the recording is lifeless and dull, with continuously audible gating artifacts due to the incredible amount of filtering required to remove the audience.

The CD is "Peggy Lee & George Shearing: Beauty & The Beat" and the correct CD is the one that was issued in the early 90's. The later releases are the destroyed versions - happily, if anyone wants to buy a copy the good version sells for around 5 bucks on Amazon. Make no mistake, this is one of the most realistic surround recordings I've ever heard. Yet it's not a surround recording!

Via the Fosgate Tate II 101A and the Shure HTS-5300 the soundfield is fully around you and you can place each performer at the front 'on-stage', with the audience behind and to your sides... The Fosgate Tate is my preferred way to hear it because the SQ mode produces stereo surrounds, giving that last bit of 'realism' - the Shure 5300 creates a stronger front stage presence due to the Center Front channel - I might try using the Shure after the Fosgate to extract a Center channel from it and SQ recordings. Via the digital Pro-Logic decoder in my Yamaha DSP-A1 the soundfield clings to the speakers a bit more strongly with less clear phantom imaging - but then, Pro-Logic is speaker-emphasis biased since it was designed to create very audible directional speaker-based effects in large auditoriums with dialog locked in the center and not create delicate phantoms with soundstage depth.
 
Thank you Disclord for that reccomendation. I will look for this disc. I already picked up the Annie cd you mentioned and it does have the sq encoding.
 
there are also quite alot of just plain stereo cd releases that are missing tracks from their double lp counterpart...
Jazz at the pawnshop is one that springs to mind and some pressings of Belafonte At Carnegie Hall.

At least for the quad release of Belafonte they had the honesty to write somewhere "highlights". :)
 
Thank you Disclord for that reccomendation. I will look for this disc. I already picked up the Annie cd you mentioned and it does have the sq encoding.

The Peggy Lee album is wonderful - I think you'll like it. Also get the CD of "Chase: Open Up Wide" - it's SQ and was encoded with the original 'square' SQ encoder but with the side walls encoded by using 2 more CBS 4200 SQ encoders as an early method of achieving "SQ Position Encoding." Since the CD is mastered directly from the 1/4 inch SQ master tape, there's no intervening LP cutting master sub-generations to get in the way and add phase or level errors that upset decoding - with the errors LP's have added on top of that. So the CD decodes beautifully on the Tate SQ decoders and on both the Sony SQD-2020 and the Layfayette SQ-W with just incredible localization. (I've heard it played through all of them - the only decoder it didn't sound right through was my Sansui QRX-6500 with the Vario-Matrix in the SQ Phase Matrix position due to the limited corner separation of the Type-B Vario-Matrix in that receiver) about the only drawback to the CHASE CD is a 'rough' high-end due to the nasty op-amps used in the 10-Pole precision phase shifters of the CBS SQ encoders - CBS SQ encoders had a 'ragged' sounding high end and it's audible in spades on the CHASE SQ CD. British and Columbia Records SQ releases sound much better because they used 'resistor ladder' type phase shifters that didn't require huge numbers of slow, highly distorting, Op Amps in the circuitry.

If you have a LaserDisc player, find David Bowie's Serious Moonlight concert and Dolly Parton Live in London - both were SQ encoded by Gary Reber (of Widescreen Review) because he was part of Tate Audio and had his own quad production company. The DVD release of David Bowie - while having incredibly bad 5.1 DTS and Dolby Digital mixes, keeps the SQ mix on the 2-channel "Dolby Surround" track. I've compared it closely with the LaserDisc and the DVD decodes exactly the same as the LD through the Fosgate Tate. Sadly, Dolly Parton in London isn't available on DVD, although Gary Reber did re-issue the Buddy Rich concert on DVD in DTS 4.0 - decoded through his Tate and encoded to DTS. He didn't make the 2 channel SQ track available on the DVD though, so it's only available on the LD release now.
 
They butchered the Q8 of "Company - Original Broadway Cast." Dropped two of the tracks and started 2 others halfway into the songs. Great rear speaker use. There is a 1969 documentary on the recording session out there. Good to study microphone setups and subsequent mixing.
 
For those un-aware of my blog, the Chase album is available for download (SQ360 decoded) and Annie is due to be re-issued in a new SQ360 version. Plus of course, there's so much more.....

OD

sorry for the blatent advert
 
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