Quad Rachmaninoff on CD?

[jdmack]

The recording of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 performed by Arthur Rubinstein and the Philadelphia Orchestra was originally released only a a Quad Reel and a CD-4 LP. There was no stereo release of this recording when it was originally released. This recording is now out on a CD called "The Rubinstein Collection, Vol. 60." My first question is - does anyone have this CD and do the liner notes say anything about it being remixed to stereo for the CD release? The next question is - if an LP was originally released only as CD-4, and the master tape used to make the LP was used to make a CD, would it be decodable? I presume not, since the CD would not carry any information over 20K.

As an experiment, I recorded an online sample of one of the movements, and decoded it in Adobe Audition using scripts for both QS and SQ. I have the quad reel for comparison, and the SQ decoding sounded sort of close, with dryer sound in the front and more ambience in the rears.

J. D.

 

[bming]

Any decoding attempt on this CD would only result in fake quad (with classical music would still sound pretty good) as the discrete system was designed to be, well, discrete -no encoding is involved in the process. The rear information was carried on a high frequency carrier wave which was demodulated on playback to give you the full 4 channels.

Some of the RCA quad releases were latter re-released in Dolby surround CD's which would have entailed encoding the original quad master tapes into the Dolby Surround -some Tomita recordings and some of the Classic Film Score Series were re-released on CD in this format.