Santana - III Sony Japan Quad SACD (Release date: November 24th, 2021)

[4-earredwonder]

Only Amigos and Festival are fake.

By fake, do you mean double stereo or subpar UPMIXES. In any event, I wonder if this would preclude Sony Japan from releasing them as QUAD SACDs?

 

[Imbobman]

My fun has been with UPS. Their delivery estimates are terrible, especially when signature required.

Exactly! That's why I quit using them as a carrier.
I'd quote someone a price, then when I actually went to ship it, it was way more ..
Fuel surcharges, & other variables...
I would wind up losing money..

 

[Petr Kropotkin]

OK- I couldn't really play it this weekend- as my 4 y old grandson stayed with me for the weekend.

Don't quite get that (and I had twin daughters, now 37, who had early 1970s prog. rock blasted at them while still in the womb). You should've put it on and introduce, educate, condition, indoctrinate him into such music. Once he's old enough to discover what supposedly passes for "music" these days, he'll fondly remember bopping around with his grandad to 1970s Santana, recall some very happy memories, and ask grandad if he could please borrow that Santana III disc.

 

[reidc]

Don't quite get that (and I had twin daughters, now 37, who had early 1970s prog. rock blasted at them while still in the womb). You should've put it on and introduce, educate, condition, indoctrinate him into such music. Once he's old enough to discover what supposedly passes for "music" these days, he'll fondly remember bopping around with his grandad to 1970s Santana, recall some very happy memories, and ask grandad if he could please borrow that Santana III disc.

Attention span of this grandson is 45 and half seconds. Trying to get him to sit for music...ain't gonna happen!!!

 

[djstephan]

Any European distributors yet ? Amazon..JPC ?

Import duties and VAT (Value added tax) make it too prohibitive to order from CD Japan.

 

[edisonbaggins]

Attention span of this grandson is 45 and half seconds. Trying to get him to sit for music...ain't gonna happen!!!

My 4 yo is good for about one song. If he's allowed to "dance".

 

[fizzywiggs41]

Attention span of this grandson is 45 and half seconds. Trying to get him to sit for music...ain't gonna happen!!!

Good luck with that . You'll need it.

 

[fizzywiggs41]

By fake, do you mean double stereo or subpar UPMIXES. In any event, I wonder if this would preclude Sony Japan from releasing them as QUAD SACDs?

I don't think I'd use the term fake . Maybe just a poor quad mix and subsequent SQ encode .
FWIW I don't mind "Festival" ,but I'm not a fan of "Amigos". So I'd pounce on a quad SACD copy of Festival from Sony Japan.
Compared to all of the Quad output from Santana those two are at the bottom* , when it comes to Quad selections from Santana.


*I wouldn't buy "Welcome" regardless of the quad mix . But that's a musical opinion of mine.

It sure would be a nice gift if Sony Japan released the Quads of the 3 Aerosmith ,or the 2 West, Bruce and Laing , or even better....... all 3 or 4 of the Bob Dylan quads (Desire , Planet Waves , Nashville Skyline , and Greatest Hits).

Wishfull thinking by Fizzy

 

[sjcorne]

I don't think I'd use the term fake . Maybe just a poor quad mix and subsequent SQ encode .

The Q8 tape of Festival has the original stereo mix in the front speakers and artificially-generated echo in the rear speakers. It almost certainly wasn't remixed from a multitrack source. Amigos in decoded SQ has a similar sound, but there is no discrete tape to compare it to.

 

[fizzywiggs41]

The Q8 tape of Festival has the original stereo mix in the front speakers and artificially-generated echo in the rear speakers. It almost certainly wasn't remixed from a multitrack source. Amigos in decoded SQ has a similar sound, but there is no discrete tape to compare it to.

I'd still buy it ,and why not. Sony Japan needs all the support they can get .

 

[jefe1]

Does anyone know why these two Santana quads after a superb run of great mixes were put out as fake quad? I just dont get it.

 

[4-earredwonder]

Does anyone know why these two Santana quads after a superb run of great mixes were put out as fake quad? I just dont get it.

Obviously, Jeffie, SOMEONE was ASLEEP at the mixing console.......and I'm sure it wasn't CARLOS!

 

[jefe1]

Maybe there was a lot of smoke during the mixing sessions.

 

[fizzywiggs41]

Does anyone know why these two Santana quads after a superb run of great mixes were put out as fake quad? I just dont get it.

Again not fake quad, does a bad quad mix . And subsequent SQ Encode .

FWIW I still have my quad copy of "Festival".

 

[sjcorne]

Does anyone know why these two Santana quads after a superb run of great mixes were put out as fake quad? I just dont get it.

One theory I've heard (I think it was @steelydave who originally posted this a few years ago?) is that CBS didn't want to pay for the studio time needed to do the remix. Steven Wilson mentioned in an interview recently that some of his 5.1 remix projects can take weeks to complete, and he's working entirely in the digital domain. I can only imagine how much more time-consuming/difficult it would be to create a surround mix entirely in the analog domain. Quad LPs were never a big money-maker, but by 1976-77 there was barely anyone buying them - so it's sort of understandable why they'd put the minimal cost/effort into creating something that wasn't going to sell many copies to begin with.

 

[kap'n krunch]

I used to have "Let the children play" on 45!

 

[4-earredwonder]

One theory I've heard (I think it was @steelydave who originally posted this a few years ago?) is that CBS didn't want to pay for the studio time needed to do the remix. Steven Wilson mentioned in an interview recently that some of his 5.1 remix projects can take weeks to complete, and he's working entirely in the digital domain. I can only imagine how much more time-consuming/difficult it would be to create a surround mix entirely in the analog domain. Quad LPs were never a big money-maker, but by 1976-77 there was barely anyone buying them - so it's sort of understandable why they'd put the minimal cost/effort into creating something that wasn't going to sell many copies to begin with.

A plausible theory, Jonathan, but the same can be said today for modern Surround remixes ..... catering STILL to a smallish niche market and with inflation, etc., those $8~10 QUAD LPs in the mid to late 70's translate into $60+ in today's market. And those 70's multi tracks were as fresh as daisies in those days while the search for the absolute multi tracks today in itself sometimes represents great expense and super sleuthing!

And to be perfectly honest ... how many of today's Surround remixes are subpar even with the advances in digital mixing/'mastering?????

 

[steelydave]

One theory I've heard (I think it was @steelydave who originally posted this a few years ago?) is that CBS didn't want to pay for the studio time needed to do the remix. Steven Wilson mentioned in an interview recently that some of his 5.1 remix projects can take weeks to complete, and he's working entirely in the digital domain. I can only imagine how much more time-consuming/difficult it would be to create a surround mix entirely in the analog domain. Quad LPs were never a big money-maker, but by 1976-77 there was barely anyone buying them - so it's sort of understandable why they'd put the minimal cost/effort into creating something that wasn't going to sell many copies to begin with.

By the end of 1975 CBS realized that quad wasn't going to achieve mass market adoption, and moved from trying to get everything they put out also mixed in quad to a more selective approach, where only big sellers and marquee names would get the quad treatment. Who can blame them for the change of tack too, how many copies of stuff like Lee Michaels Nice Day for Something or the two Buddy Miles quads made their way to the cutout bins, along with a lot of early CBS quad releases? I think Stan Kavan may have said explicitly that they were moving to this more selective approach on one of those WNYC Men of Hi-Fi shows from 1975, in fact. RCA did exactly the same thing in 1975, the only difference being that they released far fewer quads in '75 and '76, and none in 1977 whereas CBS did a fair few.

The simple (and to me, obvious) reason that they didn't do real quad mixes of Amigos (1976) and Festival (1977) is the number of copies the quad mixes of those albums would've sold simply didn't merit it, especially since they were done at Wally Heider in San Francisco and not at one of CBS's own studios in NY or San Fran, and I'm sure CBS didn't want to pay out to have them done there. I believe by that point Santana had renegotiated his contract with Columbia and probably had sign-off over who engineered his albums (hence why he was recording at Heider's with Fred Catero and not at CBS SF or LA) so they couldn't just send the album down to Dick Bogert and Warren Vincent like they had with other stuff (Tower of Power, Return to Forever, Miracles, etc.) during that period. I think if they'd done these albums at CBS SF with Glen Kolotkin (like Welcome and Borboletta) there'd probably be a much higher chance of getting a 'real' quad mix.

Also bear in mind that during the absolute height of quad in '73/'74, Abraxas, which was CBS's best-selling quad release only sold 250,000 copies to the stereo version's two million, and by 1976, according to industry figures quad sales had fallen off a cliff, so spending $10k (that's about 50 grand in today's money) to do a quad mix of an album represented something of a risk, because do you think they were even selling 25,000 copies of some of those latter-era CBS releases? Based on how rare some of those 1977 releases (Isley Bros, Return to Forever, Maynard Ferguson, etc.) I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't even sell 10,000 copies. I also don't think they anticipated that people would care about, or be discussing this stuff 10 years later, let alone 40 or 50 years later - they were just trying to get a product finished and on the shelves to meet a street date, and if that one didn't work out there was undoubtedly another album by the same artist to record the following year. Someone probably just made a spur of the moment decision based on the balance sheets those years, and here we are debating it all these years later.

It's also worth noting that Al Lawrence, who was the head of CBS's quad program, seemingly quietly left the company either in late '75 or early '76 (he shows up writing studio reviews for an audio magazine in mid '76) so there was really no one at the helm quality control-wise - maybe Santana's recording contract called for a quad version to be issued, and the bean-counters said "we need a quad mix as cheap as possible!" and they got what they paid for. What CBS was doing here wasn't unprecedented either - both of the Guess Who's last two albums for RCA (1974's Power in the Music and 1975's Flavours) were released in fake quad derived from the stereo mixes (as was their 1973 flop, Artificial Paradise), and somewhat inexplicably so, given that in 1975 Jack Richardson did a presentation at a Canadian music trade show extolling the virtues of quad where he demonstrated by doing a quad mix of one of the band's tracks live in front of the assembled crowd.

Again not fake quad, does a bad quad mix . And subsequent SQ Encode .

Fizzy, there's no doubt that you love quad and that you've brought a ton of interesting information here, but your continued insistence in this thread (and many others like it) on ignoring overwhelming, often incontrovertible evidence in favour of continuing to propagate thoroughly-debunked rumors and baseless hearsay (often from outdated print publications) about the existence of supposed quad mixes does the hobby a great disservice. Not just in terms of muddying the waters intellectually, but also by encouraging people to spend their hard-earned money chasing quad El Dorados (not the ELO album) that never existed in the first place. You can't simply wish this stuff into existence - this album never had a real "bad quad mix", the Tommy soundtrack never had a QS release, and Captiol Records never released a dozen QS stealth quads in 1974 - no matter how many times you repeat the story.

This is absolutely a fake quad, unless you believe that using an upmixed stereo source counts as a "bad quad mix." As @sjcorne noted, the quad version is just the stereo version with a reverbed version in the rears, and as this album had a Q8 release there's no grey area where you can blame it on the vagaries of SQ decoding. The same goes for the other "Catero quads" from '76/'77 including Herbie Hancock's Secrets, which I checked the Q8 version myself and posted about in another thread here, and Amigos, which despite being SQ-only has the exact same sound as the other fake albums that did have a Q8 release.

 

[4-earredwonder]

Since none of us are ever privy to any current sales statistics regarding QUAD/5.1 nor ATMOS physical discs or for that matter surround downloads, very doubtful any of Audio Fidelity, Dutton Vocalion nor SONY Japan QUAD discs are selling any better NOW than they were in the roaring early 70's QUAD era!

Same query applies to boutique items like the new Beatle's 5.1/Atmos box sets, the John Lennon sets, George Harrison's ALL THINGS MUST PASS and the Band's stunning 5.1 box sets in addition to the Rhino Chicago and Doobies Quadio discs!

And we do know that sales of physical discs are waning as even MoFi's Stereo SACDs for the last few years have only been offered in VERY LIMITED pressings of 1~3K copies.....not up to 10K as in previous years.

And with the rapid passage of time and the questionable shelf life of analogue master tapes I think it more imperative, than ever, to reissue as many of those old QUAD recordings as possible instead of playing Russian Roulette by making those master tapes ridiculously expensive to access by imposing unrealistic licensing/royalty fees.

Surround music HAS made a comeback, albeit still confined to a niche market ...... but some of THE greatest music of the past, encoded in QUAD formats needs to be heard by a new generation while those master tapes are still INTACT and those anti~QUAD hold out artists like Led Zep, the Eagles and numerous other first rate artists should realize by now IF their EARS are still functioning that QUAD/5.1/ATMOS is NO LONGER A GIMMICK and that 21st Century Technology has the means to deliver their artistry in stellar [read: State of the Art] ways a previous generation was hardly privy to!

 

[DuncanS]

In transit

Its arrived! Along with the Chick Corea - Return To Forever SACD.

Where have they been lurking for 16 days? I thought may be in customs, but no customs stickers/charge (yet!), its arrived so not lost. So sent by hot air balloon, too quick. So that just leaves those b*****d garden gnomes, didn't even open and listen to them, they're probably Ed Sheeran fans anyway