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) .
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.
on anything . An opinion is just that ,"an opinion" .
