Why no MCA or Decca quadraphonic?

[Cyber 1]

Sound like Pete had something to do with it during the Quadrophenia sessions:


Q: The album was called Quadrophenia in part because it was planned to be issued in the quadraphonic format. What happened with that?

RN: The parent company of Track Records, which was their UK label, was Universal and MCA, in the US in LA. Universal/MCA had adopted a certain system for this quadraphonic bullshit, which is all it was. It was supposed to be the next thing after stereo. But it was a bunch of crap. They took the stereo and they folded in out-of-phase tracks. It wasn't any kind of what we call discrete quad, where you have dedicated left-right front, left-right rear. When we tried a test mix halfway through with the album—when we finally got the equipment to encode these bullshit quad tracks—we realized that the front-to-back separation was like 5dB [decibels]. It was like a big giant mono. And Pete said, "You know, I am not going to do a quad mix that's worse than the stereo mix. Period." Why do anything like that? And that was it; whatever Pete said was it. He sent that memo to MCA. They were furious, I think, because they wanted to launch their whole quad thing with Quadrophenia, a Who album, the follow-up to Tommy, the whole kind of nine yards.

And I was right with him, man. I thought this was a bunch of shit, you know. I think that in one afternoon session, that all blew up when we realized that it was a crock of shit, this whole quad idea. And it was Pete's decision.

I think that in the end, the quadraphonic thing that MCA and record companies were trying to do in those days was gimmicky. It would have sold the decoder and two more speakers and amplifiers. So you have your normal stereo, and then you put it through a decoder and add another amplifier with two more speakers, and you have quad. But what you have is mono. And we weren't buying it. It would have been nice to have done a quad thing in 1973. Wouldn't that have been fabulous. But it wasn't to be.

http://www.furious.com/perfect/quadrophenia2.html

 

[Q-Eight]

Too bad they didn't just INSIST on true Quad release with either a Quad Reel and Q8-only edict. Might not have sold in the tonnage they wanted, but would've helped kick off MCA/Universals Quad gig. Kind of makes sense why they never really jumped on the bandwagon. Who did MCA have on deck that was bigger than The Who at that time? They couldn't play big, so they took their ball and went home.

Shame too. Lots of other equally good (or IMO) better artists signed to MCA during that era.

 

[EMB]

If MCA had been serious enough about quad to issue at least a handful of titles, they hardly needed the Who as their flagship act. Elton would have done nicely (as we heard much later), and MCA did of course have Lynyrd Skynyrd, and probably could have gotten away with a Neil Diamond title or two. They also had pop (Roger Williams) and country (Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty, among others) who would have filled out any quad catalog the label might have issued.

Aside from which format to choose, MCA's braintrust probably just adapted a 'wait and see' attitude that ultimately became 'who cares?,' since in the end no format took over and quad petered out by 1976. Ironic, then, that TOMMY and several Elton titles made the cut later on, and would have been quite nice to have back in the day.

ED