Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: Jan. 20 2008, 10:33 |
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I should preface this response with a couple things:
The first is that if for any reason the quad mixes aren't decoding as intended on your system, there's nothing wrong with your equipment. Pro Logic II isn't SQ - it has similarities with SQ, which is how it manages to extract something interesting from these old SQ encoded albums, but the matrix isn't identical, and the decoder's logic circuits are designed with different priorities to those of an SQ decoder. So, if it doesn't come out quite as it's meant to, that's why...and if it does, be very glad!
The second is that my reference here is a decoder that's about as old as Ommadawn, built entirely with discrete components which probably don't have quite the same values they did when it was built. Its steering logic seems to still be holding up amazingly well, and as far as I know, it's still sending everything to the right places (the last time I properly checked was a couple years ago), but there's room for doubt!
With that said...
That part of Ommadawn Part Two does swirl a lot. There are some static parts in there, then the sound of the guitars with a heavy phasing effect applied, which swirls around - it seems to me to swirl rather more randomly than going in an orderly clockwise direction; sometimes it goes from right to left, other times it goes back in the other direction. The acoustic guitar ought to be hard front centre.
The bit right after that section should be a nice test of whether things are decoding as they should be - the harp part bounces between rear left and rear right, which I think is a rather enchanting effect. I think it's a shame that these mixes still haven't been released in a more modern format so that more people can enjoy them (and indeed, so that they can be heard without them being mangled through the SQ encode-decode process, as is the case with the DTS versions that are out there).
Now somewhere around here, I have a digital transfer of a QS encoded version of the same mix. I fear it's probably currently stuck on a hard drive inside a computer which died and was combined with the bits of another to make a working one...a good excuse to get out the LP it came from, I suppose, it would be interesting to make the comparison again for the purposes of answering your question better. I don't honestly remember anything coming out very differently to the SQ version (apart from the fact that the QS decoder I have is far less sophisticated than the SQ one), but still...fiddling around with these things is one way to spend a rainy afternoon when I should be doing something more important, and from my point of view, listening to Ommadawn more than once is hardly a great hardship.
The SQ encoding is still very much intact on the remastered Exposed - it sounds superb to me! I particularly love the Incantations disc - I think the composition's grand scale fits the 4 speaker format very well. Of course, that's the format Incantations was created for...somewhere out there is a 4 channel master tape of the studio version just waiting to be released in nice shiny digital form...
I particularly like the 'Ode to Cynthia' part of the Exposed version...the way the audience's clapping and the reverb of the hall fill the sound stage just makes the whole thing sound huge and quite beautiful.
I think the Exposed mix is quite adventurous, actually, so if not much seems to happen when you play it, unfortunately it's just a case of the Pro Logic II decoder not liking the SQ encoding very much.
What actually interests me is that they decided not to release Incantations in quad because they felt it had pretty much died (in all its various incarnations) by 1978 when the album was released, yet the next year they decided to mix Exposed in quad and put it out as an SQ only release. I'm glad they did, of course, but it does seem to represent an unexpected change in thinking.
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] goes round and round and round and round, constantly, in an approximately counter-clockwise direction, while simultaneously being present on all of the 4 smaller speakers (front-left, front-right, rear-left, rear-right). The track separation is a bit less pronounced when the tubular bells come in - they chime from everywhere - but the background spins around all the time, for the whole duration of that section, up to the very last bleeps of some of those 64 guitars. 
There are of course various other parts of Ommadawn which go round and round in the Quad mix, one of them being the very fast "diddlydiddlydiddly" solo in Part 1 which I discussed with Korgscrew some time ago. 
