Korgscrew
Group: Super Admins
Posts: 3511
Joined: Dec. 1999 |
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Posted: June 08 2008, 10:05 |
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I was told some years ago that all of Mike's quadraphonic albums - including Incantations - had been transferred to high resolution digital multitrack, remastered and were just waiting for someone at Virgin to get off his or her bottom and sort out a release on a suitable format (which at the time would have been SACD).
The Boxed mix of Tubular Bells has of course been available on SACD for quite some time, and I suspect it'll be a very long time before there's an opportunity to hear it sounding any better than that. High resolution formats just haven't taken off in the way some might have hoped - the recent trend has been towards reduced rather than increased resolution in music, in the name of convenience. Only the surround layer is the Boxed mix - both the SACD stereo and the CD-compatible layer are the original stereo mix, as remastered for the 25th Anniversary edition.
I think all of those albums, both Boxed and Exposed, really do benefit from being played back over four channels like they were meant to be (though before anyone takes me to task on a technicality here, I did say over four channels...an SQ decoder outputs four channels' worth of sound, but it's a far cry from a discrete four channel system! That was accounted for in the mix, though, by monitoring through an encoder-decoder chain). I think Hergest Ridge makes a lot more sense in that context and I find the Incantations half of Exposed really quite exciting. I wonder what the studio version of Incantations would have been like had it been left as quad rather than folded down to stereo - I suspect that it too would have made more sense when placed in the soundspace it was conceived to fill. I find that the front to back movement is what really brings the Exposed version to life.
I like the sound of the Tubular Bells SACD, so I'd certainly like to see the rest of Boxed available in that format. It could be a good opportunity to create new stereo versions of those remixes too - though SQ encoding does basically take 4 channels and stuff them all into 2, it does it using phase shifts, amongst other things, which does lead to a rather less distinct stereo sound. Taking the original four channel master and doing a straight mix down to two would give a cleaner result. All they did for the CDs was to take the SQ encoded two channel master and transfer it straight to CD, which is good news for anyone with an SQ decoder, but perhaps less good news for the majority of people, who just want to listen to it on a stereo system!
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