Thread: Hundreds!?

Posts: 9

Post by Jed May 5, 2005 (1 of 9)
This is a quote from the MusicDirect catalog, about Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" SACD: "... over 30 million copies of this album have been sold ... The news of this reissue was literally enough to force hundreds of audiophiles to rush out and buy an SACD player!"

30 million copies sold, and only hundreds of people got an SACD player because of it. I would think a respectable number would be in the thousands, at least that is what I would have expected.

(It happens that this was the first SACD I had, long before I had an SACD player.)

MusicDirect has the complete line of SACDs, by the way.

Post by tream May 6, 2005 (2 of 9)
Jed said:

This is a quote from the MusicDirect catalog, about Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" SACD: "... over 30 million copies of this album have been sold ... The news of this reissue was literally enough to force hundreds of audiophiles to rush out and buy an SACD player!"

30 million copies sold, and only hundreds of people got an SACD player because of it. I would think a respectable number would be in the thousands, at least that is what I would have expected.

(It happens that this was the first SACD I had, long before I had an SACD player.)

MusicDirect has the complete line of SACDs, by the way.

In the audiophile world, hundreds may not be an unrespectable number,certainly not for the release of a single SACD and right at a single point of time. What would happen if the Beatles catalog were released, remixed for 5.1 by George Martin and Paul McCartney? Well, we can dream.

I buy a lot of my SACD's from MusicDirect, but while they have everything available in the US, they do tend to lag their competitor Acoustic Sounds in terms of release dates, and boy, do I wish they would take the initiative and import a few things like the Exton and Avex catalogs or the Universal Japan releases so that they really did have the complete line. However, one major benefit of MusicDirect is that they do have regular (3-4x per year) sales (10-15% off everything in stock) and their customer service has been really good. Nice people, too.

Post by Dan Popp May 6, 2005 (3 of 9)
tream said:
What would happen if the Beatles catalog were released, remixed for 5.1 by George Martin and Paul McCartney? Well, we can dream.

tream,
I'm not sure how they would do that, since most of the Beatles' stuff was done on 4-track, often with several voices/instruments married on one track of tape. My dream is that we could get the mixes as the lads originally intended them - which was in mono up thru about Revolver, IIRC.

Plus, Martin has retired because he just doesn't hear that well anymore.

Post by tream May 6, 2005 (4 of 9)
Dan Popp said:

tream,
I'm not sure how they would do that, since most of the Beatles' stuff was done on 4-track, often with several voices/instruments married on one track of tape. My dream is that we could get the mixes as the lads originally intended them - which was in mono up thru about Revolver, IIRC.

Plus, Martin has retired because he just doesn't hear that well anymore.

Dan, you're right on all counts. Anyway, it was a fantasy-I think the chances of the Beatles appearing on SACD are about the same as the remainder of the EMI catalog, about nil.

Post by Jed May 6, 2005 (5 of 9)
tream said:

In the audiophile world, hundreds may not be an unrespectable number,certainly not for the release of a single SACD and right at a single point of time.
...
What would happen if the Beatles catalog were released, remixed for 5.1 by George Martin and Paul McCartney? Well, we can dream.

I didn't state it, but I think that only hundreds is an inpediment to the large-scale acceptance of SACDs. DSOTM is so popular that I thought that a lot more people would jump on the SACD bandwagon.

As far as the Beatles, I think that something like that would go a long way, but I may be wrong, given the results for DSOTM.

SACD isn't going to survive on "hundreds".

Post by Jed May 6, 2005 (6 of 9)
Dan Popp said:

tream,
I'm not sure how they would do that, since most of the Beatles' stuff was done on 4-track, often with several voices/instruments married on one track of tape. My dream is that we could get the mixes as the lads originally intended them - which was in mono up thru about Revolver, IIRC.

The first two UK albums were twin track - vocals on one side, instruments on the other, for the most part. Then they used 4-track up through part of the white album. But often they used more than one 4-track and mixed and bounced, etc.

Post by vonwegen May 8, 2005 (7 of 9)
Jed said:

The first two UK albums were twin track - vocals on one side, instruments on the other, for the most part. Then they used 4-track up through part of the white album. But often they used more than one 4-track and mixed and bounced, etc.

Geoff Emerick & the Abbey Road technical staff were able to seperate the individual instruments from the bounced tracks on 4-track for both the Anthology series and for the re-mixes of all the songs on the Yellow Submarine soundtrack CD that came out in 1998. Don't doubt for a moment that they would be able to do the same for SA-CD multi-channel--the technology is available, only the will is lacking.

Post by delerue May 8, 2005 (8 of 9)
Where did you get your figure from? 30 million copies sold sounds too good to be true !!! I googled and found the following link

http://www.brain-damage.co.uk/news/0405212.html


and their quote of 800,000 copies sold is more realistic.

I wish DSOTM had sold 30 million copies of the SACD version. That would be enough incentive for the suits to rethink the fate of SACD.

Post by Dan Popp May 8, 2005 (9 of 9)
Jed said:

The first two UK albums were twin track - vocals on one side, instruments on the other, for the most part. Then they used 4-track up through part of the white album. But often they used more than one 4-track and mixed and bounced, etc.

Jed,
Your first comment has something to do with the release mix, not with the 4-track master. Your last comment does not change the fact that 4 tracks is all they had to work with. IOW, "bouncing" (or as they called it, "tape reducing") enabled them to get more than 4 recorded sounds on 4 tracks, but it was still 4 tracks.

There was also no way to sync machines together in those days. So two 4-tracks running simultaneously would drift out of sync (although even this technique was usable, and used, for short sections).

To vonwegen's comment about "separating" the married sounds on each track: technically this is not possible. Let's say that the lads filled up one tape with 4 tracks, then "reduced" (bounced) those four to one track of a new tape. In that case, if the original 4-element tape still existed somewhere, it would be possible to come up with a new mix, of course. However, that was not usually what occured, according to Martin's book, the title of which I forget.

What usually happened was that what we would call the "basic tracks" - say drums, rhythm guitar and bass - would be recorded onto ONE TRACK. Then the boys would overdub a vocal and say, lead guitar onto two more tracks. These three tracks would be mixed onto the fourth track, and the original three beside it would be erased! They would then add overdubs onto these.

As I say, I'm recalling something I read some time ago, and their methodology did change through the years, but obviously it is not possible to go back and separate things that were recorded together, or un-erase tracks that have been recorded-over.

This is one thing that makes their recordings so remarkable. They committed to things very early and didn't look back. Even reverb was sometimes recorded onto the basic track/s, and if you've ever tried to judge how much reverb will be needed at the end of a mix, from the beginning of the mix, you'll know just how much skill this takes.

P.S. My guess is that the Anthology recordings were "unfinished" and had much less tape reduction, therefore more individual tracks are available; and it's easy to imagine a multi-speaker, or at least multi-stem (that is, multiple submix) master for a movie, even in those days. The main body of the Beatles catalog was recorded in the very MC-unfriendly way I described. The ignorant savages; they thought it was about the songs! 8-)

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