Center recordings....from SACD

[Song4uman]

So I have been listening to the recordings taken from the SACD CD in the car for the last several weeks (since I took the Christmas albums out of the Cd player...)

I have to say that I LOVE Karen's voice probably as much as anyone here. I enjoy listening to those tracks...but I find myself starting to sing along as the background vocals would go.....or hum the french horn part, etc.

I know this has been talked about before, but I truly believe that Karen and Richard were the perfect musical fit. We see that all of his "offerings" after Carpenters didn't fare well on the market. Akiko, Scott Grimes, Verinique, his solo stuff...maybe it was all just a little dated....and we know that Karen's solo album wasn't released, although I think it was probably as good as much of what was being released at the time...but her sound is just not the same (I know that was the idea) on the solo album.

I know that towards the end of their recording time, there were many things that affected them both and they could never regain what they had in their heyday....

Anyway, Richard's music/arrangments were not the same without Karen and her voice was not the same without his arrangments and mixing. What a gift (even for a short time) we were all given and can still treasure!!!

Happy New Year to everyone!

Jonathan

 

[Harry]

I'm about 7 years late to the SACD party, as far as the surround level tracks go. Yeah, I've heard the YouTube clips with the center channel stuff, and to me those just sound "incomplete." It's nice to hear an isolated voice for maybe part of a song, but overall, it starts to sound the same and boring, if I may use that word.

I've had the SACD disc since release day. I still remember sitting in the parking lot at Bryn Mawr's Borders store at lunchtime, listening to the CD layer and discovering the two new mixes on that layer, "Superstar" and "Top Of The World." And I participated here in our old thread on the subject, but really had no way of accessing the Super Audio CD layers on the disc. And there are two. One just has the same audio and mixes from the CD layer, just souped up into higher resolution. The third layer is where all of the "magic" of the disc resides.

A year or so ago I finally got a Sony Blu-Ray player. Sony, one of the co-founders and supporters of the SACD format, built this Blu-Ray player to also play SACD discs, a nice feature. I'd read about it when I got it, filed the info in the back of my mind, and proceeded to experience the joys of Blu-Ray *video*. Sometime last year, I had a spare minute and with curiosity, put the Carpenters SINGLES 1969-1981 SACD into the player to see what it would do. The songs came up on my TV screen - the disc type said SACD - and I was then called away for something or other. I'd not gotten back to that experimentation until just this past month.

In working on our upcoming Carpenters project, I needed to dig into the surround layer of the SACD, so I dug it out, plopped it in, and began noticing that it sounded rather strange on my current stereo setup. I've not hooked up surround speakers yet since moving to Florida - the room layout doesn't lend itself to extra rear speakers, so I've basically set my stereo to fold everything down to three speakers, left, right, and center.

When I first played this SACD, the tracks sounded oddly balanced. Karen's vocals were coming out of the center AND the right, with a lot of the other elements all condensed in the left channel and oddly reduced in volume. So I did some digging in the menu structure of the player and found that I could set a lot of things differently than they were currently set by default. Once I found the proper SACD settings, I was able to hear a better representation - or downmix - of the 5.1 surround layer. In my case, I was now letting the machine fold everything down into two properly balanced stereo channels, left and right.

What a revelation! The two previously new mixes sounded the same as ever, but the other tracks now sounded very different from prior releases, or even the stereo CD layer. I marveled as I noted that Karen's vocals were no longer lathered in heavy reverb. Different vocal takes were employed on "I Believe You" and "It's Going To Take Some Time" - all of this documented years ago, but I was hearing these for the first time. New and different balances in the orchestrations and backing vocals made all of the tracks sound new, fresh and exciting.

So I decided to attempt to capture this audio. It was two channels, so I reasoned it could be placed on a CD-R. That's when I fed the digital output of the Blu-Ray player which was downmixing the tracks, directly into my CD recorder, thus creating a new two-channel downmix on a standard CD-R. Now I have something I can play and enjoy in the car, on the computer, basically anywhere that plays a CD.

These mixes are something really special for fans, and I wanted to chime in with my delight, even if it IS old news to some of you. If you've only ever heard the CD layer, you're missing something really neat. Dedicated SACD players are not easily had these days as the format didn't really take off. But since Sony has provided a way of hearing them via their Blu-Ray players, I heartily recommend finding one that plays these discs, especially if you've got the SACD and haven't had a way of playing it, like me. Finding the actual disc these days is tough, as it's out of print and selling for big bucks in the used marketplace. I'm glad I got one.

So, while I understand the excitement of the center-channel recordings currently floating around on YouTube that were made from the SACD, I still like the records all put together. The whole is definitely greater than either of its individual parts when it comes to Carpenters recordings. Listening to the isolated center channel is an interesting curiosity - as is the Karaoke disc with only backing vocals - but neither will ever take the place of the full recordings all put together and their many mixes, old and new.

Harry

 

[Mark-T]

Thanks, Harry! I'll remember the Sony SACD connection if and when I get a blue ray player.

 

[Dave60640]

Harry...after listening to the SACD as you did, would you concur that RC just has to be prompted into doing the same with the Christmas Portrait sessions? I am dying ( quite literally given my age ) to hear all these tracks in 5.1 surround.
Obviously the record company dictates what could be a potential "seller" and advise RC accordingly, but everyone has to see the potential here...

 

[Harry]

It would certainly be nice, but whether or not he and the company feel it would be profitable is another matter.

Harry

 

[Rudy]

SACD is pretty much dead for the mass market. It is seeing a surge in interest for audiophile releases, however, and the bulk are only two-channel high-res. Other surround formats have pretty much died away also, as the big labels do not want to spend tens- or hundreds of thousands of dollars to remix an album in surround, for sales that can't recoup the investment.

 

[gregnewyorkcity]

The acapellas off the SACD on youtube are fascinating.