PentaTone Classics: Remastered Quadro Recordings from the Philips and Decca catalogues.

Those of you who were around in the seventies will remember something called Quadraphonics, an ill-fated attempt to reproduce four discrete signals from a vinyl phonograph record. A few companies tried to use the process to enhance the realism of the listening experience, but too many other engineers were more interested in four-way ping-pong effects, and the fad soon died. However, it looks like everything that goes around comes around, and with the recent introduction of discrete multichannel sound via Dolby Digital, DTS, SACD, and DVD Audio, the Quadraphonic phenomenon is back with us again. I mean this literally, too.

Philips and Decca, who had experimented with four-channel sound more than a quarter-century ago when recording some of their best things, decided to let the old Quad versions of these recordings to put on hybrid SACDs. A hybrid is a disc that contains both a multichannel layer and a regular two-channel layer, so it can be played back either on a SACD player with the added channels or on an ordinary CD player in ordinary stereo.

Rather than going under the Philips label, the discs are named PentaTone Classics for reasons unknown to me except that the company doing the remastering is called Polyhymnia, which still doesn't explain things. According to the booklet insert, Polyhymnia was founded in 1998 as a management buyout by key personnel of the former Philips Classics Recording Center. Anyway, since they sent me their first eight releases in the new PentaTone line, heedless of the fact that I do not own a SACD player, I felt I had to write them up accordingly. Oh, well. I can tell you what the discs sound like in two-channel stereo, and then I'm sure our own HF, who knows far more about surround audio than I do, will eventually tell you more about their multichannel qualities. Incidentally, the PentaTone folks continually refer to the straight two-channel format as "stereo" and the four-channel format as "quad," "quadraphonic," or "quadro," just so our nomenclature is clear.

Actually, if I may digress for a moment, I don't know anyone who owns a SACD player; otherwise, I would have listened to these discs at someone else's house and heard them as they were meant to be heard. In fact, I'm surprised, considering that I've been reviewing movies on DVD in Dolby Digital 5.1 in my home theater for some years now, at how many people don't yet own even a DVD player. I'm not so surprised that the few who do own DVD players (like my neighbors on either side of me who just bought players for Christmas but only have them hooked up to their televisions, not to surround speaker systems) have no idea what the difference is between the five-channel sound they are told they're can get from Dolby Digital and the multichannel sound capabilities of DVD Audio or SACD. I start to tell them about compression ratios and such, but their eyes glaze over and I quit. Frankly, it's this public ignorance and apathy that makes me think neither DVD Audio nor SACD is going to catch on, especially when neither technology offers a movie to go with it, but at least they both offer more promise for reproducing natural sonics than the old Quadraphonic systems of yore gave us.

Back to my story. It seems that in the late '60s to mid '70s, when Quadraphonics was the hope of the future, Philips and Decca among other companies recorded some of their material in both stereo and multichannel formats, and they are just now being trotted out. The recordings have all been remastered from their original four-channel tapes using ...