By Rick Clark
Recent history shows that however saleable a new entertainment delivery format may appear to manufacturers and industry pundits, the factor that usually determines success or failure is a rush of consumer enthusiasm. The average consumer generally buys into a new format not for the technology itself, but rather because there is some “must have” blockbuster title on hand to spur the upgrade. Just as in the early ’80s, such sonically seductive music titles as Brothers in Arms, Graceland and Avalon boosted sales of CD players, the current growth of DVD player sales is accelerated by the DVD releases of such recent films as The Matrix and Fight Club.
Eager to find and market the first DVD-Audio blockbuster, the record companies have scoured their vaults for proven titles that can be re-issued in surround sound. Coincidentally, as music industry giant Universal began to look for a title to spearhead its DVD-A marketing efforts, Peter Frampton began pressuring the label to remaster his entire catalog. Not surprisingly, discussion soon centered on a surround sound re-release of Frampton’s landmark concert album, Frampton Comes Alive.
As it happened, Frampton was already a fan of the new format and recently completed work on a surround sound DVD, Live in Detroit, with Chuck Ainlay, one of the new format’s foremost remixing engineers. Universal quickly agreed that a 5.1 DVD-A re-release of Frampton Comes Alive would not only celebrate the 25th anniversary of the biggest selling live album in music history, but might also fuel consumer acceptance of the new medium.
“Peter and I have been talking about doing this for some time,” says Chuck Ainlay. “A year ago we did the Live In Detroit DVD. We began talking then about how it would be great to get the old multitracks out and remix the Frampton Comes Alive. We kind of just pursued it, and it happened. Since we got into it, the Emerging Technologies Department of Universal got wind that we were actually doing a 5.1 remix and that I was doing it, and they’ve become really excited to make this a DVD-A release.”
Finding the Tapes
As with any re-release project, the first task was to assemble the tapes. Bill Levenson, senior VP of A&R, Catalog Development for Universal Music Enterprises, located the original multitracks and had them sent to Ainlay. “Four shows were recorded and used on the original album, but there had to be another five or six shows recorded,” says Levenson. “I sent them everything, which was over 40 reels of tape. It was a mammoth job just getting them all in one place.”
Locating the scattered multitracks was only the beginning. Not only were the 25-year-old tapes spread out geographically, but many had been stored in a less-than-perfect environment; a number of the tapes needed work just to get them in playable condition. The original recordings had been made on Ampex 406 and 407 and Scotch 206, all recorded at 15 ips with Dolby A, and, while the Scotch tape was no problem, the Ampex reels required some serious work. “I think there was only one reel that we didn’t have to bake, but all the other 40-some-odd reels of 2-inch tape had to be baked two or three times before we could get them to play,” recalls Ainlay. “These are treasured items to us, so we were very conservative on our baking temperature and times. We didn’t want to over-bake it so that the oxide would just fall off.”
Reprinted with
permission from 
Magazine, December, 2000
© 2000, Intertec
Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved
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