"Afternoon Delight" - Starland Vocal Band

I don't have every CD release of this song, but I have enough to trace a rough history of the mastering.

The 45 runs 3:12, as Jim reported above. In the song intro, the emphatic whole notes are panned right, while the gently plucked sixteenth notes are panned left. Getting the left/right channels correct is a challenge, as I'll report below.

The oldest CD I have with "Afternoon Delight" is Good Music Record Company's 2-CD Rare Gold (1990), where it sounds impossibly terrible. Taken from vinyl, tinny EQ, no bass at all, runs a little fast, but at least the left and right channels are correct. Let's pretend this one doesn't even exist.

The next CD to feature the song is Razor & Tie's Those Fabulous '70s (1990). Here, it's from vinyl, and doesn't sound very good. Left and right channels are correct. These discs are digitally identical clones of Those Fabulous '70s:

• Time-Life's AM Gold Vol. 31 Mellow Hits Of The '70s (2000)
• Time-Life's 2-CD Singers And Songwriters Vol. 10 The Late '70s (2000)

I think Simitar's Number Ones Lovin' Feelings (1998) also uses the same analog transfer as Fabulous, which has proper left/right channels.

Bill Inglot did a new needledrop from vinyl for Rhino's Have A Nice Day Vol. 18 (1993). Overall, it sounds better than Fabulous and Number Ones, with no noise reduction and a nice long tail on the fade, but the left and right channels are swapped. The same analog transfer (also with left and right channels swapped) is used for:

• Warner Special Products' 2-CD 40 Summer Fun Hits (1993)
• Razor & Tie's Suddenly '70s (2-CD version in 1997 and 1-CD version in 2001)

Time-Life's Sounds Of The Seventies Vol. 31 AM Top Twenty (1993) uses the same analog transfer as Have A Nice Day Vol. 18, but swaps the left and right channels from that disc so that they're correct!

(The AM Top Twenty disc has a lot of swapped left and right channels, and has lots of tracks based on Rhino's Have A Nice Day discs. I will guess that the Time-Life engineer made a decision to "fix" the left and right channels based on the one song, "Afternoon Delight", which just happens to be incorrect on Have A Nice Day, and used that swap for all the tracks from Have A Nice Day discs. We'll never know for sure.)

There are lots of discs that use the same analog transfer as AM Top Twenty (all with the proper left and right channels):

• Time-Life's AM Gold Vol. 23 1976 (1996; digitally exactly 3.2 dB louder)
• Time-Life's 2-CD Body Talk Vol. 16 Sweet Nothings (1997; differently-EQ'd digital clone)
• Time-Life's Ultimate Love Songs Collection Falling In Love Again (2004; differently-EQ'd digital clone)
• Time-Life's 2-CD Seventies Music Explosion One-Hit Wonders (2005; differently-EQ'd digital clone)

So everything above is from vinyl, and the best of them sound no better than Have A Nice Day Vol. 18.

Amazingly, I found a disc that takes the song from a source tape, not from vinyl: a 4-CD set from Holland's BR Music called Definitive 70's Vol. 3 (BR Music 1007, released 1997). It sounds much better than than on anything listed above. There's a differently-EQ'd digital clone on Simitar's Love Rocks 4 Songs Of Love (1998). I strongly suspect that this tape-sourced version originated on a US disc released before 1997, but I can't confirm.

One song, lots of needledrops, several left/right channel swaps, and at the end of my analysis, a very obscure Dutch multi-disc compilation wins out. Ain't life grand?

Edited by crapfromthepast

I am reasonably sure that the Razor & Tie CD of the "Starland Vocal Band" LP was the first time the original tapes were ever used since the original 45 and LP issues back then on RCA/Windsong. The earlier incarnations are all needledrops of varying quality.