Cream - Wheels of Fire (fix, DCC, HAECO CSG removed) torrent

HAECO CSG was a quaint notion from the late '60s that persisted into the early '70s. The idea was that when stereo recordings were played on older mono equipment, the information in the center of the mix, which was duplicated in both the left and right channels, would be too loud. HAECO CSG, therefore, put the right channel slightly out of phase — usually 90 degrees, but up to 120 — so that when a recording was played on mono equipment, the center channel would partially cancel out and become quieter. To sensitive ears listening in stereo, this process made information in the center of the mix — often lead vocals and bass — sound strangely unfocused. It is generally agreed nowadays that HAECO CSG processing had a harmful effect on music, both on stereo and mono equipment.

Cream's Wheels of Fire is one of the classic examples of HAECO CSG processing. Six of the nine studio tracks and the single "Anyone for Tennis" were processed with it. Here, those seven tracks, taken from the DCC audiophile CD, appear with the hateful processing removed (the rest of the album appears in the Cream Audiophile Megapack torrent.)

To dial in on the correct degree of rotation in Adobe Audition, we monitored the sound through a circuit that inverted the right channel and then summed the output to mono. In a perfect world, the correct angle, when inverted, would make the center channel cancel out completely. Because of the nature of the analog equipment used in 1968, we can not always get perfect cancellation, but we came damn close with Clapton's guitar solo in "Those Were the Days." For the album, we rotated the right channel -105 degrees. For "Anyone for Tennis", a lesser angle, -75 degrees, worked best.