Sadly, it's gone now - when Joe Tarsia decided to sell Sigma, I've read he intended for it to be sold to people who would do right by the place. Just a better sounding room to begin with. The recordings coming out of the refurbished studio sounded quite good, though to my ear the stuff recorded in the main room at 12th still sounded best. I believe that studio, once reopened, was referred to as Sigma Studio 4 for at least some time. The building was Philadelphia International's by that time. Later on, around 1974, the old Cameo/Parkway studio was brought out of mothballs and refurbished up to the standard of the day.

IIRC, 'Only the Strong Survive' was the first big hit recorded at Sigma. Joe took about a year or so and really built Sigma up from scratch as he felt it should be, using the existing room as the foundation (for lack of a better term) for his new studio. When the great Joe Tarsia (who also recorded those 'earliest period' tracks you note) opened Sigma Sound on 12th, the sound improved noticeably. Those sound pretty good overall, but not nearly as good as what would come. The earlier stuff was recorded at the Cameo/Parkway studio, on Broad Street. The fact that it includes many non-Gamble & Huff productions, too, makes it a fine complement and expansion of Legacy's previous THE PHILLY SOUND box. (No track-by-track notes, though.) Especially for the $29.99 being charged by Best Buy for this set, it's a real bargain and a nice keepsake for Philly soul fans. The packaging is lavish, with the booklet featuring lots of previously unseen photos, and a bunch of interesting essays & interviews. There are the usual odd choices I find in almost every box set I purchase ('Break Up To Make Up' but no 'You Are Everything'?) but that's to be expected, since no two people will usually agree on what's definitive for a compilation. Sure, 'Sideshow' is a most egregious omission, and there aren't a lot of rarities here (perhaps those kind of anthologies are left to Ace/Kent?) but the selection is otherwise top-notch.

For any fans of the genre perfected by Gamble, Huff & Bell (with no small help from Norman Harris, Bobby Eli, Dexter Wansel, etc.), this set is a must-have. I also don't get some track choices.'Break Up To Make Up' instead of 'You Make Me Feel Brand New'.no 'Let's Clean Up The Ghetto'. What they *should* have done, IMO, was simply add a fourth disc to the previous collection taking us from 1976-1983, and plug in a Spinners and Stylistics track here and there on the other three. It's not the revelation the previous Philly Sound box was to me, which sounded much more cohesive to me. In all, this set is a bit of a disappointment to me. I'm not sure I like the mastering of the Spinners stuff on there, especially 'Then Came You'. It seems to me they collected previously remastered bits and pieces from already available comps, a few new remasters of things from other labels (like the Spinners, Stylistics, & Delfonics), compiled and level-adjusted the whole thing. I'm pretty confident I can detect which were mastered by Tom Ruff as opposed to the others (more bass, slightly more compression). I finally got around to listening to some of it, and as I predicted it's a hodge-podge of sound.

Philly sound studio