The quad mix is generally quite good, if not a tad strange at times - I noticed there’s a lot of diagonal panning going on. “That’s The Way...” has the drum kit mixed in stereo between front left and rear right. In “One More Time”, the steel guitar solo is centered between front right and rear left, as is the main string part in “Reunion”. There are various other examples of it throughout. I’m guessing the reason they did this has something to do with the way the album folds down to stereo, but who knows?
That's interesting, because as we've established, diagonal panning was generally only a workaround for putting things "quad center" within the limitations of SQ matrix encoding.
It makes me wonder if this was actually mixed for quad in 1971 along with the stereo mix - there's an interview with Keith Holzman, who was in charge of Elektra's quad program in the January 15th, 1972 issue of Billboard, where he says:
"We are not pleased with any compatible disk system we have seen, and, in effect, we are holding out for a discrete concept. In the meantime, we are building up a library of discrete 4-channel masters and are waiting for further technical developments and equipment suited to our desires.
It's possible we might release a few quadraphic titles sometime in 1972, but frankly we see 4-channel as an audiophile item rather than a mass marketing sale."
Unlike Warner and Atlantic, Elektra didn't license any of their quad masters to Ampex to make Q8s in 1971 or 1972, so they didn't end up releasing any quad until August 1973 when WEA made their big QuadraDisc announcement and release of 25 titles.
Might this album (along with maybe Mickey Newbury's
Frisco Mabel Joy, another 1971 album) be one of those "library of 4-channel masters" that Holzman was talking about? If so, then the diagonal pans would make sense, because in 1971 matrix-encoded LPs were the only game in town if you wanted to get quad on an LP, so maybe they mixed them to be matrix-compliant, even if they didn't have immediate plans to release them. There's no dedicated remix credits on the Carly Simon quad LPs, but Eddie Kramer was the engineer and producer of this LP, and the studio it was recorded at, Electric Lady, got quad mixdown capability in mid-1971, right around the time this album was recorded, so it's entirely possible that Kramer did the stereo and quad mixes at the same time. He also mentioned diagonal pans in that
1976 interview I found where he was discussing the quad mix he did of Led Zeppelin's
The Song Remains the Same so it certainly seems like a technique he was familiar with.
The stereo versions of all of Simon's subsequent quad albums (
No Secrets, Hotcakes and
Playing Possum) were done by the team of producer Richard Perry and engineer Bill Schnee, they of Art Garfunkel
Breakaway fame, and the quad mixes of all three of those albums sound quite similar, and unlike the quad mix for the self-titled album. I recall reading an interview somewhere with Perry where he mentioned how enjoyable it was mixing
No Secrets in quad, and given how accomplished the quad mix of
Breakaway is, I suspect the Perry/Schnee combo did those three quad mixes, and someone else, maybe Kramer, did the self-titled album.