When listening to this SACD, you have to consider the time and the source. This was once of RCA's early quads, issued only on Q8 and Q4 (as CD-4 wasn't ready yet) and the panning and spinning was done to really drive home the fact that you were listening in QUAD.
That was obvious upon first listening: someone at RCA wanted to be sure you were hearing Sound Around Your Room, and the panning effects, however contrived ("No Time"'s intro, for example, or the end of "Hang on to Your Life") made the point all too clearly, heh.
RCA was more of a classical and country label at the time, and their rock/pop acts were far and few between. This was one of their most popular acts, so they knew the Q8 would be a big seller. At the dawn of quad, the record company view was to "wow" the listener to get them to buy the hardware and software to get into quad.
By the late sixties RCA actually had a fair number of successful rock acts, compared to their pre-Beatles track record (except for Elvis, few and far between was truly the rule). And pop was always a major thing with RCA, but by the time quad kicked in, most of those acts (Harry Belafonte, Ed Ames, Peter Nero, John Gary) were in commercial decline or about to move elsewhere. Country would always be big at RCA, too, but the nature of such recordings (as we know) rendered an 'exciting' quad mix for most artists pretty much impossible.
Many of these songs were recorded on equipment that was really meant to crank out a disposable song, get it out on AM radio, and hopefully sell a lot of 45's. That being said, they are not going to sound like a modern recording (obviously), and no amount of tweaking or remastering would make them sound much better than they do here.
Generally, RCA (the dreaded DynaGroove process notwithstanding) was meticulous about sound quality of 'in-house' recordings (though it's the Nashville stuff that seems to me having been the most consistent in quality). But as producers and acts took on more power and control--the latter sometimes paired with unsympathetic producers and engineers--there became more variables in sonics. The Guess Who's material here is just such an example, and I suspect that the producer (Jack Richardson) was most responsible (for better and worse) for the band's sound and mixes, since RCA's Chicago studio should have been comparable to their east and west coast and Nashville pads.
A few years ago no one at this forum would have ever thought that we'd be able to purchase an SACD/DVD-A/BluRay/DVD-V of 40+ year old quadraphonic mixes in a store or via the web (other than hobby conversions), so the fact that Audio Fidelity is actually doing this is quite remarkable.
Absolutely! Relative newbies here may not realize how fallow the years have been until recently for a decent slate of MC reissues. Health issues aside, I'm determined to live long enough to see just how far AF can go with this series of gems, which--sad to say--will probably only be appreciated by some well after the fact, when prices go way up, or the discs are too obscure to readily track down.
I'd only add that one of RCA's problems was that, once they jumped into quad, they went with Q8 at the expense of CD-4 vinyl, even after the latter was readily feasible for most releases. That, and the volume of their quad releases, for a few years, was prodigious; perhaps too much so, because i wonder if some of the lesser titles in terms of mix and fidelity might have been because they were literally churning out dozens at a time, and not as much care went into some as into others.
As for this one...I've never heard it sound so good (and finally, as noted by others, clean and crisp without significant anomalies), but the nature of the mixes and the music still stand. This is a band I've always like a lot but could never love. I think their sound in the studio was way too clinical even when, as with "Undun" (a rare example) there was genuine passion. The quad album is also notable for using the 45 edit of "American Woman" but using the Lp version of "No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature" and the dreadful "Hang on to Your Life," which I think was better off in its shorter 45 mode, shorn of some of its pretension. Still, I'm glad to have it and to hear it as good as it's likely to get. A low '8' here.
ED
