Kirk, it's notes like this that makes me think we might have crossed paths at sometime. Maybe you were the one with long hair hanging out at Volker Park in the 70's? Oh no, I mean I guess that was me.
The only purchase I made from Beatty was a Yamaha CD-3 3rd gen CD player. I hung out at the store quite & bit & was aware of David Beatty's stance on quad. There is bits & pieces of truth in what he says & some out right wrong such as the number of quad records released. Certainly in 1976 there was an abundance more than he listed. No systems is perfect & he chose to only point out the weak spots in each. He asks early on that the question of what quadraphonics is supposed to do. He should have read Peter Scheiber's AES paper Towards a More Spatial Environment.
Obviously Beatty did not sell quad equipment & $$ spent on that we're being spent somewhere else. I'm not sure if Accent Sound was around yet but an audio store from St. Louis was; Hi-Fi Fo Fum (the stereo store with the funny name). I was friends with the service tech there before he started working there & soon I was a Hi-Fi groupie. I traded in a lot of misc quad stuff & walked away with a new Kenwood 9940 receiver and quite a bit more over the years. Now all the staff at HFFF also did not not buy into quad. They referred to CD-4 as Compund Distortin to the 4th power. QS was Queer Stereo, etc. But they didn't try to discourage people from it. I liked a lot at both stores, spent most of bucks at just one because of the quad offerings.
Interesting documents, thanks for sharing.