I have to disagree with the above comment. Though they did get a bit carried away with the reverb (seems to be a common theme with the ABC quads?), every track features discrete elements in the rears. Usually backing vocals, strings, percussion, or piano. The title track starts off with just echo in the rear, but piano and strings enter as it builds. "Lover's Cross" seems to have different acoustic guitar parts spread all around you. “Thursday” is one of my favorites - during the chorus, you can hear different vocal harmonies isolated in each rear speaker while Jim’s lead is front and center. “Recently” is another highlight with what sounds like a bongo drum isolated in the right rear speaker and a vocal harmony in the left rear.
I did a three-way comparison between the QS LP, U.S. Q8, and Japanese CD-4 (nice to know I’ve got one of the ‘holy grails’ of quad collecting!). All three feature the same quad mix, but what’s strange is the amount of echo in the rear channels seems to vary.
The QS LP (through an Involve SMv1) seems to be the driest of the three, while the CD-4 seems slightly wetter than the Q8. I guess the matrix decoding process somehow dried out the mix? The CD-4 separation comes extremely close to matching the Q8 (see waveform pics below), but it sounds very brittle and midrange-y compared to the other two. I’m not sure who pressed these discs for Phillips, but I’m guessing it wasn’t JVC as their Japanese CD-4 pressings (Motown, Avco, etc) sound much better than this.
"Thursday" (U.S. Q8):
"Thursday" (Japan CD-4):
I'd go with an "8" on this one - good music with a solid quad mix (especially considering the relatively sparse source material), but ultimately I prefer the other two Croce albums that made it to quad (
Life & Times,
You Don't Mess Around With Jim).
Here's that cool backing vocal bit in the rears from "Thursday" (taken from my CD-4 conversion):