It's possible the converter may have gotten a bit heavy-handed with the noise reduction. Or they're from 2nd or 3rd generation copies of the original reel. I personally don't collect quad reels (too expensive), but in my experience with the conversions they are not all created equally. Some sound as good as a professional DVD-A or SACD, yet others don't sound much better than Q8s.
I'm looking at my
Dragon Fly Q8 conversion, and I just noticed an interesting anomaly. The waveform below is the song "Devil's Den", which is one of the better quad mixes on the album. It starts off with the violin/fiddle discrete in the fronts and then the rears kick in. The rears mostly mirror the fronts, but there are no drums and the bass guitar is much more prominent. Whoever mixed this one really wasn't using the quad format to its full potential, to say the least.
What's weird is that the right rear channel is unbelievably dull. It's like they copied the left rear channel over and ran it through some sort of extreme low-pass filter. Maybe I have a bad cart? I had a copy of Argent's
In Deep Q8 that had a similar problem (all of program 2 was dulled to the point of being unlistenable).
View attachment 38259
Here's an MP3 of the first 30 seconds of the track, rear channels only. You an hear that the left side dominates because that's where all the high end is. Very odd.