It's funny - when I started off with the vintage quad stuff a few years ago, all I had was the
Life & Times QS LP and it didn't exactly blow me away. Through my Sansui QSD-2 decoder, it sounded like an echoey not-so-discrete mess.
So imagine my surprise when I pick up the Q8 of the same title a few years later: it's totally discrete. Jim's front and center, there's different acoustic guitars in each front speaker, drums are in left rear, piano's in right rear, and the backing vocals are rear center. Even the grand orchestral tunes ("Time In A Bottle", "These Dreams", etc") have nice separation. So much is lost in translation on the QS-encoded LPs.
I still think the vocal echo to the rears is overdone (it seems the engineers doing the quad mixes for ABC preferred a wetter sound- the Steely Dan quads are also rather echoey), but having these in high-resolution would be a dream come true. I'd imagine the acoustic guitars and string arrangements would probably benefit the most from the sonic upgrade.
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