I recently won a copy of this tape in a lot with
Foreigner. Was really only going for
Foreigner, but there's definitely nothing wrong with a bonus Q8 in my book
I remember reading a while back that both this album and
Tea For The Tillerman were seemingly fake quad, so I decided to record it in anyway and see for myself. The sonics weren't particularly impressive at first, though some quick NR work in audacity brought out decent sound.
The results remind me a lot of the Steely Dan
Pretzel Logic quad mix: it sort of sounds different than the stereo LP (which I do have a used copy of, but I'm not intimately familiar with the music), but when you start isolating channels it doesn't seem like there are any discrete elements. This approach aggravated me on
Pretzel Logic because that album is so layered, but given the sparser arrangements here it's not totally awful.
Still, I feel despite the sparse instrumentation there was some potential here for discrete placement of elements such as backing/doubled vocals, handclaps, and some other accent parts. Hell, they could've put the dry lead vocal in the front and isolated the acoustic guitar in the rears (this might sound ridiculous but it's actually done several times in the Poco
Cantamos quad and it really works IMO- listen to the opening of "Bitter Blue" or "Whatever Happened To Your Smile"). But I have no idea what's on the multis or what the actual intent was...
As it is, it's sort of an interesting listen- can't really tell if it's fake or not, but if not it's quite conservative. The waveforms show it's definitely not straight-up double stereo. Running the stereo LP through a DSP might yield similar or possibly better results.
