There was no indication on he tape boxes and using the typical layout just sounded weird. The "aha" moment was during "Four Cornered Room" after we swapped the left front and left rear channels.
Been there - done that. My notes from 2015
Ok, going through the in progress files, I gave this one another look. My discovery that the moving sounds in 4 cornered room tipped me off that not all was right in this conversion, although it's something that wasn't immediately obvious...no one seemed to have ever noticed this until now. Anyways, the swirling could only be fixed by swapping a side pair, either the lefts or rights. The lefts seemed to make sense. The mix has parts unique to the channels, but also has a lot common to all channels, making it difficult to easily determine the intended pannings, and at some point I gave up on determining if swapping the lefts universally made sense, or caused any other inconsistencies....maybe it's an error on some but not all? I don't remember why I couldn't make a decision on it, but it got abandoned. But, this weekend going through files, I brought it up, and was rather liking the sound quality of this on my new headphones, and was like, ok, I need to make a call and finish this up, it's too good to leave in the forgotten pile. So, I decided, lets say it makes sense across the board, author a quick disc, make some flacs, and call it good. So I did a test run tonight, and I found myself second guessing myself again. What threw me off was that in many songs, I'd have lead instruments diagonal from each other, which could be intended, or could be wrong. For example, in The Cisco Kid, as the Q8 is without making any changes, the guitar is in the front right, the keyboard in the front left, which play well off of each other in the front, and the shaker is in the rear right, and the horns in the rear left, offering good activity in the back. That works nicely, and would lead one to believe you have a decent quad mix, no problems. But then making my correction with the lefts, throws the guitar and keyboards diagonal from each other. Also a valid way to mix, putting them diagonally from each other. The horns fill in the front left alright. But....if I was mixing this, I think I'd stick with keeping the keyboard and guitar in the same plane....so....that had me 2nd guessing the correction. But, then I noticed something. The spoken vocal parts in The Cisco Kid, are in 2 channels only. And as it is on the tape, they're diagonal. The left swaps fixes that. So....whatever your preference is, this has lead me to believe the intended mix is to put the guitar and keyboard diagonal, the correction needs to be made across the board. All these years, anyone with this tape has been listening to it wrong.
The error of the 2 left channels being swapped is one that happens when the mix is made using the less common rl/fl/fr/rr layout, and the next person with the tape assumes the more common fl/rl/fr/rr layout. I guess whoever made the quad mix of this album used that less common layout, and whoever brought up the tape to duplicate it to Q8, assumed the more common standard, and with the mix sounding pretty decent for the most part this way, of course no one would notice. Heck...the numerous GRT errors were far more obvious than this, and those got by. As we've seen many times, quality control was severely lacking in Q8 duplication.
