Also, does anyone else find it strange that the lead vocals in "Almost Lucy" are in front center and rear right?
Per our convo. with @sjcorne above, I decided to do some tinkering with "Almost Lucy"
I first took the Right Rear channel and did a Vocal Isolation in RX 8 Music Rebalance.
Then cleaned it up a bit in Audacity and Inverted it ...
Then Merged back into the Right Rear and replaced the original RR (some minor artifacts remained noticeable, but primarily when listening loud with isolating the Right Rear )- but definitely puts his vocals back to center and leaves mainly conga, cymbals, keyboard & guitar echo in the Right Rear ...
Almost Lucy is important to me because this track is one of those lesser know songs that comes along for the ride while you were playing the hits on LP. It grew on me a lot and it became a favorite. This album and YOTC are loaded with those.
So I spent a bit of time isolating the channels of
Almost Lucy in Audacity. This whole mix is weird and interesting.
The Front Left and Front Right are basically the same track but each has a different guitar track panned to it. In several spots, the Left seems more veiled, less bright, maybe wetter at times. I hear vocals, bongos, cymbals, guitar, in both. I believe its the same guitar solo in both fronts, but the EQ is different. Maybe to shade it to one side or make it sound more like double tracked. Maybe it is double tracked?
The Center seems to be a blend of the front R/L but at much reduced level and with a more ambient perspective on everything. Nothing is isolated in the center that I can tell. And except for the guitar parts, the differences i hear between the R/L pair are more level/EQ/reverb related.
There is quite a bit going on in the Rear Left that are not in the fronts. There is a nearly isolated harmony female vocal that I didn't even know was in the song. I went back to the 20 year old stereo CD for reference, and now that I know its there I can recognize it. Till now I just thought it was a Stewart overdub. This channel also has more prominent keys (vibes?). There is low level front hall like ambience as well. Again Bongos and cymbals. I think this channel is too low in level such that the harmony vocal seems more of a distraction than a feature because of it. Though I haven't tried boosting the level of this channel on the main system (yet).
The strangest channel is the Right Rear with dry lead vocals, bongos, cymbals and keys. The harmony vocal is there, at about the same respective level as the stereo track. There are no guitars except ambience.
My overall perspective when played on the main system projects Stewarts vocals to the right side. There are wide soundstages on the sides, with a fair amount of discrete flourishes The Left Rear seems empty.
Like I said. Weird.
I'm not convinced a simple channel swap is going to work with this. I'm not even convinced it wasn't deliberate.
