I have to agree that there's something wrong with the channel assignment on this, the vocals on a diagonal is a big hint, and upon further listening, the diagonals just pair up better. However, simply swapping the rights to bring the vocals to the front doesn't fix it, as the clicks at the beginning are now paired diagonally. This leads me to believe that either the front or backs then need to be swapped to get rid of that diagonal action that seems unlikely to be how it was mixed. Upon further analysis, it appears that yes, it's not just the clicks that are made diagonal, so that it does make sense to do that swap as well. To make the quad mix align with the stereo mix (based on the clicks), the following corrections should be made, in my opinion:
Move the front left to front right
Move the front right to rear right
Move the rear right to front left
These errors happened often in the quad days, and they will continue to happen time and time again as long as we continue to have a lack of standards in track assignment, and a lack of attention to detail in the process of manufacturing the product. What really gets me is that in theory, someone mastered this. Which means that someone listened to this, with a critical ear, whose job it is to pay attention to detail and fine tune the sound to get the best sound possible out of this. And despite this being his job function, despite him supposedly listening to this critically, he failed to notice the obvious error in channel assignment. I'd like to know who mastered this, because that is one person who should be unemployed.
