Generally speaking, the CBS SQ encodes were done simultaneously with the discrete 4-channel tapes because the engineering department felt that deriving a 2-channel SQ-encoded tape from a 4-channel tape introduced the possibility of more phase error which would degrade the quality of the SQ decode. The upshot of this is that if there are channel assignment errors in the discrete (Q8) version of a release, they'll also exist in the SQ LP version. Take Earth, Wind & Fire's
That's the Way of the World (another Don Young quad mix) for example - one side of the album had the phase inverted in one of the front channels (which is surely not an intentional decision) and this 'feature' (ie mistake) exists on both the SQ LP and Q8 releases of this title.
The reason I know without a shadow of a doubt that there's a channel assignment error on
Birds of Fire is that there's no way to replicate what happens on the drum roll that opens One Word using any kind of quad joystick panner that would've existed at the time. There are points in that pan where the sound appararently moves diagonally, ie right rear to front left, front right to rear left, and so on. There's no way to do this with a joystick panner: think about it, let's say you're in rear right, and you want to slowly move to front left - the halfway point between those two positions in "quad center" (ie where the joystick would rest in the middle if you weren't touching it at all) and at this (brief) point you should be hearing the same mono signal at equal power in all 4 channels. This doesn't happen in the One Word intro, instead you hear it in only two of the four channels (ie FL/RR or FR/RL) as the pan 'moves' around the room.
The 'upside' with this album is that aside from the opening to One Word, there's essentially no other interaction between the front and rear channels, so if the weird schizophrenic 'X' pan (and the fact that the instruments in the front are stereo imaged oppositely to the way they are in the original stereo mix) then there's no need to worry about, or 'fix' this album. But if you're like me, and like things to be "correct" just for the sake of being correct, it's an easy thing to remedy, especially if you have your collection ripped digitally - apply the fix using
@HomerJAU 's MMH after you rip it and you never have to think about it again.
I honestly don't begrudge Sony Japan for not having fixed this, because they were probably just following the channel assignments on the tape box, and the only information and discussion about the channel error is hidden deep in a 5-year-old thread on some enthusiast forum in another language. The only reason that AP fixed the phase issues on
Blow by Blow was because Brian Moura was friendly with Gus Skinas and alerted him to my findings about the problem when he was authoring the SACD for them a few years back - otherwise I'm sure it would've been out-of-phase just like the Sony Japan issue. Note that even the "correct" AP version of
Blow by Blow still exhibits the 'LFE delay bug' because it came out some years before I identified this as a problem, and it's why that album still shows as having phase problems on a phase meter even with the main channels corrected.
