Aside from the missing songs and wide lead-out, another interesting thing I've noticed with those R4P titles is that they tend to be pressed very quiet. My American Woman CD-4 needs to be seriously cranked, like even more so than the D-V SACD which is relatively low in level. Maybe there was some kind of limit on how loud CD-4 records could get at the time?
I think almost all Japanese CD-4s were quieter than US pressings, and I actually think that's part of the reason they sound better.
It may have been the case that in those very early days they had to press them at exceptionally low levels just to get the system to work, but I get the impression that the RCA engineers that came up with CD-4 knew full well that they were (to paraphrase noted philosopher "Stone Cold" Steve Austin) trying to stuff 10 lbs. of crap into a 5 lb. bag, and that compromises were going to have to be made as a result. I think this was one of the compromises they made.
It seems to me that even though they didn't want to say it publicly, they knew that pressing CD-4 at the same levels as stereo vinyl led to sibilance and distortion that was magnified during the demodulation process, resulting in what we now call "sandpaper quad." I get the impression (for a few reasons) that RCA's early approach was that they wanted to make CD-4 QuadraDiscs as a de facto standard as a single-inventory quad solution, and that the actual quality of the quad playback kinda took a backseat to establishing market share - ie in their eyes, if they pressed their US records at a volume that led to "sandpaper" quad, it was an acceptable compromise if it meant they were selling more of them to stereo buyers who were never playing them in quad anyway.
There's a long list of CD-4s that basically seem to fall into the "impossible to demodulate without distortion" category, and nearly all of them are from the US, like most of the Arista titles, some of the A&Ms like Cat Stevens
Greatest Hits etc. and I don't think it's the shortcomings of a demodulator or turntable setup, I think these defects are baked in to the record (so to speak) as a result of the aggressive way CD-4s were cut in the US. I know
@fredblue can attest to this, as I remember him telling me about buying sealed copies of US CD-4 records and still not being able to get them to demodulate without distortion whereas others worked fine.
This isn't something that was only discovered after the fact - I kinda marvelled at one of the hosts of that 'Men of Hi-Fi' series on WNYC (links in
this thread) really giving Keith Holzmann (who was one of the guys in charge of WEA's quad program) the gears over the poor fidelity of the WEA QuadraDiscs during his appearance on one of their shows to promote their rollout sometime in 1973. All Holzmann could really say in response was that he thought the discrete approach was better than its matrix competitors.
