Well, a 1/4" 4-track format has the same track width as the TSR-8 multitrack, and you typically want to use noise reduction on those.
You can try to push the quality up a bit by ganging tracks (1-2 = L, 3-4 = R) but that can introduce phase-related artifacts and they say the additional hiss caused by the extra head & amplifier stages involved negates the improvement in quality.
If you're trying to economise by having multiple masters in parallel (1,3 = song 1, 2,4 = song 2) I would not recommend that as you will get crosstalk between the songs. (Another reason people use DBX on the TSR-8, it cuts crosstalk down incredibly well)