Beginning sound in Luther Vandross "Stop to Love"

This is more of a sound question. What is the name of the sound that comes at the start
of Luther Vandross "Stop To Love". It's a metallic sounding pad sound that reverbs at the left speaker and it's initiated again and it reverbs to the right speaker. I know for a
fact this is not an analog sound. I believe in my heart that this is either a DX-7 sound
or some other FM synth sound. Can anyone identify it.

I would think it's probably a DX7 sound, as you say. If I had a DX7 I could go through the 64 (?) factory sounds (as I recall, it was 32 in onboard RAM, plus another 32 in a rewritable cartridge), but unfortunately I don't. Maybe someone here does. But the problem might be that, by 1986, people were commonly also using sounds they'd programmed themselves, or purchased as part of sound sets from third party suppliers, so it might be very difficult to pin it down. Perhaps a better place to ask would be a message board devoted to Yamaha FM synths, if such a thing exists.

I went to a DX-7 site and found a sound patch called "Filter Sweep". I am kinda thinking the sound on "Stop to Love" is actually a variation on that one. I know that Jason Miles a famous synth programmer actually programmed the sounds in "Stop to Love". He may have created a patch out of Filter Sweep using a delay variation. I mean a delay which causes the sound to move from left to right.

That sounds very plausible. The DX7 was notoriously difficult to programme, compared to a traditional analog synth, but by 1986 two things had happened: a lot of third party programmers were selling sound sets, plus professional keyboard players/programmers had really started to get into programming or tweaking sounds, so it wouldn't surprise me at all that someone like Miles would knock up something to order (perhaps tweaking an existing sound) because they needed a fancy little sound to make the intro more interesting.