[logbiscuitswave]

> Early stereo records often had rather drastic left/right panning (eg. some Beatles stuff) or had to hedge their bets in case they were played back through eg. mono radios/badly set-up stereos and so on…

Many early stereo mixes were so bad because the stereo mix literally just put half the channels into L and the other half into R. For Beatles’ stereo mixes you would lose basically half the song by changing the balance full L or R. This was the case for many other early mono to stereo masters. Capitol Records’ Duphonic process also added a slight delay between the two channels to give a feeling of depth. It almost certainly didn’t reflect what the original producers or engineers would have ever intended.

For many classic albums that got this “fake stereo” treatment if you were lucky you would eventually end up with a proper stereo remaster done decades later. For example, hearing the original the properly remastered stereo version of Pet Sounds released in 1997 is a drastic improvement over the Duophonic stereo mix from 1966.