Who ever thought it sounded good this way? I think it's because headphones weren't widely used back then.

Turns out early audio consoles with stereo didn’t have a pan knob. They had a pan switch. So choices were limited to left, right, or center (mono).
Wasn’t til later that the pan pot was invented allowing incremental panning and true stereo mixing.
- That's wild. But theoretically they could make two separate mono tracks, right? For example, a left mono track with 75% of what would have been an isolated left channel + 25% of the right channel and, similarly, a right mono track with 25% of what would have been an isolated left + 75% of the right. Then, sure, pan switch it fully to left and right.
  
  That's even more complicated.
  
  You have to understand that mixing consoles from that era were supremely limited in channels (think four, eight, later sixteen), to the point where they would often have to mix one section (say, the drums) and then record that mix to tape so it would take up a single channel and then do the guitar, bass, and vocals on another channel. The idea of having two of the same thing going through two channels was an exorbitant luxury they couldn't afford!
- Thank you, that's the piece of info I never had. If it's not a Reddit-level fact. The 2 channels were new and people wete trying things out and mind-altering substances were freely available as well, so judgment might have been hogtied at times.
  At the time, there was sentiment that it was a way to sell two amplifiers and speakers instead of one, a suspicion furthered by the later arrival of quad, which for many was a bridge too far. Audio places tried that briefly and then went back to selling stereo. And may be why a certain generation looks askance at 5.1 etc.
  There were other changes as well, tubes/valves to solid state plus hybrids...when I read about Cloud products in IT, it rhymes, marketing hoodoo inveigling into genuine tech appraisals.
  
  It’s an incorrect comment based on a real thing.
  There was equipment with switched panning, but knob panning was so common it was referenced in diy electronic project books aimed at high schoolers.
  There are some tube amplifier circuit types where the pan control actually changes directly what signal goes to what grid of what tube, and in those cases it would be useful to have switch instead of pot pan, but there were circuits to mitigate the problems and even tubes intended to take multiple grid inputs by that time.
  Another comment explained how a person could work around that problem and get pot pan with split channels and they’re right.
  One of the biggest reasons for switched panning was that it wasn’t always clear that you were going for a stereo effect! Often in the case of reinforcing a live band, you had some speaker cabinets for different frequencies and it would be stupid to send the trumpets to the big cabinet meant for the tympani!
  Partial panning was also used in lots of the movie versions of stereo and multi source sound from over a hundred years ago so it’s not like switched panning was the only option or something
  Switched panning is famously present on mastering machines though for the old (er than single groove stereo) two groove stereo record type.
  So switched panning isn’t the reason for the wild mixing of the 50s and 60s, but it did exist.
- I mean this is true but not about the '70s as the original post states. Even by the '60s they had sophisticated stereo audio mixers - they just cost hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of running on people's phones like today.
  
  Yeah, we had stereo mixing/mastering pretty much down by the 70s I think...
  What I think OP might be referring to are albums that were recorded in mono in the 60s, and then released again in stereo in the 70s when the tech only allowed for full L or R panning. Those albums were never meant to be listened in anything but mono though.

The jump from mono to stereo made a lot of engineers' heads spin. Then again, how many 100% perfect 5.1 albums have you heard?
Actually, I've listened to only three 5.1 remixes, all of them phenomenal albums to begin with, and their 5.1 jobs were pretty meh. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots came out pretty good, but mainly because they just fucked around and tried stuff.
- I hate the “spatial” mixes.
  Sometimes they’re done really well, but most of the time it’s just putting different parts of the song in different areas and makes it sound “diluted”.
  Like, the guitar is in front of you, then the bass is behind and to the left… why??
  
  You’re missing a key ingredient: Lysergic acid diethylamide.
  In all other circumstances I agree with you.
  
  My understanding is that most (at least rock) music is mixed this way, just subtle enough to help your brain pick out instruments but not enough to consciously notice.
- Have you ever listened to Zaireeka appropriately? I haven’t, but that must be a headache to line up correctly.
  
  I thought part of the point of Zaireeka is that it is impossible to get it exact every time, so every time you play it it is a unique soundscape.
  
  It was a pain in the ass but me and a buddy got it working once. I was a young teen and this was long before weed helped me see more beauty in music, so I didn't get much out of it, but as an adult it'd probably be different.
  
  I don't think it's supposed to line up "correctly" no?
  
  It's a life goal!
- Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, who produced Pet Sounds, was actually deaf in one ear. Despite that, he got along just fine in a monophonic world, but the switch to stereo completely left him behind. It was a huge change in how music was mixed.
  
  And yet Pet Sounds (and even the contemporary stuff they originally recorded for SMiLE but never officially released) still sounds phenomenal to this day despite being in mono.
  The man was a wizard.
- It makes sense. I bet it's super hard, especially at first.
  It's largely a headphone problem, at least for me. I can't listen to a song where certain tracks are completely isolated to one ear. The audio doesn't need to be mixed perfectly, but I need at least a little bit of each sound in each ear. Otherwise it's too distracting. My brain hates it.
  
  It's supposed to sound like the band is in front of you on a stage. Not all mashed into one spot in the center of the stage. You should be able to close your eyes and picture where each drum is positioned. Where the before guitar players are standing. And you should be able to hear the shape of the room. Modern recordings mixed digitally can no longer do this. Then again if you're streaming Spotify into Bluetooth your missing most of what's there anyways.
- There's some cool 5.1 and even 7.1 stuff in classical music (I don't have a a surround sound setup myself but I hear a lot of talk of it).
- This dvd was great in surround sound
  https://www.discogs.com/release/182434-Orbital-The-Altogether-51

Just put it in mono. Now, how can I fix this infamous autotune trend?
- Now, how can I fix this infamous autotune trend?
  Instrumental-only music?
  
  You mean quantized, snapped-to-the-grid instrumental music? Sigh.
- Brother it's time to join us in the drum and bass camp
  
  I second this motion. All in favour?
- Just ignore that crap and put some real shit into your headphones. Like The Cramps - Songs The Lord Taught Us.
  Play it loaded.
  
  I just love this kind of personal recommendation instead of the same shit Spotify and every streaming/scrobbling service keeps recommending. Sure I will, thank you.
- this kind of comment just reminds me of how people used to complain about distortion on electric guitars when it was initially discovered/invented/popularized
  
  For me, your comparison falls short in the sense that electric guitar distortions actually amplified the audio resources musicians had to express ideas and textures. Autotune was initially a tool that also did enhance the set of tools musicians had before it appeared, however, the lack of creative uses compared to the amount of use it gets in the industry, makes it a trope to my ears. Autotune feels like a Marvel Comics hero movie at this point.

This would be more early 60’s, mostly because those engineers were working with 2 track stereo which really limits your options. Most artists were recording on at least 8 track stereo by the 70’s.
- Exactly. This is a 60s thing, not a 70s thing.
  
  I noticed that I had blown the front left speaker in my first car when bohemian rhapsody was missing vocals. I don't remember when "a night at the opera" came out, but I'm going to be bold and say the 70s.
  
  Hendrix springs to mind

What's interesting is just how different the quality was of some of the stereo releases vs the mono bounces. For an example, the stereo HDCD version of Pet Sounds is a little wack, but even if you joined the two channels to mono it sounds a hundred times better than the shittastic mono release. Got to wonder if they optimized it for AM radio play the way that similarly awful sounding releases in the early 2000s optimized for iPod earbuds.
- This is why, when it comes to old music, I always try to listen to it the way it was originally intended.
  Pet Sounds, as beautiful as it is, was originally released in mono. It was mastered to be listened to in mono, at a time when stereo was mostly just a novelty.
  It wasn't until much more recently that they've taken those masters and created "real" stereo mixes from them. While they can often sound pretty good, they never quite reach the level of the best sounding mono mixes of the same material.
  Just my opinion of course.
  
  That may be a thing with some releases, but I'm convinced that the original pet sounds and even the MFSL mono release are very inferior to that one HDCD stereo release. Still I'm listening to in 16bit/44kHz form, but to me it sounds way higher fidelity and likely is closer to the source. I can pick out instruments and sounds that I didn't hear in the other version.
  In general though I find modern 'remasters' are horrible and compressed and I think it's lame that services like Spotify usually have only the most recent (and therefore worst) version of a given album.
  May the source be with you
- Is that why some 00's songs sound so compressed?
  
  00s music sounds so shitty because that was when digital music first became a thing. People thought 128kbps bitrate MP3s were acceptable (until they hear that mp3 they got from KaZaa play over the PA at their wedding and realize it sounds like raccoons fighting in a trashcan).

The things people did with mixing in the 70s and 80s were revolutionary, and a lot of the sound you hear today was invented in that time. Things like the drum sound in "In the Air Tonight" with compression gating has been used ever since.
https://www.musicradar.com/news/drums/classic-drum-sounds-in-the-air-tonight-590970
- Incredible. I’m learning a ton and gaining a huge appreciation of it all thanks to everyone’s comments in this post.
  
  That's what good link aggregators are for.

It was the early days of a new technology and way of listening that was completely different compared to the past 60+ years of recorded audio. I guess as a more modern analogy it's like those cheap 3D films at the height of the fad that felt the need to gratuitously shove objects directly in front of the camera to get the most out of the 3D effect.
- Those were the better 3d movies because they at least felt like there was depth. Unlike those modern movies.

Does make it easier to isolate vocals I guess
- And instrumentals.
  
  And vampires

It was designed to show off stereo sound which was still fairly new at the time. I like the way those recordings sound actually.

Wild guess but stereo equipment wasn't a thing in households and it was a way to get the adoption going

One of the worst abuses of stereo in my opinion are old Beatles albums. Maybe cuz the tech was somewhat new they were playing far too much? Too much for me anyway
- It's like motion controls. Nintendo came out with the Wii, motion controls were a huge goddamn fad for a few years, and now 2 of the 3 main console manufacturers put a gyro in their controllers which might be used for fine aiming control and that's about it.

I believe that they had stereo mixing pretty figured out by the 70s...
Early-mid 60s though? Sure.
Unless you're referring to when they started mixing mono albums into stereo, then yeah. Those albums were never meant to be listened in stereo, and I wouldn't listen to a remaster of any of them unless they were officially approved by the band, or done by the band's own producer. And even then...

Today's music is digitally mixed on laptops and has zero dynamic range or feeling. Then again people listen on Bluetooth now so they are only getting 20% of the music anyways. Makes me very sad
- Let’s get you back to bed, Rick Beato.
- 2024 I finally tried some Bluetooth headphones after maybe 10+ years.
  Still using SBC by default, still no duplex HD audio, and still static driver noise at idle.
  What is even the point lol. SBC-XQ only solves the first problem which is still inferior to even the cheapest of quality 3.5mm cable.
  Even my Nintendo DS sounds better and it's limited to 32Khz audio lol.
  
  Jeez, were one of the two devices 10 years old? That hasn't been my experience for a long time (except the duplex audio issue. I can't believe it's still terrible.)
  Then again, I mostly use BT for the convenience. Being able to do yard work with zero wires is amazing.
  
  I wonder what you would think of LDAC if you'd ever try that

The early days of stereo (which is what you’re talking about, the recordings of 70s which aren’t using stereo as an “effect” almost universally have the vocals panned to the center. The old way to take the vocals out of a recording was to adjust how much of the signal present equally on both channels was allowed to be played) were all about two things: backwards compatibility with mono systems and giving people with stereo systems a recognizable effect no matter what goofy system they had.
Wild panning accomplishes both goals.
Studio engineering that used the stereo format to create the illusion of a room or capture the sound of the room the players were playing in wasn’t developed yet and came from the experimental stereo recordings that sound crazy now like silver apples of the moon.

My dad had some albums, maybe Mike Oldfield or others...there was a train going through a station, and hearing it pass from left to right in stereo was amazing at the time

It’s fun and interesting all the experimentation that went on back then. As someone deaf in one ear… it’s hard to truly appreciate, but I get it.

You know, I love those albums where they fucked around did things like hard-pan all the drums to the right channel. I'm here for the experimentation.

This might explain why old players had a mono/stereo setting.
- I think it was to reduce distortion on mono records when played back with a stereo stylus. I could be wrong though.

CMV: Mono mix of Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" is better.

There's actually a biological reason for this, believe it or not. Language and music "time share" many characteristics of both hemispheres of the brain. Language and music are processed in different hemispheres.
Read pages 20-26 of the book "How Music Really Works" by Wayne Chase. It breaks it down in detail.

I'd be perfectly fine if everything was just mixed mono. I see little value in stereo. I'm weird like that.
- In electronic music you often slightly detune the left and right of a synthesizer to make it sound "wide", you can't do that in mono and if you mix the stereo down to mono it sounds boring.
  
  However most clubs are going to be playing mono so always bounce to mono and test mix.
  
  Cant you do that in mono with two oscillators? Also aren't analog synths mono most of the time?
- like @zaphod said, its mostly to make it sound wider. in mono, everything sounds like its in the center of your skull. in stereo, some stuff it a few inches from my ear (wherever the drivers are), some stuff can be in my head, some can even be in my throat if that makes sense
- Things like Spotify or your phone/earbuds themselves usually have a mono setting. I use it all the time when only wearing one earbud. Beatles songs are notorious for splitting vocals to one ear only.
  The solution is already right there. But let me guess, "No, I want to use my old wired earbuds from 1995 and they should accommodate me in my archaic niche use case instead of me upgrading my earbuds to enjoy the new features developed like forced mono"?
  
  Beatles songs are notorious for splitting vocals to one ear only.
  FYI, you're listening to the wrong mix then. Beatles albums (particularly those before The White Album, or maybe Sgt. Pepper/Magical Mystery Tour, I forget exactly) were never recorded with stereo in mind. The tech was pretty new, and the stereo mixes of those songs/albums were more of a novelty.
  If you're listening to the 2009 Remasters, make sure you're listening to the mono versions if it's an album prior to 1967-1968 or so, otherwise you're gonna get this "fake stereo", panning a mono signal between L and R, bullshit.

karaoke moment

They just* got stereo back then , right?

Think this is more an artifact of the way vinyl records worked - since audio can be encoded in two channels via the way the needle moves in certain orientations
- Urr, I don't think that's it. I'm not sure stereo sound for vinyls has ever worked so that something like this would be necessary, and it wouldn't really make sense – why would they have to put vocals on one channel and instruments on the other?
  A stereo vinyl player just has the needle moving up and down in addition to left and right, so that the left-right axis is the sum of the waveforms of both channels and the up-down axis is the difference – which means that a regular mono player can play stereo vinyls
  
  Hm, not sure why they'd do it then - maybe just easier to keep organized with the workflow of the time?

has anyone tried out apple's 'spatial audio' and how it compares to 5.1?
- It does what it claims to do in that it makes the music sound like it’s coming from a set of speakers a few feet in front of you in a room that has poor sound deadening. I really tried to like it but it just sounds more muddled/is fatiguing for me.
  Edit: I haven’t tried it on acid yet tho, maybe that would make it make sense.