Mono/Stereo & Masters -- A technical clarification

["David C. Olstein" <born2run@pipeline.com>]

>>Let's put Quick One into perspective please.  Just like the Beatle 
>>albums through this point, the original master was recorded in mono. 
>>AFTER the fact they reprocessed or remixed for stereo. The same 
>>applies with the Who. 
 
Uh no, not quite.  After the development of multitrack recording, it became
a complete misnomer to speak of an album being recorded in mono.  The Quick
One album was NOT recorded in mono.  It was recorded on a multitrack (I
suspect four-track) recorder and then mixed down to mono and stereo
versions.  During the early 60s, it was common for a mono mixdown master
tape to be electronically processed into simluated stereo, generally be
moving to lower frequencies to one channel, the higher frequencies to the
other, and adding some echo/delay/reverb.  By the late sixties, it was
common for a stereo master tape to be "collapsed" to mono (e.g., Yellow
Submarine soundtrack).  During the mid-sixties, however, unique mono and
stereo mixes were often prepared, and sometimes there were very substantial
differences between the two.  For instance, the mono mix of Sell Out
includes different guitar parts.    
 
As long as Charlesworth and Astley had access to the multitrack tapes,
there is absolutely no reason why they couldn't produce a true stereo mix
of the album.  Moroever, it sounds like a true stereo version of the album
WAS previously released, at least in Europe, so perhaps those mixes were
available as well.   
 
Because I already had the European mono CD, I had hoped very much that the
new version would be in true stereo.  I'd like to believe that the only
reason the reissue wasn't in stereo was because the multitracks were
unavailable and the existing stereo tapes were damaged.  Whether that's
what happened, however, is anyone's guess.  It certainly would have been
nice for them to provide some kind of explanation in the booklet for why
mono mixes were used (as was done when some of the Beach Boys CDs were
released in mono).