The Return to Mono
The growing number of bluetooth speakers and digital personal assistants means that fewer and fewer are experiencing music in stereo.
Before there was stereo, there was mono; exactly the same sound came out of all speakers. While that meant no cleverly-produced guitar-solo panning from left to right, it also meant that you didn’t need to care a great deal about how you placed your speakers and yourself while listening to music.
Stereo sets took a while to get adopted into the homes of music-listeners, so for instance most of the The Beatles albums (from 1963’s ‘Please Please Me’ to ‘The Beatles’ (often called “The White Album”) in 1968) were originally mixed and produced in mono — it was also these mixes that the band members approved; the stereo mixes where done later while none of the band members were present. (This is one of the reasons why I believe mono-Beatles are superior to stereo-Beatles, by the way…)
Mono > Stereo?
While I could go on and on about The Beatles in mono (and how great that 2014 release on 180g vinyl cut from the original analog master tapes really is) I won’t. A lot has been written on this topic, so I’ll leave it to you to dig deeper (which I can only recommend).
