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

SzethFriendOfNimi , 5 hours ago

Does make it easier to isolate vocals I guess

eightpix , 5 hours ago

And instrumentals.

Viking_Hippie , 2 hours ago

And vampires

Midnitte , 6 hours ago

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

hydroptic , 6 hours ago

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

Midnitte , 4 hours ago

Hm, not sure why they’d do it then - maybe just easier to keep organized with the workflow of the time?