When I'm listening to certain Remastered Beatles Tracks on Spotify via Headphones, some individual instruments come only from one side. This feels very sharp and uncomfortable. My interpretation is that my brain is surprised, since in a natural environment, the sound would come through both ears, even if it's straight right or straight left of me.
So essentially bad Re-Mastering
Is that correct thinking?
Things were a bit more primitive back then.
You don't mention which tune disturbed you, but, as late as 1967 - Sgt Pepper - unless I'm wrong, the master only had four channels to mix into the final two channel or mono product.
There was certainly literal "cut and paste" (splicing) involved in creating mix tracks to be fed to the master tracks.
If you wanted to mix two tracks into one, you played both back simultaneously (maybe on two different tape decks) and record the mix on a third.
You couldn't go too far with that or the tape noise would intrude.
Kudos to George Martin.
"And of course, we were on 4-track and not a 120-track like now. We had to make decisions and put all the right sounds on at the time of recording." ---
Beatles Engineer Geoff Emerick
Eight track became available for Abbey Road.
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"Recorded in February 1967, using two Studer J37 Multi-Track Recorders. After recording tracks onto the first tape machine (referred to below as "Tape A"), the tracks were bounced -- combined and mixed -- onto tracks of the second tape machine (referred to below as "Tape B"). Bouncing freed up tracks to overdub additional instruments. The technique was devised to overcome a limitation of 4-track recording equipment. Today's modern multi-track and digital recording studios make such efforts unnecessary. Note that only the second tape -- the "bounce" tape -- is heard in this video. Each of four tracks is shown in a different colour. "