[timbley]

I've been listening to some older recordings in mono. Just listened to Leroy Anderson Christmas Special from 1952. Youtube is great! To keep it authentic, I sometimes turn off one of the speakers for mono recordings. I find it sounds smoother and fuller, very relaxing to listen to. It stands to reason that if you have two speakers in a room creating identical signal, there is going to be some cancellation and reinforcement of various frequencies at each ear. Maybe mono is the way to go for some music. Any thoughts? It'd save a lot of money on speakers and a lot of headaches with stereo imaging if we just went back to mono.

[Mag]

The Best example I have of a mono recording is Pictures at an Exhibition by ELP. I use 4-channel stereo speaker configuration, sound is really good.

I also created numerous folded down mono recordings. Works well in my room. The difference between folded mono and stereo may not be obvious if you don't know the difference, stereo having a wider soundstage, folded down mono, being more centered, soundstage.

Recordings of bands like the Monkeys, were mono. I have a dvd somewhere were I can play and hear the difference between mono and a stereo recording.

[Mag]

My method for creating folded mono recordings. I take a stereo recording and use the dts/Neo music mode in multi-channel pre-amp, which I believe matrixes stereo into two identical tracks from left & right speaker with center channel off. I then record the two tracks to cd-r.
What dts does is it can actually separate up to like 19 sounds, which is why it works well.
Now this was actually a mistake on my part, thinking that I was tweaking a stereo recording to sound better, not knowing that I was actually recording two identical tracks.
I now know the difference, but playback in my room, the difference was not obvious to me. So I have both tweaked stereo and mono recordings that I can compare.

[timbley]

That's interesting Mag. When you say DTS can separate 19 different sounds, you mean it can extract them from a stereo or mono recording and pan them to other channels? I did a little reading on folded mono and saw there were some problems, like center panned voices "popping" from getting added on top of each other.  I could see how the DTS might help with that.
I'll listen to that ELP Pictures recording. I need to find the raved about original mono Beatles recordings and check them out too.