Thanks for the info, Greg! I agree that the mono Alice sounds fantastic. Mono sound gets a little too much disrespect if you ask me - for any material from the mid-60s on back, it's really the way to go. Until that point, stereo mixes were a niche market and just an afterthought on the part of the producers and artists - the mono mixes were almost always superior sounding to the stereo versions. Stereo didn't really come into its own until the late-60s.
That's overgeneralized a bit, but I agree with the sentiment. Orchestral pop, jazz, classical, and other "grown up" music caught in one pass was usually recorded in lovely stereo starting in the late 50s. However, "produced" music, such as rock and roll, was rarely recorded in true stereo until the late 60s, since the recording devices of the time didn't have enough tracks to accomodate stereo
and the common overdub techniques used by pop producers. You usually ended up with most of the band over THERE, a few overdubbed strings or something over THERE, and the vocals in the MIDDLE, with a dollop of reverb to try to cover up the distance (a "fix" that, we now understand, had the opposite effect). "You've Lost That Loving Feeling" is a particularly lopsided example of this.
Add to that the superior sound quality of the full-track mono tape format, and stereo mixers' tendency to "lose" overdubs (The Look of Love), edit points (Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye), and the opening guitar strums that they accidentally erased from the session tape (Yellow Submarine), and the mono mix is frequently the way to go, albeit often hard to find in this CD age.
Disney didn't mess with STER unless they had true stereo to put on it, and I've found that nearly all Disney stereo is lovely. At least until the early 70s. That's when simulated stereo reared its ugly head . . . taking mono tapes and messing with them to create an alleged stereo effect, always with dire consequences to the integrity of the original sound. The Disney version of fake stereo used a combo of a small dab of reverb, quick and constant balance adjustments (making one speaker or the other louder every second or so) and a slight phase differential between channels. The result sounded more like an edge-damaged tape than anything else, and unfortunately could not be mixed back to mono without further damaging the high frequencies.
