Double Your Pleasure

The prior post's talk of Beatles songs in stereo got me thinking about this whole "stereo versus mono" thing and remembering that there are a couple of other albums out there in mono that should be available in stereo but aren't--namely, The Rolling Stones' Hot Rocks and the Donovan album A Gift From a Flower to a Garden. Both have been released in stereo, but the current versions are the mono versions. In the case of the Stones album, the difference is phenomenal; some of the songs demonstrate an amazing complexity an intricacy in stereo that is totally flattened in mono. The Donovan album also loses a lot of subtleties when it's flattened into mono. Since the stereo tracks do exist and have been released on CD before, I have no idea why they've been buried now. It's a shame, though; those who haven't heard these in stereo have no idea what they're missing...