Tony, now you're getting into the whole history of stereo music starting in the 40's I guess and evolving into surround sound now. Your question is basically asking "What good is stereo?".

The answer is simply personal taste. Don't like it, turn it off but the vast majority do like stereo.

When you mentioned live gigging of course then stereo is completely lost in most cases. But when I was using Biab live some years ago I panned the bass and drums left and everything else right and used a stereo splitter coming out of my laptop headphone jack. Why? It gave me some control over the mix on the gig even with a mono PA because I used two separate channels using that L and R feed from the laptop.

It's very hard to mix your tracks at home and have that mix still work at different venues because of vastly different acoustics. Having individual tracks go into their own channel would be ideal and it can be done but it's expensive and complicated. My simple two track panning worked well enough.

Bob

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