My friend's once wired his stereo so he had a speaker in the front room and one in the back room.
It sounded passable (mostly) until he played the early binaural stereo stuff from the Beatles. At that point you'd have Ringo on drums and George harrison on Guitar in one room while John and Paul were singing, almost a cappella in the other. Most strange.
That was fairly common in the early days of stereo - the thinking seemed to be that stereo was for "music buffs" who would want to separate the vocals from the accompaniment. Some of the earlier Beatles recordings (e.g. She Loves you) were mixed only in mono at the time so it was impossible for engineers subsequently to produce decent stereo mixes without crudely splitting the vocals and much of the instrumentation across the two channels (the binaural approach). If you can get hold of a copy, there's a late 1966 'hits' compilation that has what is claimed to be a stereo version of She Loves You but it's actually a binaural mix as the original master tapes weren't kept. It sounds horrible. (The same happened to a lot of Buddy Holly's recordings after his death.)
I haven't listened to my stereo versions of the early albums for some time so I'd need to go back and check but, so far as I can recall, while the first one, Please Please Me, had a stereo mix with the vocals and backing widely separated, stereo mixes of the albums from With The Beatles to the White Album are closer to what we might think of as true stereo with the vocals present on both tracks for
most of the songs*. The odd one out in the catalogue is Rubber Soul - the stereo mix of that has the vocals and instruments too widely separated and sounds pretty awful as a result. I have the original mono mix, which sounds great.
From Revolver onwards, they started playing around a bit on the stereo mixes so that you did have
some vocals on one channel only, but that was used relatively sparingly for effect - for example, the switch between the verses and chorus on Eleanor Rigby or the way Lennon's voice pans across the channels on A Day in the Life.
* Most mono mixes at the time were simply the stereo mix bounced down on to one track but The Beatles' engineers always mixed the two independently. For the anoraks, it's interesting comparing the mono and stereo mixes of The Beatles' albums and spotting the (many) differences. Pepper has the most obvious examples, but there are plenty of others to be found, from different vocals to, at the extreme, one track being almost a minute longer in stereo.
