I posted about the release on a Glenn Miller Facebook page - oh, Lord, if you think soundtrack enthusiasts are anal-retentive, you ain't seen nothin'. Of course the stereo-ization of the home vid releases was brought up, but thankfully Mike Matessino had already addressed that on the film score message board, where one poster who is notorious for spreading nothing but incorrect information all over the Internet brought it up.
"Upon evaluating the original elements and finding no legitimate dual perspective material, I back-traced the project to the early '90s with what is now Deluxe Audio and discovered that technically this was a Chace Stereo project. As you know, it was relatively new at the time, and this was simply an example of Fox trying it out.
Yes there are separate overlays and separate vocals -- for SOME but not ALL of the songs -- which allowed, for example, for the orchestra to be stereo-ized while the vocals are basically kept mono. And, yes there are occasional instances where passages between verses have distant orchestra on the vocal track, which could have been utilized to enhance things into a stereo image, but that's it. Any discerning ear can tell what's going on by listening to the track from those videos.
Only where we have genuine dual perspective "push-pull" elements does it make sense to create stereo for a CD soundtrack release and that was not the case here (occasionally I'll stereo-ize a mono track if it has to blend with true stereo material around it). We have not actually had those push/pull elements for titles as early as this. It's the late '40s through '53 that we find them.
The most obvious evidence in this case is that the orchestral material was not slated with two numbers (11 & 12, 81 & 82, etc.) as they would be if they were recorded in dual perspective. Could it have been synthetically stereo-ized? Sure, but that would not have been responsible preservation. The documentation and the elements are clear, even if memories are not."
