[Scott Dorsey]

Brassplyer wrote:
Audio from a 1974 taping of the Tonight Show, it's from an LP that was released of this particular broadcast, which predates stereo TV broadcasts and consumer video. LP is in mono.

Is it likely there was ever a stereo mix or were these shows mixed strictly to mono?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: Quad video machines had two tracks, but you couldn't run stereo
on them because the second audio track was very low-fi and sounded quite
different than the main audio track.

A few years later when Type C machines started to take over, you could get
stereo videotapes but hardly anyone ever did because the plant infrastructure
was all still mono since the broadcasts were mono.

Now.... there were three kinds of exception. The first exception was pretty
rare in 1974 but got more common as time went by. Some shows that were
very dependent on music would put timecode on the second audio track and
synch to a multitrack recorder. Don Kirschner's Rock Concert did this,
so did Austin City Limits. This allowed them to make a mix at their leisure
for broadcast. It was still a mono mix, but in the future it could be
mixed for stereo. (They were still invariably miked for mono, so there
would often be only one ambience mike and one audience mike and so forth.)

SOME shows ran a second stereo recorder without synch because they intended
on releasing the material on record and they wanted something that sounded
better than the crappy videotape audio, but they didn't have the need or
budget for full multitrack. I know at least one standup comedy special
where this was done.

And the THIRD kind of exception was those shows where everything was
lipsynched to playback anyway, either to commercial records or to
recordings specially made for the job. For example, the Lawrence Welk
band would go in and record to audiotape one day, and then go back the next
day into a different studio and mime their actions onto videotape.
Occasionally, since the original tracks were made in an audio studio with
a stereo console, some of these will turn out to be stereo. Often those
recordings were wiped and the tape reused the next week, though. So all
that is left today is the videotape.

I don't think I saw a stereo console in a video facility until the 1990s,
to be honest. Hell, video people were happy if they could understand the
words. Sometimes they were happy even if they couldn't.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."