What a astute observation! You know, I feel the same way! I'd like to see a "mono check" monitor button that would simply collapsed the stereo mix. Something I've always had on all my consoles, in every control room. Freaking computer programmers have never lived in a control room nor understand the difference between left at right and their combined implications of interaction in unflattering ways. Of course, I usually don't monitor directly out of the computer. So on whenever console/amplifier combination I may be using, I always have a mono button. Or I may take a snippet and make sure everything is all right in mono. But I couldn't agree with you more.

Although I know plenty of actual really good professional engineers that don't care what kind of phase problems they may be creating as long as the stereo image is what they want. They never had to cut vinyl nor listen to mono car radios or table radios. Don't you love it? I always make sure my stereo mix sounds great and mono. And generally, in that respect, some of my mixes may not be as broad as the tips on my chest. Besides, I'm used to mixing in mono for all of the jingles I produced over 30 years ago. Never intended for stereo release. Only eight tracks, bounced, layered & laid up to 24. Needless to say, I was the only one thinking about stereo release during the entire process. And so, the stereo releases still amaze me today. Unfortunately, the public never heard it that way. But then, they didn't hear a lot of rock-and-roll in stereo back in the day when things were only mixed to mono. So I think I'll even be posting some of the very well orchestrated jingles just to use as examples as to what one can accomplish with very rudimentary professional gear in the old analog days. But if it wasn't for the Scotch 250 & 30 IPS barefoot machine with lots of saturation, compression, downward expansion, they would have never sounded this good, especially without my engineering. They certainly ain't your local sounding jingles. They sound like hits because later, after the lyrics were changed they became hits.

Jingle JAP
Ms. Remy Ann David

It seems a mono switch would also indicate how "stereo" a given mix is. I did buy the preamp with the mono switch, but have not tried it with Cubase yet.

Scotch does help the mix. (sorry i couldn't resist)