Yes, they did. An inherent tradeoff between mids and bass has to be made to prevent the needle skipping, too. A great example is if you go listen to roots or du

Yes, they did. An inherent tradeoff between mids and bass has to be made to prevent the needle skipping, too. A great example is if you go listen to roots or dub reggae, like Barrington Levy - mids are sucked in to accommodate the huge bass, and the treble is pushed up to compensate for the resultant lack of clarity/character. Needle skipping is also the original reason for mid/side (or in old terms, lateral/vertical) style processing - in a stereo record groove, anything mono is equal on both sides, hence in the 'mid(dle)' of the mix. Anything panned is more prominent on one side than another. Compressing the mid and side differently allows you to maximise the stereo-ness of the record without as much effect on the overall mix, and without throwing the needle off to the side. When multi-channel recordings first came out, they originally mixed different instruments to different channels instead of trying to create a cohesive single image. It was basically between headphones and the quest for loudness that engineers found that you can get 'more' out of the record with a (now-traditional) centre-focused mix.