Unlike most other 1960s soundtrack, there is no subjective decision to make whether the Viva Las Vegas masters should be remastered from 3-Track for release or not, simply because there were no (final) original stereo masters produced for Viva Las Vegas in the first place. It is not an easy task because of dry sound and irrational use of the 3 tracks available. How a mix should be done is usually too subjective to even argue about, but perhaps not in this case.

'Night Life' was recorded with a saxophone instead of backup vocals on the third channel, and 'C'mon Everybody' was recorded with backup vocals only on the third, "empty" channel, whereas 'If You Think I Don't Need You' has saxophone, trumpets and trombone instead of backing vocals on the third channel.

No effort at creating a stereo or even mono image can improve this situation and it is considered necessary to keep the instruments on one stereo channel, the vocals centered, and the backup vocals on the other 2-Track stereo channel. This will leave an almost empty right channel, and a certain amount of leakage from the instrumental channel may be necessary. It is exactly this approach has been taken on the 2003 FTD Viva Las Vegas soundtrack, which is an ambitious attempt at remastering the entire Viva Las Vegas soundtrack. 

MGM soundtracks were recorded dry and the typical 60s approach would be to apply dynamic processing for record release, especially utilizing dynamic compression and only light reverb of the vocal channel. Using just a little compression and hardly any reverb makes this modern attempt a success overall and so much better than previous efforts. The result does not sound alien beside the original Girl Happy LP masters, which were recorded in the same manner as Viva Las Vegas and also by George Stoll and David Wiechman.

Sadly, the amplitude level has been pushed up about 3-4 dB over the 0 dB limit on the FTD Viva Las Vegas extended soundtrack and this distracts from what otherwise would have been an excellent release all the way.

There is too much digital echo (by any standard) on the Double Features version of 'Night Life'.

All timings in the 'Musical Breakdown' below are taken from the DVD release of the movie.

What should have been the definitive release of these sessions on Follow That Dream's limited edition The Viva Las Vegas Sessions 3xCD set, sadly wasn't the case. Although everything has been restored, remixed and remastered from scratch, some outakes are missing dialogue and take slates which were present on previous releases, and where takes were presented with dry vocals on previous releases, they now contain added reverb, as does the complete set.

In March of 2007, Sony decided to go through all of Elvis' masters. They retransferred everything and remastered all tracks including repairing as many clicks, pops, bad edits and dropouts as they could. They have used these newly mastered recordings on their new releases since 2007 including budget soundtracks, Legacy releases, the 30 disc Complete Elvis Presley Masters collection and the Franklin Mint package.