Did STeVE's shenanigans ruin the Who's catalog?

"That was MCA going through a very, very difficult time with some of their library people. A guy in L.A. told me one of the guys that worked at the MCA library was taking home tapes and cutting together his own little playback reels. When MCA found out about this, they kind of went, 'Right. Anybody asks for a master, we haven't got it.' They recovered all the tapes and built a little editing room in the library where some bloke would piece them all back together again. So over a period of time, they just denied all knowledge about having masters while this was going on. I was told time and again that the stereo masters were missing, which was the real reason that we started to remix everything. And out of that came this mix of Quadrophenia that Pete said, 'Oh, that's the way it should have sounded.' So it was kind of driven because we didn't have the original masters more than anything.”