Walking past my local Oxfam store window this morning, I noticed a fine selection of Beatles albums on display. As McCartney once sang: “Buy, Buy, Says the Sign in the Shop Window, Why? Why? Says the Junk in the Yard.”
“The impending arrival of new remasters,” comes the answer. “No-one needs those old, hideous, hastily transferred CDs now! Here come the Beatles, 2009!”
Fine, I’m all set to splash the cash at some point, but I’ve been struggling to decide which set to buy. Here’s the youtube trail for the forthcoming stereo release which includes all the albums, liner notes, short videos and retails on Amazon for £169.98.
Albums included in the Stereo Set:
Please Please Me
With The Beatles
A Hard Day’s Night
Beatles For Sale
Help!
Rubber Soul
Revolver
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (also includes 1987 notes, updated, and new intro by Paul McCartney)
Magical Mystery Tour
The Beatles
Yellow Submarine (also includes original US liner notes)
Abbey Road
Let It Be
Past Masters (contains new liner notes written by engineer Kevin Howlett)
Albums in the Mono Set:
Please Please Me
With The Beatles
A Hard Day’s Night
Beatles For Sale
Help! (CD also includes original 1965 stereo mix)
Rubber Soul (CD also include original 1965 stereo mix)
Revolver
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Magical Mystery Tour
The Beatles
Mono Masters
But what about Let it Be and Abbey Road? Well, they were never mixed in mono, so you don’t get those. You also can’t buy the mono albums separately – they come as part of a box set, but you can buy the stereo albums individually so you can top up those missing albums. So, naturally, one would expect the mono collection to be cheaper than the all singing, all moptop shaking stereo set. And one would be completely wrong: the mono set costs £199.98 at Amazon.
And, hey, you may say “I’ve got the Capitol mono set, I don’t need this one,” and you’d be wrong again. The US mixes (Capitol) are different to the original UK masters.
So let’s see how the two versions are going to (approximately) compare:
The Word (Stereo)
The Word (Mono)
I personally prefer the thump and drive of the mono recordings and dislike the panned drums of the stereo versions, especially in headphones where the whole effect is enhanced. Of course, there will be benefits to some of the stereo reworkings, particularly when it comes to albums like Revolver and Sgt Pepper’s – it’s a shame they didn’t include any songs from those albums on the official trailer.
Here’s some PR that doesn’t seem to have been circulated enough – I got this from the Gearslutz Forum.
The re-mastering process commenced with an extensive period conducting tests before finally copying the analogue master tapes into the digital medium.
When this was completed, the transfer was achieved using a Pro Tools
workstation operating at 24 bit 192 kHz resolution via a Prism A-D
converter. Transferring was a lengthy procedure done a track at a time.
Although EMI tape does not suffer the oxide loss associated with some later
analogue tapes, there was nevertheless a slight build up of dust, which was
removed from the tape machine heads between each title.
From the onset, considerable thought was given to what audio restorative
processes were going to be allowed. It was agreed that electrical clicks,
microphone vocal pops, excessive sibilance and bad edits should be improved where possible, so long as it didn’t impact on the original integrity of the songs.
In addition, de-noising technology, which is often associated with
re-mastering, was to be used, but subtly and sparingly. Eventually, less
than five of the 525 minutes of Beatles music was subjected to this process.
Finally, as is common with today’s music, overall limiting – to increase the
volume level of the CD – has been used, but on the stereo versions only.
However, it was unanimously agreed that because of the importance of The
Beatles’ music, limiting would be used moderately, so as to retain the
original dynamics of the recordings.
When all of the albums had been transferred, each song was then listened to
several times to locate any of the agreed imperfections. These were then
addressed by Guy Massey, working with Audio Restoration engineer Simon
Gibson.
Mastering could now take place, once the earliest vinyl pressings, along
with the existing CDs, were loaded into Pro Tools, thus allowing comparisons
to be made with the original master tapes during the equalization process.
When an album had been completed, it was auditioned the next day in studio
three – a room familiar to the engineers, as all of the recent Beatles
mixing projects had taken place in there – and any further alteration of EQ
could be addressed back in the mastering room. Following the initial
satisfaction of Guy and Steve, Allan Rouse and Mike Heatley then checked
each new re-master in yet another location and offered any further
suggestions. This continued until all 13 albums were completed to the team’s
satisfaction.
So, the stereo recordings are louder and less dynamic than the mono versions; no actual remixing took place (it was restoration); and a mastering / EQ process has been put in place. And this took a team four years to complete.
But, ultimately, this massive cash-in means that the original ethos of Apple created by John and Paul (so artists wouldn’t “have to go down on their knees in somebody’s office”) seems to have fallen very far from the tree.
*For another comparison of the mono and stereo versions, check out Jesus Diaz‘s piece on Gizmodo.