I have had it up to here waiting for the Beatles catalogue to be remastered

Yes, but with the creepy dead-eyed CGI characters from his other projects? No thanks.

geir the shit sounds better

Well, surely, I know there are those who think Pavement (or Sex Pistols) sound better because they don't play well too. It is all subjetive, of course....

YOU'RE subjective!

It being in mono doesn't affect the notes played, Geir.

also you consistently confuse a style of playback and audio fidelity

Placings of the albums in this week's Top 40: http://www.theofficialcharts.com/top40_albums.php

5. Sgt Pepper
6. Abbey Road
9. Revolver
10. Rubber Soul
21. White Album
24. Beatles in Stereo
29. Help
31. Past Masters
33. Magical Mystery Tour
37. Hard Day’s Night
38. Please Please Me
49. Let it Be
51. With the Beatles
56. For Sale
57. Beatles in Mono

89. Yellow Submarine

and Beatles' 1 at 54

Beatles in Stereo is the box set?

yeah

Well, surely, I know there are those who think Pavement (or Sex Pistols) sound better because they don't play well too. It is all subjetive, of course....

huh? i have no idea what you mean by this, Geir. but you def. miss the point of the mono- in some cases they are wildly different (esp. SPLHCB) and arguably superior mixes

It's really just about very good mix vs. so-so mix, and the mono one happens to be the very good one. Didn't have to be that way, but it is, so there you go...

Massive challops but Abbey Road kind of sucks (other than George & Come Together).

100% wrong

totally wrong

Yeah, I would really HATE to have sit through a beautifully restored Yellow Submarine rendered in three dimensions and projected onto a screen several storeys high. Especially if they're going to use this newfangled remastered soundtrack.

"Restored" is one thing, "remade" another

It's just like an hour of the frog song. oh and i want you (she's so heavy) which is just boring and long. and actually, when i said 'except george' i forgot Something, which is also balls. And so ends my Beatles challops.

one for the rong thread

xpost. You've never listened to it, have you?

I feel like "The End" is their prettiest moment tbh

i want HOOS
i want HOOS so baaaaaad

he's so. . . HEAVYYYYYYYY

Geir especially misses the point of the mono mixes when he states that we "naturally" hear in stereo, therefore all mixes should be done in stereo. I can't speak for Geir, but I've never witnessed a musical performance in which I could only hear the singers' voices in my left ear and could only hear their instruments in my right ear. It's the height of un-naturalness to hear music this way.

I located a torrent of 320mbps MP3 rips of the mono mixes, and I have to say that even at this lossy bitrate I'm mightily impressed. Rubber Soul regains a lot of muscle.

ok, i listened to abbey road again and my 'it's just an album of the fucking frog song innit?' was clouded by the quick hits of maxwells silver hammer and octy's garden usually making me turn it off and making me forget I never really liked the medley either. Polytheme Pam is a jam though.

I've been listening to various takes of 'The End' today, and trying to play along to the unwinding on the air drums - the slowing-down bit is really, really hard to do.

xpost But Octopus's Garden is great! Some of George's best-ever guitar work!

Ha, I did actually find OG a bit charming this time around. Other than hearing it in passing at a friends house the other day, it was the first time I'd listened to Abbey Road in about 5 years and it's not as bad as I remember it. Still most probably my least favourite album though (never heard YS though).

Just sat through the Beatles TV prog that was on recently.

Now, Alice wants to remix them.

What this means, I have no idea. But she has worked out she needs to talk to somebody who has access to the music...

So in the challops department, I acquired some of the stereo remasters last week (MP3/320) and did A/B listens with some of the '87 CDs, and acquired some of the mono ones today (MP3/192) and listened back and forth between all three, and am not hearing enough to make me care to pursue it further. I guess my ears are just not evolved.

I dug out "Help" soundtrack from the Capitol box, and boy there's some weird stereo "echo" on "Ticket to Ride", like it's playing on someone's transistor from down a tunnel. Stereo *and* mono versions.

Say it ain't so, someone!

does anyone think these remasters are lacking a bit in the bass department? It seems like they went for an almost classical clarity on things, which means that while I can hear everything, the overall wallop is a little underwhelming. Abbey Road suffers the least from this to my ears, but the White Album seems awfully top heavy, and I was a bit disappointed in both the Rubber Soul and Revolver discs (which also seemed to de-emphasize the drums!). I haven't compared w/my old CDs yet, and I'm hoping I'm wrong about this.

really? i feel like everything I've read has made a big deal about the bass! haven't heard 'em myself yet, so I don't know ...

320 bitrate of a mono mix is a really reall high bitrate since the left and right channels are the same. That's practically lossless.

there is almost no compression on these, so they are not going to sound bass-heavy compared to some other remasters. I can see how this could be bothersome depending on your playback system. I lost my good earbuds and have had to listen to mp3s of these through the stock apple ones and they're really treble-y, but the cds on my stereo at home through good speakers sound very well rounded, no bass issues at all. the beatles aren't meant to have booty shaking bass.

I dug out "Help" soundtrack from the Capitol box, and boy there's some weird stereo "echo" on "Ticket to Ride", like it's playing on someone's transistor from down a tunnel. Stereo *and* mono versions.

Say it ain't so, someone!

As with all Capitol Beatles albums up until Rubber Soul, Help! was "Dexterized." The process (adding assloads of reverb, and making shitty "duophonic" mixes) refers to Capitol's Beatles-hating A&R man, Dave Dexter. He reportedly assembled the Help! soundtrack in a single evening.

don't be stupid guy, obviously its better than the mono bcz it was done later

duh

Geir especially misses the point of the mono mixes when he states that we "naturally" hear in stereo, therefore all mixes should be done in stereo. I can't speak for Geir, but I've never witnessed a musical performance in which I could only hear the singers' voices in my left ear and could only hear their instruments in my right ear. It's the height of un-naturalness to hear music this way.

Only if you think that music=live concerts. To me, concerts mean zilch and nada. What matters is what is created in the studio, doing things as perfectly as possible. The ones reaching the highest levels of success in this matter would be acts such as 10cc, Steely Dan or "Brothers In Arms" era Dire Straits. Obviously, The Beatles didn't have the equipment back then that could possibly make their recordings sound as good as those, but the stereo mixes is an attempt to try to get just a little bit closer to the audio perfection of the aforementioned bands, which IMO is always a goal to at least try to reach. One should always try for as perfect audio quality as possible. Which was of course not on the same level in 1963 as it was in the golden age of hi-fi in the 70s and 80s. But still...

http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/facepalm.jpg

The guitar on Drive My Car really snaps

maybe it's years of 'seperation' in cinemas and on stereo / 5.1 dvds but i can't understand this whole mono love at all. listen to I FEEL FINE for example and tell me that sonically and every which way it doesn't just sound a million times better. it's the 21st century! this is how it's meant to sound now!

the stereo mixes is an attempt to try to get just a little bit closer to the audio perfection of the aforementioned bands
If that was so, Geir, then why didn't they work harder at it, hm?

I'm not a mono purist by any means, and lawd knows I love me some stereo, but regardless I'd rather hear the thing that was laboured over and loved, rather than the thing that was slapped together at the last minute to fill a smallish but growing (and therefore commercially but, evidently, not artistically, at least not in this case significant) segment of the market.

YMMV, obviously.

I don't understand your point at all Geir. (tqh I haven't understood any of your upthread points either so I'm probably asking for it but whatever). Those early mono mixes, as far as I can understand, were a complete labor of love for The Beatles and Martin...mixed to be as pleasing to the ear as possible. Right? Can we accept that at the very least? If that can be an accepted starting point, then I don't understand why just the plain fact of it being in 'mono' negates anything they've put into the mix. I don't get how you dismiss it out of hand just for being 'mono'...as though that were a bad thing or that the sounds contained within are somehow inferior. The first half of Wizard Of Oz was filmed in black and white...doesn't mean it's necessarily worse than the technicolor half. Bad analogy but gah, I'm at a loss to understand where you're coming from.

Forget it, Jake, it's Geirtown

lol

I don't understand your point at all Geir. (tqh I haven't understood any of your upthread points either so I'm probably asking for it but whatever). Those early mono mixes, as far as I can understand, were a complete labor of love for The Beatles and Martin...mixed to be as pleasing to the ear as possible. Right? Can we accept that at the very least?

They worked more on it back then because mono was a bit like 5:1 is today, some futuristic format that people maybe didn't believe in (plus they probably didn't expect to become "canon" at that stage anyway). But it's a question of taste, and I don't like the supposed "bunch" that tended to come with mono mixes either. In the case of Motown, it sounds much more polished in stereo, with less "punch", and that is partly why I like the stereo better.

I can buy that maybe the mono masters of the first two albums are preferrable for some people, because two channel stereo sounds really weird in headphones not least. But from "A Hard Day's Night" onwards, stereo is all that counts. And, as for "Sgt. Pepper", it was said for a long time that it was the first stereo mix they really worked on, maybe not Beatles, but surely George Martin alone, and it's only in recent years that people have started speaking so nicely about the mono mix being the only bit that counts. Like, then, why did George Martin work so carefully with the vocals on "A Day In The Life" going from side to side, for instance?

"Stereo" you mean? (first sentence)

As I've said before, Mono is harder to mix.

Plus, Stereo is "right, take the settings that we noted for Mono, stick guitar over there a bit, bass over there a bit, pan the vocals out, yup, sounds good, go."

i.e. if they were *only* mixing stereo, it would take almost as long to do as Mono *and* stereo.

I prefer stereo to mono, and by quite a margin, but Geir you talk a lot of nonsense about this subject.

The only thing lost in stereo mixes are those few overdubs. Overdubs are really a disgrace seen in retrospect, but I can understand why they did it back then. Now, the only case of a really crucial overdub in the Beatles catalogue is "I Am The Walrus", which was also the reason why the stereo mix becomes mono halfway into the song. But there are some glaring cases in other catalogues, like Beach Boys "I Get Around" and Status Quo's "Pictures Of Matchstick Men", which cannot really be corrected. Which IMO sucks, but obviously they didn't think of the stereo mixes as important then. Today they are though, also stereo mixes of 60s material.

There was that famous "extra snare hit" on the Zombies' "She's not there" that was added during the mastering process, and so is missing from the stereo version.

Until they called up the drummer recently, and he still had the very same snare, so he popped along and they re-recorded it. and it sounds the same as it did!