Anyone know when The Beatles albums will be remastered?

[jwleeman]

any prediction? either on Amazon or iTunes?

[Kris]

These have been annoyingly remastered: Amazon.com: The Beatles 1: The Beatles: Music

[theblue1]

Whenever there is a choice to be made between the "remastered" version and the original CD transcription of a classic album, I always try to take the original.

Why?

Because it sounds most like the vinyl version I probably knew and loved.

I use a subscription service, so it's often possible to choose from several different albums. The differences between the original transcriptions and the often just plain awful remasterings is painful and obvious.

The music industrial complex (you should pardon the expression) has seemed determined to milk the last few drops of revenue out of some of these classic recordings by giving us horribly brightened and hideously squashed versions of old favorites -- and they sound like unmitigated shit for the most part.


I haven't heard the Beatles remasterings.

[jproc]

I almost always go out of my way to get the UN-remastered versions of classic albums...

I want to hear them exactly the way they gained popularity and influenced other people...

[brill bedroom]

Well, in the Beatles' case, that means you should be listening to them in mono and on vinyl (which happens to be my preference with 60's British stuff, anyway). That's the way they went out originally, the fake stereo stuff all came later.

The Beatles will eventually remaster their catalog and we will all buy those albums once again to hear them with better A to D conversion. They always have something ready for Christmas, so i imagine they will do it in groups of 3.

[deeper]

Originally Posted by brill bedroom

Well, in the Beatles' case, that means you should be listening to them in mono and on vinyl.

Exactly.

Most folks don't realize that the Beatles/Martin/Emrick labored for hours mixing the mono versions to perfection, and then at the end of the session when their ears were all wore out, the Beatles and George Martin would go home and leave Geoff Emrick to throw together stereo mixes (often mixing an entire album to stereo in an hour or two!), because nobody really cared much about that newfangled "stereo" technology.

And today everybody listens to the stereo versions!

And being among the very first albums digitized to CD, the Beatles catalog of CD's suffers from stone age A/D conversion and poor mastering.

I hope the new masters do justice to the Beatles recordings. Just listen to the Beatles' "Love" CD to hear what is possible with modern technology...

[JustinAiken]

In the meantime, everybody go check out Dr. Ebbett's transfers of vinyl onto CDs... it sounds much better than the official CD releases!

[PRobb]

Originally Posted by deeper

Exactly.

Most folks don't realize that the Beatles/Martin/Emrick labored for hours mixing the mono versions to perfection, and then at the end of the session when their ears were all wore out, the Beatles and George Martin would go home and leave Geoff Emrick to throw together stereo mixes (often mixing an entire album to stereo in an hour or two!), because nobody really cared much about that newfangled "stereo" technology.
.

I totally agree. the only thing that could get me to buy yet another version of The Beatles' stuff would be a faithful presentation of the original mono mixes.

[theblue1]

Originally Posted by deeper

Exactly.

Most folks don't realize that the Beatles/Martin/Emrick labored for hours mixing the mono versions to perfection, and then at the end of the session when their ears were all wore out, the Beatles and George Martin would go home and leave Geoff Emrick to throw together stereo mixes (often mixing an entire album to stereo in an hour or two!), because nobody really cared much about that newfangled "stereo" technology.

And today everybody listens to the stereo versions!

And being among the very first albums digitized to CD, the Beatles catalog of CD's suffers from stone age A/D conversion and poor mastering.

I hope the new masters do justice to the Beatles recordings. Just listen to the Beatles' "Love" CD to hear what is possible with modern technology...

I'm pretty well aware of this because I put together my first stereo just before the Beatles hit. (I took things into my own hands because my ol' man wouldn't let me saw the family all in one wooden portable stereo into pieces in order to get some separation out of the inconveniently built-in speakers.)

In the rock world, stereo mixes -- when they were even done -- were an afterthought until the second half of the 60s. Of course, Sgt. Pepper's changed everything in terms of expectations.

But many of the mixes you hear on US stereo albums from the mid-60s are relatively clumsy attempts to milk stereo out of 3 and 4 track production masters, often heavily bounced or pinponged... So you'd have the rhythm section hard on one side and the lead vocals and strings or lead guitar on the other. When I caught up on my collection by buying used records at the end of the 60s, I would often seek out the mono version because it sounded better on a stereo.

[MarsBot]

Originally Posted by deeper

Exactly.

I hope the new masters do justice to the Beatles recordings. Just listen to the Beatles' "Love" CD to hear what is possible with modern technology...

Yes. the "Love" CD sounds great. George Martin's son Giles (?) supervised that, and I read they went back into all the various generations of tape for each song and then lined them up in ProTools so that they could find combinations with the most clarity that approximated the originals. That's what I think they should release, but obviously these remixes would be slightly different than the originals, so I think they would freak out the purists. You can hear this on the Love CD where they play extended parts of songs like Hey Jude.

I hope Paul, Ringo and the widows can agree to take a chance on this and let a competent remixer try to capture the flavor of the originals with these new ProTools tracks. AFAIK they dumped all the tapes they could find into ProTools. What a huge project though.

[spazdr8cr]

This is really funny to me, because I was always impressed by how daring and avant garde the the beatles mixes were, with the extreme panning especially. Now I find out it was all a big mistake!

[PRobb]

The "new tech" Beatles that I like is the Yellow Submarine remixes. They went back and loaded the prebounced four-tracks into a DAW, synced them up and then (and this is the key) did the mixes like The Beatles would have done them if they could have locked up the machines. So you get the doubled BGs in "Nowhere Man" left/right with the lead center. Or the strings in Eleanor Rigby" panned across the speakers. And Ringo's drums first generation.

Just to be clear- the Beatles had four track machines. So they would fill one tape and do a "reduction mix" to one or two tracks of another to get new tracks. And sometimes do it again. But their final mix was off a single four track, and Ringo's drums might have been third generation by then.

But I still really want the original monos!

[RKrizman]

Originally Posted by theblue1

Whenever there is a choice to be made between the "remastered" version and the original CD transcription of a classic album, I always try to take the original.

Why?

Because it sounds most like the vinyl version I probably knew and loved.

\

That's only true is you listen to it on vinyl. One problem with just transcribing masters designed for vinyl straight across to CD is that it doesn't account for the tonal quality that vinyl playback brings to the party. So it might sound thin and bright, which is then exacerbated by early harsh soundingdigital converters.

-R

[theblue1]

Originally Posted by RKrizman

That's only true is you listen to it on vinyl. One problem with just transcribing masters designed for vinyl straight across to CD is that it doesn't account for the tonal quality that vinyl playback brings to the party. So it might sound thin and bright, which is then exacerbated by early harsh soundingdigital converters.

-R

Not agreed.

I have about 1200 vinyl discs... as noted, I put together my first hi fi component stereo [on my allowance and car wash/lawn mowing/door-to-door cleaning supply sales, it wasn't much of a stereo ] just before the Beatles broke in the States. I'm kinda familiar with the sound of vinyl...

Trust me, I've found precious few "remastered" albums from the vinyl era that are an improvement on the original CD versions -- at least if the originals were released after around 1983-84.

Agreed that AD converters have only gotten better.

Unfortunately, "mastering engineers" appear, in large part, to have only gotten worse as the experience and skill required for vinyl mastering gave way to the invented need to "improve" classic recordings by clumsy squashing, brightening, etc.

[jwleeman]

Whenever there is a choice to be made between the "remastered" version and the original CD transcription of a classic album, I always try to take the original.

i personally wouldn't make a rule to only buy the original releases of classic albums.

the remastered version of "invisible touch" is excellent IMO. everything is so transparent, and the dynamic levels were carefully controlled.

[PRobb]

Something else to keep in mind is that The Beatles were constantly fighting EMI to get more bottom on their records. EMI had very strict standards, and The Beatles always wanted to know why they couldn't have the kind of bottom they heard on American (particularly Motown) records.

So it is possible that remastered versions could be closer to what they wanted at the time. I'd like to hear as close to the mix session tapes as possible.

[mwikkid]

back on topic and in answer to the question:

They announced they'd release the remastered versions of the entire Beatles catalog sometime this year, but I haven't heard that they've set a date yet.

I forget where I copied/pasted this from, but I had just emailed someone with this news clip last week so I dug it up from my 'sent' box and I'm posting it here:

"In a written statement submitted earlier this month, Aspinall told
the High Court that surviving members Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, and
the widows of John Lennon (Yoko Ono) and George Harrison (Olivia
Harrison) had been taking a wait-and-see approach to Web-based
distribution. They decided that before jumping on the online
bandwagon--which accounted for a whopping $1.1 billion last year, they
wanted to digitally polish the 40-year-old songs. (The Beatles have
been famously technology-shy, having waited until the mid-1980s to
release their albums on CD.)"


"We're remastering the whole Beatles catalog, just to make it sound
brighter and better and getting proper booklets to go with each of the
packages," Aspinall explained. "I think it would be wrong to offer
downloads of the old masters when I am making new masters. It would be
better to wait and try to do them both simultaneously so that you then
get publicity of the new masters and the downloading, rather than just
doing it ad hoc."