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

I haven't read through all of this, but one advantage these new vinyls will have is better bass. EMI mastering engineers frequently lowered the bass levels from the master tapes when preparing production masters to cut to vinyl. The newer remasterings are translations of what was on the original tapes.

CNN: So a remaster is as if the Beatles existed today and are downstairs.
Rouse: Yeah.
CNN: And recorded with today’s technology.
Rouse: Yes. That’s what you are trying to achieve, yes.

CNN: Would you agree the [early] CD era actually took away the richness of the music,
and now we have moved beyond that and are going back to the original, or is that just a
lot of …
Rouse: No, I still think that probably the CDs aren’t up to the sound vinyl gives us, but
it is the CD that we have got. So we have to make do with that as it stands at the
moment. And I would like to think that what the guys have attempted to do is to make
it sound more acceptable in that format.

CNN: The press release says you took out bad edits. I didn’t know there would have
been bad edits in the original Beatles. What does that mean, and what is it you could
take out?
Rouse: There wasn’t many, to be honest. I mean, it was just an issue that we could
deal with now. There were a few songs where they had created it over two takes and
they wanted to use a part of one take and a part of another, and sometimes the edit
wasn’t as good as it could be. In some cases, we couldn’t do anything about it. But if we
could, we would try and smooth it over so it wasn’t so obvious.
We have treated the stereos and monos just slightly differently in the sense that we
think the stereos are going to the product that is going to sell the most, because most
people are into stereo -- but obviously the collectors and people who grew up in the
’60s are going to be more familiar with the monos.
So from that point of view, one of the things that is a contentious audio problem today
is limiting, “brick-wall limiting,” which is making the music as loud as you possibly can.
And you make it louder than somebody else’s so yours sticks out a little bit more. For
something like the Beatles, a band from the ’60s, it would have been inappropriate to
have given it that treatment, but we have made them slightly louder. So that they are
at least slightly contemporary for today but certainly not as loud as the more
contemporary bands. But the monos we haven’t, for example. The monos remain
unlimited.

I have the mono cd box and I love it

I know the vinyl is better etc but I'm happy to have something good sounding so I'm happy :)

i think the mono box would be the way to go.

I'm eternally grateful for them too, because it's given me such a level of detail and...warmth?...that I never had before. Like now it sort of sounds like 4 guys in a room playing together, like sometimes you can hear fingers on strings and it just makes the music so much more alive for me, personally

lol that sounded corny

I agree. The 2009 remasters I've heard are really warm sounding and super clear.

VG OTM. I have the mono (CD) box and love it. Warm and punchy.

I haven't read through all of this, but one advantage these new vinyls will have is better bass. EMI mastering engineers frequently lowered the bass levels from the master tapes when preparing production masters to cut to vinyl. The newer remasterings are translations of what was on the original tapes.

― 50 Shades of Greil (C. Grisso/McCain), Thursday, September 27, 2012 7:40 PM (33 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

In his book (Here, There, and Everywhere) Geoff Emerick talks about how he had to go to some lengths to ensure that Pepper was a flat transfer during the mastering process.

EMI was notoriously bass-shy, even compared to other British labels. Lennon in particular was always pissed that Beatles records had so much less low-end than Stones or Who records.

That seconddisc link claims they're not boosting the loudness for the lps: It was also decided to use the remasters that had not undergone ‘limiting,’ a procedure to increase the sound level.

capitol pressings had big bass. serious bass! everybody has to come over to my house. for real. beatles sound so sweet on my ancient pioneer speakers.

sang freud, do you own any of the old mfsl pressings?

i got these 70's japanese pink floyd pressings a couple of weeks ago. ay yi yi...so amazing. obscured by clouds sounds so nasty! heavy stuff. makes me believe in god when i hear stuff like that. for real.

Early Capitol releases -- like the epochal The Beatles Second Album -- were more frantic and alive than the UK versions, mainly because of the ludicrous amounts of reverb added by Capitol. But more bass, too.

things got better around rubber soul. capitol stuff sounded better. or emi or the beatles gave them more shit for it. i dunno. course rubber soul is a whole different animal on capitol...

maybe revolver was the turning point. nice mono capitol revolver always sound great. brit pressings just better all around in the end. but capitol DID know how to make a record.

beatles recordings were pretty simple. kinda hard to fuck them up.

The mono Beatles Second Album is really thin sounding. I like the other early mono Capitol pressings (Early Beatles and Beatles '65) I have better than that one. Used to have Beatles VI mono but it was funky sounding.

sang freud, do you own any of the old mfsl pressings?

nah, i've been a beatles cheapskate through the years. i still have my nearly destroyed yet somehow still playable capitol originals from when i was a kid. plus various things i've picked up here & there but nothing fancy. i might give these reissues a go; sounds like they're putting their heart into it.

they're about as good as you could ask of such an undertaking

Oh man, messing with "bad edits" is not good, imo.

There's a rip of a German DMM white vinyl "White Album" that's been floating around for a while and it really sounds incredible.

they're nice. the white vinyl white albums. i think early apple pressings are better though. half speed master mfsl white album is pretty phat too though.

if i bought beatles remastered anything i think i would buy japanese versions. if i were rich. just cuz they are so much better at making cds. manufacturing cds. other than germany maybe they're the only country that cares anymore about sound. in a big way. not in little ways. would definitely buy their version of the remastered vinyl too.

I'm not buying these, not buying these, not buying these.... five, six times of purchasing this catalog is enough for me, even for my favorite band. I have a decent toshiba-emi japanese blue box. not the best pressings on vinyl but they're good enough, and I loved the mono and stereo remasters. so i'm out this time.

http://www.spincds.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/bealesloveme7.jpg

To celebrate this important date in the history of British rock, EMI are releasing this "replica" of the original single in the original colourful house Parlophone sleeve. The audio is taken from the mono remaster of 2009 to ensure highest quality playback.

It's fifty, that the important date in history.

vinyls are out today in the U.S....anyone get one? really curious as to how they sound

samples here sound pretty awesome:

www.beatles.com/vinyl/

Haven't heard it myself, but what I've read so far doesn't bode well ("under a thick blanket"..."gloomy nightmare"..."missed opportunity").

We sold like $300 worth of these today. I still don't get why you wouldn't just buy the originals.

tarfumes, do you have any links to impressions?

Yep, the Steve Hoffman forums: part 7, and towards the end of part 6. More favorable impressions are being posted, but the big hangup is that these were not mastered at 24 bit/96kHz. Which is apparently a thing.

some initial Hoffman postings did claim the same about the CDs; that they were 'a botch' etc. i wonder if these are considered better/worse.

Here's a bunch of Beatles nerds comparing various pressings on a http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-11-12/entertainment/ct-ent-1113-beatles-vinyl-20121112_1_beatles-nostalgia-beatles-catalog-beatles-lps65,000 system. Verdict seems to be that, overall, the new pressings are just fine.

Wow, fucked that up. Anyway, there's the link.

thanks for the links, man it's hard to parse the discussions of mastering engineer dorks

haha, seriously.

the chicago tribune thing is funny, too, because they basically can't come to consensus.

fuck it, i might just buy sgt peppers or something and check one out

i mean i'd love original pressings too, oh for a world where beatles UK orig pressings were just laying around in used record shops for 25 bucks

mm copies of the white album that are tatty but play ok go for 100 quid in Mono, excellent copies you're looking close to £200.

The Chicago Tribune story is pretty useless when you consider that the listening test was done on a $165,000 stereo system. Most of us don't hear music that way.

Bought a $1 copy of "Yesterday and Today" last weekend. It's a little bit warped but there is like one skip on the entire record and it sounds damn fine anyways.

i feel so dumb, in the 90s when i first started buying records you used to see beatles shit around more, just figured they'd always be around for a decent price, should have bought them all up

not to mention the literal fortune i could have made if i would have bought up every dollar bin prog record in like 96/97

As I read more posts on the Hoffman forums, the problems seem to mostly center around the quality of the US pressings themselves, rather than the mastering. Lots of reports of warping, off-center records, and something called "non-fill" which, according to wikipedia, is "where the vinyl biscuit does not sufficiently fill a deep groove during pressing (percussion or vocal amplitude changes are the usual locations of these artifacts). This flaw causes a grinding or scratching sound at the non-fill point."

http://www.tonepublications.com/analogaholic/review-the-new-beatles-box/

"Lots of reports of warping"

i see this a lot with new vinyl in general. don't know if its because people are rushing things because of high demand for vinyl or if its because people putting out vinyl now are getting sloppier but its pretty common with new reissues and new underground records i see. like, to the point where i am used to it.

Thanksfor that link skot, seems like a pretty rational assessment

Thanks for posting that review, Scott.

The majority opinion on the Hoffman forums seems to be that EMI cheaped out by going with Rainbo for the US pressings, which is (apparently) the source of warping, surface scuffs/noise, and off-center pressings. Supposedly, in order to get this out by x-mas, corners were cut. I suspect it's less about the high demand for vinyl than it is about rushing things to make sure the box got on the market asap.

If EMI was serious about chasing the audiophile market with these, they would have gone all-analog with the mastering/pressing process, and they wouldn't have used George Martin's much-maligned 1986 stereo remixes of Rubber Soul and Help! (which, to me, is the biggest problem with this new set). But going all-analog would have cost money, and EMI knew that most potential buyers wouldn't necessarily know or care that these are, for all intents and purposes, vinyl copies of CDs.

There's a similar vinyl Who box out now, and while I'd love to hear Endless Wire on vinyl (which puts me squarely in a tiny subset of the distinct minority of those who would love to hear Endless Wire, period), I can't for the life of me imagine that, like this Beatles set, it's anything more than a rush-job cash-grab by the record company.

Endless Wire was released om vinyl, btw. I think it's easily attainable.

I haven't heard any of the new vinyl but anyway. The Beatles remasters rock, both the stereo and mono boxes. They did it right. Hard to complain, really, about any of it. There might be a thing or two, ok, like the funky intro to the stereo version of A Hard Day's Night, but whatever. There is more bass overall, on the stereos, but that's a good thing. The vocals and the ambience are vastly improved across the board, I think.

Past Masters is still a thing (versus including the singles etc. on the appropriate albums) and I'm cool with that. I would have been cool if they'd put the singles on the albums but ultimately, that sort of compromises the integrity of the album as a unit, a standalone statement. The singles likewise were standalone statements, but collecting them together (with the EP-only tracks) does make sense. Listening to PM gives an accelerated experience of the growth of the Beatles, which isn't a bad thing, in fact the opposite, it can be quite mind-blowing.

The Anthologies are still out there, for them that wants them. I got each of mine on release day, vinyls and CDs. It was a big deal at the time, at least the first one (talky bits and all). Honestly? Some of the bootlegs sound better but the official versions are extremely welcome, after-the-fact fuggery and all. The iTunes versions of the Anthology stuff seem to be remastered, they sound better. It would be nice if the series could be remastered for cd also. Maybe a good excuse to include some more stuff, Carnival of Light, 104-minute version of Helter Skelter, etc.? Who knows.