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

Hey hey, John's getting remastered too.

Double Fantasy ... Naked. because if paul does it yoko has to do it too.

had it up to here waiting for this pizza to get reheated

dunno if I care about the remasters (I have almost all of this stuff on vinyl, with the odd exception of Mind Games and Imagine). probably no decent outtakes or extras

I think they've let out most of the usable stuff already in his Anthology box and the two 80s outtake lps (I did notice Menlove Avenue missing from that press release). I imagine Yoko doesn't want to put out "A Toot and A Snore" or any other unreleased coke doodlings.

I wonder when they'll do some new Ringo remasters.

is the 2000 mix of imagine much different from the original?

I find it unlikely that Lennon's catalogue is possible to get to sound much better than the remasters a few years back did.

McCartney hasn't done the job since 1993, so probably a bit more to gain there, in terms of sound.

in terms of brickwalling

15 Apple Catalog lps to get remastered in October too

Badfinger - Ass, and it's about fucking time!

Haha, you said "Badfinger - Ass".

That's all very nice, but Apple really should get to a Singles box set, with the rarities etcet.

That Frank Sinatra one, the Brute Force one, and so on...

Bought the Mono box yesterday: It was an impostor box, all recordings in stereo, a couple jackets inside out/falling apart, CDs missing. Beware anything too cheap to be true--it probably is. I returned it okay, but am waiting on the real thing still.

How bizarre.

I still don't regret spending £150+ on that mono box.

unlike people who dropped £200+ on a plastic apple.

(I'd still be interested to hear those 24bit recordings though)

I tell you what!

That beatles mono box is going for around £50, consistently, on ebay.

Got one for meself (yesterday), obv it's not arrived yet.

How about Stereo? I still want one of those...

Amazon has some third-party mono boxes for $114.00 (USD). Doesn't seem too bad.

I'd stress about getting something like that posted. But then I'm a sad fetish-object fawner.

"Please, no don't mail it. I'll drive over. No, no, don't even touch it. I have gloves."

I still get a lot of joy out of the packaging of the mono box. Those little cds, packaged like little albums...it makes me smile every time I open it.

xpost Haha, yeah, that's me.

yeah, I'd wait to see it before celebrating...

people putting the mono box on Ebay with no starting price either have van loads to get rid of, or there are bootleg boxes going around.

I don't think we will see the +£200 scrambles of last year but seeing as they are all coming from the same seller, I'd be cautious.

let us know if it's kosher (which it should be coming from Muswell hill)

yeah i was all excited and a friend warned me he had gotten a cheap chinese bootleg of a season of the wire from ebay

I saw mono boxes in a store last week, guess they didn't sell out. $150 CDN.

Mr Veg said they did a second run or something? That's how he got mine for me for Christmas. Because at first I was like, "DUDE. How did you GET this??" but it turned out you could still get them. Which didn't lessen it as a gift or anything (cough)... :)

Those mono boxes are still new on shelves at a few stores here...

I risked £75 for one on Amazon. It looks like new, beautifully packaged etc (other than ugly big black sticker all over the back of the box, but even that looks official). Have been working my way through it slowly, reached Revolver and there's a noticeable flutter on the disc. I've never had a cd that sounds like this - silence plays as silence, but sound is accompanied by something like a flag fluttering softly in the wind - and I don't really know who to complain to.

The one I have, the 'sticker' is just a piece of paper, so you get rid of it and the whole box is a pristine white.

I'd compare your CD with some of the HQ mono rips on youtube... see if the flutter is there.

Or skip ahead and see if its on more than one disc....

Good to hear you are working through them chronologically, I was STRAIGHT into that white album.

then the next day a more measured approach..

oh an if anyones got 5 mins to kill.... http://bit.ly/dwXguc

49 out of 75 answered correctly in 8m:01s

Beatles IQ of 329.314

Latest:

auction cancelled by ebay. Moneys seized (in my favour)

and so on, and none

:( Bummer, dude. But glad you didn't get hosed.

I bought the real thing last weekend. This is quite the fetish object!

Beware cheap impostors on Amazon. One way to tell bootlegs (at least the one I got) from the real Mono Box:
__They aren't actually in mono.
__They don't have sealed plastic covers over each album.
__The discs inside are in square plastic sleeves, rather than next to paper sleeves and also plastic sleeves rounded at one end.
__Some of the album covers might be manufactured inside-out.
__The covers are smaller and the text on them unreadable.
__They don't include things like the poster for the White Album.

If you have a sticker directly on the box, it's probably a bootleg.

Attention young ladies! Attention young ladies!

Yesterday I saw two copies of the Beatles mono box going for £100 in the HMV "clearout" sale.

(This was in Reading Oracle, Mark G. I don't know if they'll still be there.)

I'll 'ave a butchers.

I don't have the link at hand right now, but adding to the 4th quarter "Apple Sloppy Seconds" reissue campaign is the remastered re-release of the Red & Blue comps.

http://www.thebeatles.com/#/news/Red_and_Blue_Albums_Remastered/

what kind of stupid clearance sale tries to offload the mono box???

I'm sure HMV has space for 2 boxes, they can just get rid of the thousand of obsolete-at-time-of-printing Ibiza 2010 compilations.

at under £100, I'd almost entertain the notion of buying a 'spare'.

That would be crazy, wouldnt it?.......wouldn't it?

Ooh, a fresh, hermetically sealed 'spare' untouched by human hands.

Good lord don't get me started.

Hm. My copy passes all of Pete's tests except for the big black sticker and, uh, the fact that I don't actually know if it's mono (I've only used the player with the speakers side by side!). I've heard that the booklet is likely to be either shoddy or missing too, and mine isn't. If it wasn't for Revolver still having that damn flutter...

My conclusion is basically that if this is a bootleg, it's so good it doesn't really matter. If the bootleg factory really is turning out copies with such crisp printing, beautiful colours, the Sgt Pepper cut-out moustache, etc. etc. they kind of deserve their ill-gotten gains.

Interesting spiel on that Red and Blue reissues page says the reissues 'broke chart records'. Anyone know how the mono and stereo boxes and reissued albums actually sold? It felt that they kinda quietly underperformed in the end. Did any one album hit the million mark worldwide, or was that never gonna happen? I wonder which particular chart record they broke.

Skip to the end of "Helter Skelter." The mono version doesn't have Ringo's "I got blisters on my fingers." The stereo version does.

I don't know about buying a spare Mono box, but I'm already considering getting the stereo box, to which my wife responded, "Isn't that a little excessive?" She's right. I'll get it in ten years when I literally have $200 to burn for the pretty light it gives off, and have already donated to several charities that year.

> Did any one album hit the million mark worldwide,

wikipedia page about the red album has some stats for germany - 2M sold.

Another good mono test is headphones.

The space before the count in and Lennon's 'Bye' on the Sgt Pepper reprise is noticably longer on the mono version, if that helps.

Interesting spiel on that Red and Blue reissues page says the reissues 'broke chart records'. Anyone know how the mono and stereo boxes and reissued albums actually sold? It felt that they kinda quietly underperformed in the end. Did any one album hit the million mark worldwide, or was that never gonna happen? I wonder which particular chart record they broke.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_albums_in_the_United_States

1973	The Beatles	1967–1970	Capitol		16× platinum 
1973	The Beatles	1962–1966	Capitol		15× platinum

Both sold less than Led Zep IV (23* platinum) which came out before them so I don't know what records they broke - maybe for compilations?

oh wait I read that as the Red and Blue albums breaking records, sorry.

mm yeah i was talking about da remasterz / boxes from last year. it'd be interesting to find out what say the top 3 reissues were saleswise for the individual albums. we've become used to the beatles breaking all sorts of records by now so i'm wondering what 'broke chart records' means in the context of that press spiel linked above.

Mine is mono - no blisters. It looks like it's a genuine set with one annoying flaw then - no bootleg's ever been put together as well as this.