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

Anyone worked out why the mono (less CDs in it) is more expensive?

I think it's because the mono box is a limited edition

not the most solid evidence, but cd japan does mark their listings differently by that token:
http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/search3.html?q=beatles+box+set&step=20&r=any&order=score&media=

Anyone worked out why the mono (less CDs in it) is more expensive?

The mono set actually contains two copies of the product - one in each speaker - so Apple is overlooking the opportunity to charge double the money. The stereo set only has 50% of the product in each speaker.

Just checked a minute ago, and Amazon.co.uk have bumped the prices back up - £200 for mono and £160 for stereo.

Beatles.com is now showing a clip of the Revolver mini-doc.

Appears to be rather weak chopped up version of the Anthology stuff.

clips up over at amazon http://www.amazon.com/gp/entity/The-Beatles/B000APTK6K though I'm not sure whether that's the best way to judge how good these sound ... will listen when i get home from work. wonder if the price for the box set will come down at some point? right now, it is out of my price range ...

Does anyone know which stereo mixes will be used on the first 2 albums? Will they use the original 2 track mixes or new remixes that George Martin have been playing with the thought of making? (Most of those songs would probably sound better with one channel in the middle and the other one to the left/right rather than one extreme right and the other one extreme left, but that would also be kind of revisionist)

Yeah, but does anybody actually like it like that?

Does anyone know which stereo mixes will be used on the first 2 albums? Will they use the original 2 track mixes or new remixes that George Martin have been playing with the thought of making? (Most of those songs would probably sound better with one channel in the middle and the other one to the left/right rather than one extreme right and the other one extreme left, but that would also be kind of revisionist)

― Geir Hongro, Monday, July 20, 2009 5:46 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

stereo mixes in general for those albums is revisionist

You could say so, but those stereo mixes were originally done as early as 1965-66, which is quite some time ago by now. And at least until the CD releases in 1987, that is how people who bought them on vinyl since the late 60s got used to hearing them.

this is now posted on the Amazon site in the U.S. the list price is $298.99 discounted to $239.99.

Product Description
FEATURES:

-Dimensions: 5.75" x 5.38" x 2.63"

-Description:

·Hard white glossy slip box
·Limited edition (10,000)
·CDs packaged as mini LP replicas (replica artwork, sleeves and gatefolds)
·Remastered by Paul Hicks, Sean Magee with Guy Massey and Steve Rooke

-Contains:

Original Mono version - 11 albums (12 discs)

+= mono mix CD debut

·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 (features all of the mono tracks that appeared on singles, EPs. or that never made it onto the 13 albums)

-Essay written by Kevin Howlett

*note: Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road and Let It Be are not included, as they were originally recorded in stereo

as for the stereo mix, the list price is $259.98 discounted to $204.99:

Product Description

FEATURES:

-Dimensions: 12"x6"x3"

-Description:

Hard black glossy lift top with magnet clasp

CD's packaged in three panel digi-pak with digital mini documentaries

Remastered by Guy Massey, Steve Rooke, Sam Okell with Paul Hicks and Sean Magee

-Contains:

All 13 Studio remasters plus Past Masters (digi packaging with digital mini documentaries)

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

Magical Mystery Tour

The Beatles

Yellow Submarine

Abbey Road

Let It Be

Past Masters

DVD of all 13 mini-documentaries (Running time: 40 minutes)

10,000 is 'not many' for a beatles edition!

there is some dispute about that limited edition number, EMI already denied that this was the case. who knows.

It's only the mono that's ltd edition?

808 state vs the beatles is an interesting prospect.
or is it a different guy massey ?

That's Graham Massey, isn't it?

oh yes. crappy morning @ work. fuzzy brain.

A second boxed set has been created with the collector in mind. 'The Beatles in Mono' gathers together, in one place, all of the Beatles recordings that were mixed for a mono release. It will contain 10 of the albums with their original mono mixes, plus two further discs of mono masters (covering similar ground to the stereo tracks on 'Past Masters'). As an added bonus, the mono "Help!" and "Rubber Soul" discs also include the original 1965 stereo mixes, which have not been previously released on CD. These albums will be packaged in mini-vinyl CD replicas of the original sleeves with all original inserts and label designs retained.

That's odd, for having 'All of the Beatles recordings' none of these sets have any of the Christmas records, do they?

No.

Altogether now! "Get one of those for your trousers, get one of those for your hairrrrr"

the christmas recordings are the big ommission (also missing: a couple of available mixes of early tracks like ask me why and please please me; mono yellow sub mixes [if these exist, apparently a matter of dispute]). fwiw, cute as the christmas record is, they are not mindblowing works of art and you can find perfectly good bootlegs on the internet now so I don't really care. It'll just be nice to get decent sets of the actual albums on cd finally (yeah I have the purple chick stuff, yeah it's pretty good, but those all have issues too).

The Mono Yellow Sub is just the stereo mix combined.

the whole mini-documentary thing with these is irritating.

Yeah it will be like 5-minute edits of Anthology stuff padded with Box Set adverts.

btw I really like the 66/67/68/69 xmas records, they're really pretty charming and nice, even if they are slight..

For your game playing enjoyment:

GILES MARTIN WAS conjuring spirits, or perhaps summoning gods. The tools for this ritual included a pair of omnidirectional microphones, a digital mixing console and a hastily-procured set of teacups and saucers, but the magic was in the room itself. Studio Two at Abbey Road in London has changed very little since 1969, when Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison recorded together for the last time. The Steinway upright McCartney played on “Lady Madonna” still stands in one corner, its middle keys worn to the wood. Sound-absorbing quilts hang in wide stripes down the whitewashed brick walls. The view from the control room on the second level is much as it would have been for George Martin, Giles’s father, who oversaw the creation of nearly every Beatles album from this room. Giles held a slender finger to his lips, which turned up into a playful grin. He handed cups and saucers to three people nearby and mimed a sip. The others followed his lead, and a few feet away the microphones captured the small clattering sound of four people drinking tea.

The odd recording session in March was one very small contribution to what Apple Corps — the company still controlled by McCartney, Starr and the widows of Lennon and Harrison — hopes will be the most deeply immersive way ever of experiencing the music and the mythology of the Beatles. The band that upended the cultural landscape of the 1960s is now hitching its legacy to the medium of a new generation: the video game.

The sound effects Martin recorded are not anything most people who play the game will notice consciously. The Beatles: Rock Band, which is to be released on Sept. 9, involves playing ersatz instruments in time with the band’s original music. Between songs, players will hear the group warming up and bantering in the studio. Martin combed through hundreds of hours of tape to find these clips, but the chatter, recorded directly into microphones, lacked the subtle echo and ambient noise you would have heard if you were actually in the studio at the time. So after laying down a sound bed of background noise, Martin played the original clips through a set of speakers on the studio floor and rerecorded them through his mikes, this time with all the ringing acoustics of the room. Through the control-room window, Martin stared into the empty studio as if his mind’s eye could put physical form to the disembodied sounds. Across the decades a guitar was tuned, a snare drum rattled and John Lennon warmed up his voice for a new song called “Come Together”: “He got teenage lyrics, he got hot rod baldy.’’

And in response to me sending that around, Tom E. on Twitter:

Giles Martin is the Christopher Tolkien of pop!

the game is really neat and they did a nice job. the chatter stuff is kinda cool as atmosphere.

also I met Giles at e3 this year and he was actually super personable and nice, that NY times piece is so overwritten it makes him sound weird or something but he was just like a really nice dude and super friendly

he and his team also did some pretty interesting work in terms of getting the old track into a playable form for Rock Band...they had to come up with a way with filtering and other tracks to turn 2 track masters...i think they actually filed some patents and stuff..

anyway kinda geeky stuff but interesting to me.

Every time I see this thread bumped, I think of this record:

http://991.com/newgallery/Queen-Latifah-Latifahs-Had-It-U-471810.jpg

Long New York Times piece on the whole Rock Band hoo ha. Looks like a good read. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/magazine/16beatles-t.html

u might want to look a few posts up dude

ah yes my bad. onset of alzheimer's.

"Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Rubber Soul will join Abbey Road as the first three Beatles albums available to download for The Beatles: Rock Band."

I'm not likely to buy many of these albums, but those three are among those I almost certainly won't. (I'll pass on Let It Be and Magical Mystery Tour for sure as well.) Beatles for Sale, now we're talking.

white album or nothing

For me it's the first four, White Album, prob. Revolver and maybe Help. And depending on how they sort out the Past Masters songs and how many of them end up on the RB disk, that one too. E.g. I'd want "Rain", "Paperback Writer", "I Feel Fine", "Revolution", but I think several of these are on the basic game disk.

That article is kinda funny. "The Beatles aren't really rock stars"?

.... I guess if you consider a band like Poison to be the model of rock stars then perhaps that's true.

Then again if you're basing it on drug intake and groupie sex I have always held a sneaking suspicion that the Beatles were far more hedonistic than anyone can imagine.

i took it to mean that there aren't, like, joe satriani-style shred solos in their songs... wasn't t dragonsofrce who sprang to fame through their appearance on guitar hero?

The beeb are celebrating all this in their own special way: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/08_august/17/beatles.shtml

the highlight sounds like being this:

The Beatles On Record, directed by Bob Smeaton, charts The Beatles' extraordinary journey from Please Please Me to Abbey Road and reflects on how they developed as musicians, matured as songwriters and created a body of work that sounds as fresh in 2009 as the time it was recorded.

Narrated entirely by John, Paul, George, Ringo and their producer Sir George Martin, the documentary features more than 60 classic songs, rare footage and photos from The Beatles' archives and never-heard-before out-takes of studio chat from the Abbey Road recording sessions.

-

Then again if you're basing it on drug intake and groupie sex I have always held a sneaking suspicion that the Beatles were far more hedonistic than anyone can imagine.

Drugs, yes indeed. Not so sure about groupie sex though. And Rolling Stones were far more hedonistic at the time anyway.

Yeah, Groupie sex, loads of it. Soz Geir.

Not so sure about groupie sex though.
Are you serious? Their hotel rooms were revolving doors for groupies.
You don't really buy the suit-and-tie-and-tea-with-the-Queen sham that Brian Epstein put over on the world over four decades ago, do you? The Rolling Stones only seemed more sinister because they were specifically marketed by Andrew Loog Oldham to appear decadent, providing fans with an alternative to the "nice" Beatles. In fact, the opposite was closer to the truth.

From www.believermag.com:
Many in the media were quick to notice the two groups’ contrasting styles. When the Rolling Stones arrived in the United States, the first Associated Press (AP) report described them as “dirtier, streakier, and more disheveled than the Beatles.” Tom Wolfe put things more sharply: “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” he quipped, “but the Stones want to burn down your town.” Since these comparisons proved useful to everyone, both the bands and the journalists collaborated on the charade. In the early 1960s, Keith Richards remarked, “nobody took the music seriously. It was the image that counted, how to manipulate the press and dream up a few headlines.” Peter Jones, who wrote about both bands for the Record Mirror, recalled being in a “difficult position” because he was expected to “gloss over” the Beatles’ tawdry indiscretions. “It was decreed that the Beatles should be portrayed as incredibly lovable, amiable fellows, and if one of them, without mentioning any names, wanted to have a short orgy with three girls in the bathroom, then I didn’t see it.”

yeah i just read a lennon plastic-ono-band-era interview in this rolling stone compilation book and he basically said it was fucking insane on the road in when they still toured, in terms of groupies

yeah, he said it was like "Satyricon", right?

yeah something like that, it's in that rolling stone interviews book that came out a couple years a go.

Jazzbo OTM

The Rolling Stones aren't wearing matching suits but they're playing the same fucking game.