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

PLEASE PLEASE ME = amazing! fluffed vocals and dodgy guitar on a number 1 smash!

this whole remasters campaign proves that if you do it *right* it will get people jazzed. that's the beatles for you i guess.

So do I need the mono stuff if I already have the stereo?

Totally feeling what Houston's feeling. Everyone's voices so assured but still... SO youthful. You can't front on this music, really. If I have one qualm right now is that the high end on RS and Revolver can verge on the harsh when guitars, hats and tamborines are going @ it all at once.

"Till There Was You" is revelatory.

looking forward to downloading the mono one.

― The Sorrows of Young Jeezy (jim), Tuesday, July 7, 2009 10:26 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm. one of the worst-managed catalogues of all time.

In a way, yes. Not sure what I consider worst. Overkill a la Boney M, Elvis Presley, CCR and The Police or the opposite extreme a la The Beatles and Prince.

Also, overdubbing old tracks to make new tracks. Happened twice with the Beatles, happened loads with Bob Marley, for instance.

so help and rubber soul sound alright then? how are the mixes on those? they retained the "87 rebalancing" whatever that meant. Is the dgital reverb from the 87 cds gone? the mono box has the original mixes of those albums along with the mono.

i want mono early ones and stereo late ones and maybe both for SPLHCB. don't want to spend £200 for some old records too much. have been forced to burgularize them via the internet.

god knows which im going to buy but tempted to get at least a few of these.

Oh, probably none of them!

I was thinking of getting Abbey Road, as it's the only one I haven't got on CD, but then I've got it on LP, and olde cassette formats...

Pepperland sounds fucking amazing!

No but yeah but...

One thing re: these "remasters" - the bit in Eleanor Rigby where the voice switches channels mid-word would count as a technical cock-up, no? Because it is still on this remaster (leaked mp3s). I thought they had cleared up technical non-performance faults, so why not this? Or am I listening to some prank version?

Obviously I am a total cloth ears, but the only differences I think I have heard so far are louder/clearer drums and percussion/handclaps, possibly clearer voices, and... just about everything on Strawberry Fields, which could just be me never having listened properly before to what is basically The Magic Roundabout soundtrack (in my head).

Not that I really give a toss whether the Beatles ever reach the iTunes Store or not, but can anyone make sense of McCartney's comments quoted here:

So what's been the hold-up all this time? McCartney tells Observer Music Monthly: "We've been keen to do this for a while. I met Guy Hands on a plane once. His crew bought EMI. I refer to them as Terracotta but I believe it's Terra Firma. I said: 'What is the problem? I want to do it, we all want to do it.' And he explained that in the deal that we want, they feel exposed.

"If [digitised Beatles music] gets out, if one employee decides to take it home and wap it on to the internet, we would have the right to say, 'Now you recompense us for that.' And they're scared of that." We'll see …

Does he think the entire Beatles catlogue is somehow not on the internet already? What would this hypothetical employee leak?

CARNIVAL OF LIGHT!!!

Yeah, but they're talking about the existing catalogue, right?

Maybe McCartney finally ran out of memory.

LOL

Everyone's afraid of telling him that everything the Beatles ever did was on the internet over a decade ago because they don't want him to say "now you recompense us for that". It's like when Grandpa's computer won't work because he has adware all over it, and then you have to tell him that he needs to download some sort of program on there to clean up everything and he's mad because you want to put more stuff on the family computer. So instead of actually telling him the truth you just go see what grandma's doing instead.

Only in this case, grandpa's stoned all the time.

Actually maybe he doesn't want recompense so he doesn't have to pay his ex any more than necessary.

Good thing we can count on Ringo to come in and make some firm decisions

Yeah I had a fantasy the other day that the Beatles did these remasters and set up Beatle-approved torrents to make official digital copies of the albums completely free and they were instantly elevated to Music Gods of the 21st Century by the torrent set. "We have more money than God," Paul McCartney says to the press, "So we thought we'd just give out our entire catalog for free".

http://i234.photobucket.com/albums/ee303/MissBeatles/RIngo10.jpg

Hahah Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr don't know about MP3s. They can only be content with their hundreds millions of dollars and the knowledge that they were in the biggest band of all time.

Ringo invents emo.

listened to leaks of sporadic tracks and really wasn't feeling it and then just now I played PPM all the way through and by the time I hit "there's a place" I was like "FUCK". no music in my life has ever meant as much to me as the beatles music, it has been with me since I was a little kid, and I was a profound embarrassing beatlemaniac lunatic until I was 13 or so. I don't know that I've felt the music the same way since I was that young.

These are out tommorrow and I still can't decide which box set to get.

mono

Yeah, I was leaning toawrds buying the mono box + Abbey Road. But lately I've been thinking, the stereo box has all the albums, it's cheaper, and... does it really matter?

Man, even the Stereo box is sold out on Amazon now.

Do you think McCartney gets the money from these as an ongoing revenue stream, or does it all land in his bank account at once?

I heard that hundred dollar bills are delivered to his country manse and then fed directly into a wood chipper, and his gardeners use it for mulch.

I bet 90% of it goes to Sony/ATV, taking into account accounting practices and money won from suing downloaders. 10% of that is still tons of money tho.

Paul McCartney is still touring, so I'm putting that up as evidence.

Like most people, I was initially confused by EMI’s decision to release remastered versions of all 13 albums by the Liverpool pop group Beatles, a 1960s band so obscure that their music is not even available on iTunes. The entire proposition seems like a boondoggle. I mean, who is interested in old music? And who would want to listen to anything so inconveniently delivered on massive four-inch metal discs with sharp, dangerous edges? The answer: no one. When the box arrived in the mail, I briefly considered smashing the entire unopened collection with a ball-peen hammer and throwing it into the mouth of a lion. But then, against my better judgment, I arbitrarily decided to give this hippie shit an informal listen. And I gotta admit—I’m impressed. This band was mad prolific.

http://www.avclub.com/articles/chuck-klosterman-repeats-the-beatles,32560/

that guy

seriously

The photos of the packaging in that review are making me want to buy.

It’s akin to a combination of Badfinger, Oasis, Corner Shop, and everyother rock band that’s ever existed.

Corner Shop?? Does he mean "Brimful of Asha" Cornershop, or some other Corner Shop?

Oh wait, because of the sitar? Good grief.

I think Kloster Man has his tongue firmly in cheek here

Yeah there's something CRLS-lite about this.

wait, pitchfork's entire review section today is tom ewing on the beatles? huuuuh

Sounds good to me!

(Tom taking over the review section, that is.)

Cambridge Rindge and Latin School?

Liking these pitchfork write-ups!

So what do we think regular retail price will end up on these things? B3st Buy's special "sale" price is $12.99 for all of them besides White Album which will be $16.99. I can't justify splurging on the box right away, so I'd prefer picking these up slowly over time. But I'm afraid they'll be like $18 after a couple weeks.

i betcha they'll be wayyyy cheaper than that in a year or so. . .

I dunno, back when I used to buy things in shops I was always waiting for their regular CDs to come down to mid-price or below like every other band on the planet, but they never seemed to have any trouble maintaining full price for the things.

didn't Marcello once say on a diff thread that both the Beatles and Pink Floyd have it down that they wont ever go to mid-price ?