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

Yes! That & she's leaving home are so beautiful.

Remastering appears to have fixed what seemed to be a HUGE dB dropoff between "Helter Skelter" and "Long, Long, Long" so you don't have to crank it to hear the latter.

re the US film, i too saw that on saturday.
and noticed that in the second half John is hardly in it.
in fact only in the performance sections, never the off duty stuff do you see wheer the others are mucking about (hotel room stuff)
wonder what the back story is .. maybe the second film tonight will go into detail ..

MAYSLES: "Well, essentially John was hip-deep in teenage trim every offtage moment."

"21:30–22:40 The Beatles: The First US Visit
The Maysles brothers' film of The Beatles' first US tour in 1964, when Beatlemania ignited (R)"

can someone tape that for me?

hope i can still get the mono boxed set by the time i've saved up enough money to buy the damn thing!

― messiahwannabe, Thursday, September 10, 2009 6:52 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

YOUshouldseeitontheTUBE

It would be great if people raving about their favorite bits could specify if they are listening to the mono or stereo, although i guess the default is stereo

All my raving from now on will be regarding stereo flac downloads, as I cannot afford to buy it (and am not sure whether I would, considering I own all the proper studio albums on vinyl somewhere, and many of the other '87 CDs.)

call me crazy, but i actually like to sometimes listen for myself to see if i agree with the various posters!

All my raving is on the stereo versions, right or wrong. All I can say is that I've "grown up" on the '87 discs and I'm more used to hearing them this way. Works for me.

yeah, this whole stereo v. mono thing is something i haven't reckoned with--i look forward to sitting down with the mono box and digging the vaunted "authenticity". when i read that blurb from some engineer or other saying that the mono of sgt pepper is the "real" one, i ran out and bought the whole damn box--i am a consumerist pushover

Husband threatened leg breakage (mine) if I purchased the stereo box. (He knows my junkie ways and saw the need for edicts to be passed. Trust me, it's a wise course of action. I know myself too well). Bought Abbey Road, Rubber Soul & Sgt Pepper yesterday...told husband, who jokingly called me a junkie then revealed he was planning on getting me the stereo box for christmas. [*cries*] We've negotiated an arrangement wherein I buy 1 album a month. It's not ideal but it's something. I still am interested in this mono box though. Having never listened to them on vinyl (yes yes I know), I'm really interested in the compare/contrast now. And this thread has geeked me out something fierce!!!

Am completely obsessed with Abbey today. Yesterday it was Rubber Soul. But Abbey. DAMN. I know I'm repeating a thousand previous posts but it's like hearing it for the first time. And the side b medley just shines.

It's all about Magical Mystery Tour.

That's the next stop in my 1-album-a-month mystery tour....

I have to say that I think I prefer the Capitol stereo mixes of the really early stuff to these though, definitely. The balances are better and I like all that shitty reverb (those are the ones I grew up with). These stereo mixes really, really sound weird, with instruments gating in and out in the vocal channel, it's pretty obvious that these were intended mainly as balance mixes prior to doing them monos.

I finally located a stereo box and bought it, reluctantly, for way too much money. Hopefully my mono box will show up tomorrow.

I'm listening to both the stereo and mono albums. The mono albums aren't keeping my attention as well as the stereo ones are. I'm on headphones. Mono "It's All Too Much" was breathtaking though.

I've only bought stereo Abbey Road so far but holy shit the Moog!

I ripped them all in lossless in iTunes and sorted by track name and went through each song.

Please Please Me is entirely better in Mono, but from then on I've found it differs song from song and the further forward in time the better the Stereo mix. By the second album you have the Stereo mix of Roll Over Beethoven (from With The Beatles) being just awful, absolutely horrid, while the Mono is sublime, but oddly, I prefer the Stereo mix of You Really Got A Hold On Me. After the second album I've generally preferred the Stereo mixes, though it gets a little messy comparing Mono Masters with Past Masters. Help!, which might be my favourite Beatles album (yeah I know), is a bit weird, I like Act Naturally and Yesterday (maybe it's the intimacy of that song?) in Mono while basically the rest in Stereo.

Of course that's just me. Your mileage may vary.

I'm definitely stanning for the stereo side of things, as Geir as that is.

I'm noticing (on the stereo remasters) that on some songs you can hear the limitations of their voices, in ways I couldn't on the 87 versions. E.g. on "A Hard Day's Night" I can hear enough separation between John and Paul that I can hear where John's voice gives; or on "I Should Have Known Better" where John's voice cracks. Were these hard edges, as it were, blurred over on the 87 version? Mind you I don't love them any less for their limitations.

Maybe my memory's playing tricks here, but I thought the 87 mixes showed up quite a lot of the mistakes you mentioned. Something like McCartney's failiure to reach the top note in his harmony on If I fell, for example.

But I think you're right about the seperation being more acute and therefore throwing the mistakes into even sharper relief. Personally, I think this gives them an even greater appeal - but I bought far too many bootlegs just to hear them louse things up, so maybe I'm not the best judge!

Little fuck-ups are what gives colour and character to music; otherwise you end up with Coldplay.

Couldn't have put it better myself. Although I've often thought of Chris M4rtin as a little fuck up.

Yeah, I agree, the fuck ups don't take away from the music. I just hadn't noticed them as acutely until now.

sooo... does john sing 'baby you're a rich fag jew' then?

Just curious but does anybody know sales numbers for these reissues (expected or actual).
I also assume they are counted as catalog sales and won't be on Billboards top 200 list.
I always wonder how well reissues sell. I mean I can't believe that many people need another copy of a Bowie or Costello album but EC for example seems to get reissued with bonus tracks every few years.
Beatles, Dylan, etc... 1st time reissues being exceptions to this of course.

Anybody know the numbers on things like these. Checked other threads but didn't find any info.

this is probably the biggest single catalog reissue ever so I'm sure the sales are huge. the box sets alone are sold out everywhere (amoeba has some but restrictions on how many one person can buy, etc; and NO mono boxes)

Apparently there's lots of chart action (even the Mono box is top 40), butthe highest is Abbey Road at 12 or so.

This is midweeks, though.

Anyone heard the original 1965 stereo mix of Rubber Soul, which is included in the mono box set? Just curious to know how it stacks up to George Martin's 1987 remix.

> This is midweeks, though

which, given that it came on on wednesday, is only two days

i bought it on LP in the early-'80s. so maybe. all i can recall from the last time i put it on is that there was some severe separation/panning going on between the two channels. still, i remember Revolver being even more noticeably annoying in that regard.

xp

According to The Financial Times EMI shipped 5 million units to retail and the mono box has sold 50,000 through presale.
Not bad.

Abbey Road sold 7,164 copies.

I have to say that I think I prefer the Capitol stereo mixes of the really early stuff to these though, definitely.

Just to be sure, you're talking about The Capitol Albums, Vol. One? I never got around to buying that, but I think I will now. I love comparing all the different mixes of the same songs.

The Norwegian hitlists run from Wednesday to Wednesday, so will get quite some impression here by the middle of next week, as it will then include a full week of sales.

ysi?

It's kind of interesting that Mono Sgt. Pepper doesn't sound particularly "squished" in any way. The effort that must have gone into the mix is kind of staggering. If you don't think about it much, you don't even notice that it's mono. I'm listening to it on headphones right now, and not really missing anything in terms of stereo.

The thing that hits me most is that Pepper was the first rock album I ever heard, and this is probably the first time in umpteen years that it sounds the way I remember it sounding. I'm not suddenly falling in love w/the music again just like the first time, but it does pack a pretty powerful nostalgia hit. Keep getting flashes of sitting in my parents bedroom, where the stereo was, trying to make sense of the album art. Really hated Within You Without You back then, so that's changed...

I'm finding from listening to these remasters that Beatles is a very sensory, place-time kind of band for me. The songs I know, the songs I loved, I can see who I listened to the songs with, where I was, what I was eating...maybe a lot of that comes from listening to a lot of it when I was pretty young. It's not as strong with other bands as it is with these guys.

Drums on mono mix of "Your Mother Should Know" - WTF????

Watching the First US Visit on the toob...staggered/amused/wtf by the DC show where they had to move their equipment after every song to face each section of the crowd. Ringo's yanking away on the drum riser for what seems like years before some old geezer realizes 'Oh hey, he might need some help'. Crikey!

Ha! I was loving that too.

I'm finding from listening to these remasters that Beatles is a very sensory, place-time kind of band for me. The songs I know, the songs I loved, I can see who I listened to the songs with, where I was, what I was eating..

There's a bit in the Albert Goldman biography where he says that Lennon disliked hearing Beatles songs - not because he thought they were bad, but because it brought him down to remember the circumstances in which they were recorded: who he was with, the arguments, the miserableness and drugs he was taking at that time...

How trustworthy is the Goldman book? I was intrigued when I read it as a teenager around the time of the Anthologies, when it was pretty much the first exploration behind the music that I'd done. But he doesn't seem to have access to the main players, relying instead on secondary characters and unnamed sources, and it doesn't tally that much with anything I've read since. I'm also suspicious of how Goldman can write about private meetings and motives, a lot of which he doesn't appear to have any conceivable access to.

Of all the many Beatles books I've wasted my life reading, I think it all boils down to this:

Insider perspective: Beatles Anthology
Outsider/sociological: Can't Buy Me Love

They are the yin and yang of Beatles bios.

Picked up "Abbey Road" last night and was listening on my decent stereo system, and man . . . there's a roundness to the guitars and a sweetness to the Moog that I remember hearing on vinyl but not on the 87 CDs. Frankly, so far, these CDs sound more like vinyl than any others that I can recall.

Also, I A/Bed a bunch of songs for my wife from all three albums I've bought, and she was consistently able to pick out the remasters. She's hardly a "golden ears" type, but even she was pretty impressed.

Just curious but does anybody know sales numbers for these reissues (expected or actual).

Billboard expect 600,000 sales by Sunday http://www.billboard.com/news#/news/beatlemania-hits-retail-as-cd-reissues-sell-1004011616.story There was an interview with McCartney in Billboard which suggested that it was likely that the Beatles album sales could overtake Eminem (32 million sales) and become the biggest selling album act of the decade. Currently they're on 28.2 million.

I guess the biggest album seller of 2009 is still between The Beatles and Michael Jackson though...

I hope this is never remastered.

How did I forget that Help is the greatest song ever?

xpost...I guess it's true, I CAN like that song less.

anyway yeah these all sound great, the mono box in particular is really a thing of beauty, PPM sounds right and proper there. The only thing I'm kind of disappointed in is the kind of shoddy packaging on the stereo versions; they couldn't have sprung for thicker cardboard, or at least real digipacks? I ahte these slippy envelop things, and the spines of all of mine were squished in the box.