Entire Beatles’ Digitally Re-Mastered Complete Catalogue — YES!
I’ve been waiting for this for a very long time, and at last it is here: The entire Beatles catalogue digitally remastered, including all the original mono albums. I. Am. Happy.
The albums have been remastered by a team of EMI’s Abbey Road Studios in London, using original vintage analogue equipment, and the latest digital conversion systems. After a long time of initial testing, the digital transfer of the original analogue master tapes was done — one track at a time — using a Prism A-D converter and Pro Tools operating at 24-bit with 192kHz resolution. The tapes didn’t had any defects, but they were covered with dust, which had to be carefully removed from the playback equipment after each theme was digitised.
The teams — Paul Hicks, Sean Magee with Guy Massey and Steve Rooke for the mono albums, and Guy Massey, Steve Rooke, Sam Okell with Paul Hicks and Sean Magee for the stereo ones — put extra care on keeping every single bit of detail from the original tapes intact, including electrical clicks, microphone pops, and even bad edits. The whole process was painfully long, four entire years from start to finish, with the teams obsessed with keeping the spirit and quality of the original recordings intact.
I can’t wait to listen to these:
The Stereo Albums (available individually and collected in a stereo boxed set)
• Please Please Me* (CD debut in stereo)
• With The Beatles* (CD debut in stereo)
• A Hard Day’s Night* (CD debut in stereo)
• Beatles For Sale* (CD debut in stereo)
• Help!*
• Rubber Soul*
• Revolver*
• Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band* (also includes 1987 notes, updated, and new intro by Paul McCartney)
• Magical Mystery Tour*
• The Beatles*
• Yellow Submarine* (also includes original US liner notes)
• Abbey Road*
• Let It Be*
• Past Masters (contains new liner notes written by Kevin Howlett)* CD includes QuickTime mini-doc about the album
‘The Beatles in Mono’ (boxed set only)
• 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+ mono mix CD debut
All the CD packages contain the original vinyl artwork — like mini-LPs — with liner notes, historical and recording notes, plus a large amount of archival photos. They will be released on September 9, and for now we can only imagine the insane price the collection will have.
My card is ready. [The Beatles]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
Cool. I might just think about replacing my original CD box set.
They’re already available to pre-order from the usual places (some at a discount, some not).
The MONO box is harder to find – it’s apparently been limited to 10,000 numbered copies for the US (not sure about other markets). It has a price of US$259.99 at elusivedisc.com, for example. It is the one to get, if you’re serious about listening to the albums at their best on CD (the Beatles were renowned for putting all of their attention on the mono mixes of their albums, and not really caring about the stereo mix, which was done as an afterthought – only “Abbey Road” was ever a stereo-only release).
The team retained “bad edits?” You mean if there was a situation where a guitar sound drops out a fraction of a second due to some tape issue back in the day, that stays? That doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. I can understand not changing the spirit of each song/album…but some corrections, it would seemm are warranted. I hope the team didn’t go overboard in “retaining” everything that was there way back when.