Beatlemania has gripped the world again.
Isn't that wonderful?
Let me bore you with the details why....
In 1987, the Beatles' albums appeared on compact disc for the first time. Considering how much music had already found its way to CD, the Beatles were very late, so the digital rollout was a big deal. The CD's came out in batches and the excitement steadily built, peaking when Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band came out on June 1, 1987, the 20th anniversary of its original release ("It was 20 years ago today..." probably one of the greatest record marketing hooks of all time). But the elation was short lived for most that grew up listening to the Fab Four on vinyl. The transfers were done quickly and rather poorly, (even for the technology of the time). And other than Sgt. Pepper's, the presentation wasn't much to get excited about either. The Beatles were the biggest act of all time and you were going to buy the CD's anyway; so why should EMI give a crap...?
So it went for 22 years. If you bought a copy of Help! on 9/8/09 you got the same transfer that I bought in 1987. The same harsh upper range, the same boxy sounding drums. And sure the songs are still great, and Paul's bass lines are a wonder, but they sounded like they were recorded through a boom-box from tape to tape. Meanwhile, everybody and his brother were re-releasing their entire crappy catalog every two years with every new advancement in sound technology. So what were Beatles fans to do?
Well, one thing they did was keep on playing vinyl. In the most technical sense vinyl will always sound better than CD (and even DVD-A), but nowadays the difference is virtually negligible to all but the most jaded audiophile with $80,000.00 worth of high end equipment. I won't get bogged down into a long discourse about digital vs analog but here is a picture (worth a thousand words!) that displays the basic concept.
Analog is an unbroken line whereas digital will always be one's and zero's.....anyway....
On we went; while Elvis Costello and Oingo Boingo were releasing their 43rd remastering, the Beatles' music was still stuck in glorious 1987 technology. So unless you had a turntable and the vinyl, you simply could not hear The Beatles anywhere close to the way they had mastered their recordings.
An then, (after four years of work), on 9/9/09; another marketing idea no doubt, an homage to Revolution 9's recitative (number nine, number nine, number nine). The Beatles finally got their due on CD. Late again interestingly, with CD's quickly dying away theses days.
But better late than never.
All 13 albums (and the double CD, Past Masters, containing all the singles that were never released on an album), were released with a glorious sound that is, at times, literally shocking to anyone who grew to love The Beatles on cassette, (God help us), or through the '87 remasters. It is truly amazing to feel like you are hearing a song you've heard hundreds of times for the first time again. The drum sound is infinitely more rounded, the bass lines have a punch that shows even more just how amazing McCartney was. The separation of sound is better, so that instruments and layered vocals have more definition, when the Beatles harmonize you can more easily pick out the different vocalists, and the overall presence of the vocals is greatly improved, without seeming overdone or drowning out the music. Acoustic guitar parts (barely noticeable in some cases on the '87 mastering), sound crisp and lively. Various sound effects, cymbals taps, percussion parts and so on, ring out with more clarity. I wouldn't call the differences night-and-day, (for the most part), but they certainly are unmistakably noticeable.
And that, to me, is one of the best, most successful, parts of the entire endeavor. I wouldn't want to feel like the songs had been "overworked" and become unnaturally different from the songs we all know, and they are not. Instead one feels like a a veil has been lifted off of them and we are hearing them the way they are supposed to sound.
I don't want to get too overly technical about the processes involved in bringing this new life to the digital Beatles catalog, (I am not even going to get into the stereo vs mono), but I think (again), that a few pictures can say it better than any words I might use.
Here is a picture of the waveform of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" from the 1987 mastering:
And now: "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" from the 2009 mastering:
Just for fun lets do one more:
"While My Guitar Gently Weeps" [1987 Remaster]
"While My Guitar Gently Weeps" [2009 Remaster]
I'll close this long post out, (thank God I skipped the Stereo vs Mono debate, although I'll probably post about that in the coming days, lol), with some quotes from around the web about the Box Set that I liked:
"The remastered albums “make the original recordings sound newly invigorated and alive, whether you’re listening on standard earbuds or a high-end system. The buoyancy of “Something” becomes more comprehensible when you hear clearly Paul McCartney’s nimble bass line. You knew that “Twist and Shout” featured one of John Lennon’s most visceral performances, but here you can feel his vocal cords shred. The horns on “Good Morning Good Morning” roar, driving the song in a way you may not have noticed before. Lennon and George Harrison’s guitars on “You Can’t Do That” sharpen to a gleaming edge".
"It is my considered judgment that true blue Beatles fans and collectors will find the improved sonics, sparkling-clean tracks, and enhanced separation achieved by the Abbey Road studio engineers and assorted experts (who spent the past four years poring over the original tapes) on these new CDs well worth the investment. I mean, we're talking Beatles here.
So what's so special/different/amazing/not-to-be-missed? For starters, the overall sound is very clear and virtually distortion-free. The lads' lead vocals are somewhat enhanced and background voices sound less blended together, so it's easier to single out the individual Beatles singing harmonies. Formerly buried acoustic guitars suddenly are more present, and sound percussive, woody, and more resonant. Electric guitars seem to ring out more viscerally.
None of the four Beatles could be called virtuoso instrumentalists, but the juiced-up presence and an almost palpable dimensionality amps up their live rock band élan. It's most evident on "With the Beatles," their fine second record, which bristles with raw rock energy on covers like "You Really Got a Hold on Me" and "Please Mr. Postman," as well as the white-hot Lennon/McCartney opener "It Won't Be Long."
Suddenly, it's easier to imagine them playing live at the Cavern Club (minus the screaming girls). Listening to Revolver's "Got to Get You Into My Life," the horn section's brass sounds freshly polished and positively gleaming as Ringo's insistent shuffle beat drives the song up another level.
Paul and Ringo should be ecstatic about the boosted bass and more focused drum sounds, which reconfirms what a truly fine rhythm section they were. Ringo's ride cymbals and hi hats have never sounded so clear or shimmery. Tambourines and shakers, formerly buried in the mixes, can now be distinctly heard, adding visceral texture to the music. On the lovely "Blackbird," not only can you hear Paul's foot tapping out the steady 4/4 beat, but the type of shoe he's wearing is also apparent. (Lightweight leather with a thin sole was my guess, but I was stumped by the color. I would never have guessed the red and yellow oxfords with, yes, thin soles I later saw Paul sporting in the accompanying QuickTime movie.) His Rickenbacker bass, especially from "Revolver" on, swoops and thumps with added authority on these discs."
"It took the Beatles four vinyl hours and a staggering three years to get from I Saw Her Standing There — the opening song of their debut album Please Please Me — to Revolver’s demonic psychedelic climax Tomorrow Never Knows. Whatever else they achieved in their final four years, that much alone is enough to solidify into fact that there will never be a more extraordinary pop decade than the Sixties and a more extraordinary band in that decade than the Beatles.
And yet, for younger fans coming into that canon on the basis of the existing CDs, the scale of these achievements might not have immediately seemed obvious. Until today, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a CD sonically diminished by digital technology. The dogma of clarity that greeted the CD format’s arrival in the Eighties may have been great when listening to Dire Straits, but all it did for A Day in the Life was to miniaturise the blood-curdling sense of absolute arrest that this — arguably Lennon and McCartney’s greatest collaborative moment — instils in the listener. “Clarity” meant that you could even hear the join where George Martin had spliced together the two best takes of the song. More than almost any song in the Fabs’ oeuvre, A Day in the Life represents the almost impossible job faced by Rouse and his team. You want to be able to hear the constituent parts of every song without forsaking the “presence” to which vinyl seemed so perfectly suited.
When you finally do, emotions run unexpectedly high. Songs that once seemed to make up the numbers step into the spotlight in bold new colours, or, rather, the old colours revealed anew. On Revolver, the dissonant tug of Paul McCartney’s piano on George Harrison’s I Want To Tell You sounds discombobulatingly urgent, while on the 1964 A Hard Day’s Night album Any Time At All swings zestfully between the canine eagerness of John Lennon’s vocal and a guitar part from Harrison that fleetingly foretells the jingle-jangle mourning of the forthcoming folk-rock boom.
No less startlingly, songs long since dulled by ubiquity suddenly burst into life again. Yesterday in particular is a revelation. Free of the reverb that blights the 1987 CD version, McCartney’s voice radiates a damp, autumnal proximity that foregrounds the brittle bitterness of loss. No less affecting is Penny Lane, a song in which McCartney pauses the videotape of memory on a moment to which he knows he can never return, now revealed in more tantalising detail than ever.
Perhaps because post-Britpop orthodoxy has elevated the Fabs’ post-Rubber Soul albums to the peaks of critical unassailability, many of the biggest surprises lying in wait on these remasters lurk on the group’s early records. I Saw Her Standing There erupts into action with a shit-kicking clatter that never lets up. Audible in equal measure here are the grime of the Star Club in Hamburg and the sweat of the Cavern, until Harrison’s Carl Perkins-style solo kicks the whole thing into another dimension. On Baby It’s You, Ringo Starr’s drums and McCartney’s razor-raw roar retain the feral mystique that you can still hear if you play an old rock’n’roll song on a Dansette. At the end of With the Beatles, Money sounds as if it can barely be contained by the equipment being used to record it."
