the Beatles remastered recordings: yes, you should
In yet another ploy to make money off of what is arguably the most monetizable catalogue in pop/rock music history, the folks at Capitol Records and Apple Corp Ltd now bring you the entire Beatles oeuvre, remastered. The recordings are available individually or as one of two box sets: the Mono Box and the Stereo Box.
Excuse the snark. That first sentence reflects my initial reaction when I heard this NPR story a couple of months ago. The couple of song clips that accompanied the story gave precious little on which to base any kind of judgment. Even if they had played more, there's just no way to know how good this stuff might sound when you're hearing it over the radio on the highway at rush hour.
The Beatles recordings were remastered years ago with the advent of CDs, but as even the most casual fans of the music can attest, the resulting recordings were thin and kinda tinny sounding.
Yesterday I received one of the individual albums as a gift from a friend: The BEATLES, aka The White Album. Today I ripped it into iTunes and loaded it to the phone at 224k. I did it this way instead of listening first to the CD itself because I wanted to see if I could hear a difference even in a slightly degraded form. I've been listening to this music for years and years and years, over and over again. I know it inside and out, backwards and forwards. It fits me like worn in shoes. So I wanted to see if I could hear anything I'd never heard before.
I did.
In short: buy at least this one. I'm putting a whole bunch of these suckers on my gift list.
It sounds like whoever did the remastering (this disc credits Guy Massey and Steve Rooke) made it a labor of love. It is beautiful, a work of art. Dear Prudence, which may be my favorite Beatles song, made me cry like it did the first time I ever heard it. Seriously, it really is like listening to the Beatles again for the first time. I said the same when Love came out, but that was a different thing, although equally a labor of love.
This is just the songs as they were originally recorded but made to sound as if those original recordings were done this afternoon, laid onto a CD and left at your house for you to listen to.
Think I'm overstating it? Get one. Get this one. Check it out and let me know what you think... if you can make yourself heard over the music I'll have on at the time.
Cheers!
