The Beatles Remasters (9/9/9)

Mono set = amazing

I love how I got fucking dogpiled on a while ago for posting that I preferred mono to stereo...

i was working on a track yesterday and i noticed all the levels seemed "off." i was retweaking everything for a long time and got everything just right, then realized my headphones were only halfway plugged in and i had been mixing in mono. anyway it made my mix way better in the end.

and now i don't doubt all this hype about the beatles mono mixes

i don't doubt that mono is good. i don't really like the separation sometimes like where the guitar will be in one ear and other shit in the other. still, i only downloaded these remasters to seed em and boost my ratio on what.cd so whatevzz

fuck i wish i can buy the stereo box set but I am fucking broke. I am thinking about picking up White Album, Revolver, Abbey Road, Sgt Peppers and Magical Mystery tour individually though.

  On 9/7/2009 at 11:30 PM, olson said:

still, i only downloaded these remasters to seed em and boost my ratio on what.cd so whatevzz

good idea

  On 9/7/2009 at 11:30 PM, olson said:

i don't doubt that mono is good. i don't really like the separation sometimes like where the guitar will be in one ear and other shit in the other. still, i only downloaded these remasters to seed em and boost my ratio on what.cd so whatevzz

dude, when i was 17, my beatles tapes with their crazy stereo separation and some cheap acid and a tape recorder with balance control provided me and my buddies with hours of entertainment.

  On 9/7/2009 at 8:52 PM, Philip Glass said:

Mono set = amazing

BTW how do you already have the mono? I can't find it in any store, or on any torrent site.

Not my fault dude. They are everywhere. Net and physical. Just go to other stores. Or other sites.

  On 9/8/2009 at 12:34 AM, kaini said:

  On 9/7/2009 at 11:30 PM, olson said:

i don't doubt that mono is good. i don't really like the separation sometimes like where the guitar will be in one ear and other shit in the other. still, i only downloaded these remasters to seed em and boost my ratio on what.cd so whatevzz

 

 

dude, when i was 17, my beatles tapes with their crazy stereo separation and some cheap acid and a tape recorder with balance control provided me and my buddies with hours of entertainment.

the hard panning was probably just because it was a novelty at the time and i understood they were just sort of slapped together

not so much a novelty as, quite literally, people didn't know how to do stereo properly yet

there were novelty records around the same time - esquivel and his crazy space age bachelor pad music, as well as more generic fare - endless generic vinyls with 'wacky' stereo effects. i stayed in an old house once that had about 50 of these records, man was that a fun night lol

TOMORROW NEVER KNOWS (MONO) WILL BLOW YOUR MIND ON THE REMASTER

i have no desire to listen to anything in mono...ever

so far i've gone:

sgt peppers

white album

help

hard days night

abbey road

all sound great

hard days night i could barely tell a differece other than it just sounded "right...nice and loud bt not overly compressed/limited" but still gritty and 60's

  On 9/8/2009 at 9:49 AM, Brandi_B said:

i have no desire to listen to anything in mono...ever

 

 

 

so far i've gone:

 

sgt peppers

white album

help

hard days night

abbey road

 

 

all sound great

 

 

hard days night i could barely tell a differece other than it just sounded "right...nice and loud bt not overly compressed/limited" but still gritty and 60's

Neither do I, but ...

"A better way of putting it is the Beatles didn't oversee the stereo mixing, and it was done in a very limited fashion (vocals in one ear, instruments in the other. very VERY different to how stereo is done today) that can sound unnatural to the ear. The remastered stereo albums don't address that issue at all, they only cleaned up how the track sounds. The mono mixes of the early albums are ABSOLUTELY the way the Beatles "meant" for them to sound. I don't think that can really be debated."

Quote is from another forum, and I am too tired and high to re-state it so I thought I would jsut copy it. So far I have both stereo and mono, and mono is far superior.

Exactly bitches. Listen to the mono.

(except for Abbey Road, Let it Be and YS of course)

Argh, I need to find the monos

!! you all want mono ..

Neeeeed mono

a lot of the time they used two track tape for mono mastering so they could control the level of a certain tricky instrument (eg vox) separately up to mastering.

then when they did the stereo release, they just grabbed the two trac "stereo" master and pressed it up in stereo.

result - shitloads of singles where the vocal is one one channel and everything else is in the other. or lead guitar. or kick drum.

Or stuff like "I am the Walrus", where two minutes into the song, it completely goes into a low-quality fake-stereo (EQ'ed mono) because they tracked the King Lear radio live over the final result. How dare they!

Anyway, one thing for sure is that the weight of the remasters is off their shoulders now at Apple. Now, they can remix everything if they want. I can see in two years a complete remixed back collection of every Beatles song in 2.0 and 5.1. I mean it's obvious. Heck, the entire multi-tracks for Sgt. Peppers exist (search the web it's easy to find), and yesterday there was already the entire Rock Band ripped multi-tracks available of all the songs.

listened to the stereos all night last night, got hold of the monos today. my impression is these mixes were done in front of top quality monitors in studio so they sound excellent in a listening room. a lot of people here are listening on headphones, which is cool but again i think we've been trained to hear things direct center since the dawn of MTV, my entire generation's ears were taught that music come from dead center so yeah it sounds weird today, but i've listened to these mixes on my monitors, in car, and thru headphones and i prefer the stereos. the separation is just excellent.

the remasters sound pretty good, but i'm not sure about the stereo treatment they gave it, it does sound weird how they separated some stuff. but there is a definite quality imporvement.

maybe forcing it to be mono it will sound normal and still sound like a proper remaster.

It's a remastering.

Not a remixing.

The stereo you have, is the way they mixed it in stereo back then, except for Rubber Soul and Help!, which uses the 1987 George Martin stereo mixes. You still can get the original 60's stereo mixes of those two albums at the end of each mono CD.

I'll probably grab a couple of these to check them out, don't know that I want to buy the ones I already have though...

Also, Rock Band is lame- buy a guitar and you can learn to play anything you want instead of pretending.

  On 9/9/2009 at 8:07 PM, The Green Kingdom said:

Also, Rock Band is lame- buy a guitar and you can learn to play anything you want instead of pretending.

I really cringe when I hear artists/people say this - Rock Band, Guitar Hero, etc. are not about 'pretending' to play real instruments - it's an appropriate interface for a music/rhythm based game, and has the potential side-benefit of getting non-musical people interested in learning to play a real instrument, as well as non-gaming people to get into games. That's a win/win in my book.