Apple Corp Ltd. and EMI Music announced this morning from London that the entire original recorded catalog of The Beatles has been remastered for the first time for CD release. The release date is September 9, 2009 to coincide with the release of “The Beatles: Rock Band” video game the same day.
Two separate collections are being made available to the market – one stereo and a collector’s mono box set. (all images © Apple Corps Ltd, 2009)
More detailed information on the new Beatles release after the jump.
Information on the stereo set is as follows:
The collection comprises all 12 Beatles albums in stereo, with track listings and artwork as originally released in the UK, and ‘Magical Mystery Tour,’ which became part of The Beatles’ core catalogue when the CDs were first released in 1987. In addition, the collections ‘Past Masters Vol. I and II’ are now combined as one title, for a total of 14 titles over 16 discs. This will mark the first time that the first four Beatles albums will be available in stereo in their entirety on compact disc. These 14 albums, along with a DVD collection of the documentaries, will also be available for purchase together in a stereo boxed set.
The mono looks to be the most interesting of the set.
A second boxed set has been created with the collector in mind. ‘The Beatles in Mono’ gathers together, in one place, all of the Beatles recordings that were mixed for a mono release. It will contain 10 of the albums with their original mono mixes, plus two further discs of mono masters (covering similar ground to the stereo tracks on ‘Past Masters’). As an added bonus, the mono “Help!” and “Rubber Soul” discs also include the original 1965 stereo mixes, which have not been previously released on CD. These albums will be packaged in mini-vinyl CD replicas of the original sleeves with all original inserts and label designs retained.
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Let me guess, massively compressed dynamic range? These remasters are rarely any good.
I wholly disagree. The days of bad remasters ended after the terrible Jeff Buckley Grace fiasco. Check the latest U2 Metallica or Serge G. remasters.
These remasters for The Beatles have been in the works for years and were done by many people including Simon Gibson. Some notes from the release:
“The re-mastering process commenced with an extensive period conducting tests before finally copying the analogue master tapes into the digital medium. When this was completed, the transfer was achieved using a Pro Tools workstation operating at 24 bit 192 kHz resolution via a Prism A-D converter. Transferring was a lengthy procedure done a track at a time… When all of the albums had been transferred, each song was then listened to several times to locate any of the agreed imperfections. These were then addressed by Guy Massey, working with Audio Restoration engineer Simon Gibson. …”
These are going to be amazing.
Information on the Beatles website states “No compression was used on any of the mono mixes.” This obviously means there was some compression used on the stereo mixes. However, this statement (and other official statements relating to the rigorous process used to remaster the catalogue) leads me to believe that any compression used on the stereo mixes was most likely implemented tastefully and purposefully.
Thankfully, it seems we are past the silly season of gross over-compression – at least on remasters and reissues of classic albums. I’m sure the problem will remain for the mastering of modern pop music genres but this will not effect people of discerning taste who wholly ignore modern popular music.
The Rolling Stone issue with The Beatles on the cover talks about the stereo remasters a bit and mentions that just a slight amount of compresson was used… slight … on the stereo mixes.