Finally, FINALLY, the remastered Beatles albums are coming out this September! I swore at one point I had a savings account to buy all of these albums.
The greatest news of all is that there will be a separate box set of the mono mixes as well!
You see, here’s a little history lesson for those born after the sixties.
In the early 60s when The Beatles started out, stereo technology was not around. It was all in mono therefore all their instruments were mixed for a mono release.
Then stereo started catching on so it would be commonplace for awhile to mix both in mono and stereo and release both versions and you could pick up whichever version your system could handle. Think of it as a comparison between DVD and Blu-Ray films. They are the same films but with some differences.
Here’s a real interesting comparison between the two mixes of the Sgt. Pepper’s album, taken from Wikipedia:
The Beatles were present during the mixing of the album in mono and the LP was originally released as such alongside a stereo mix prepared by Abbey Road engineers led by Geoff Emerick; the Beatles themselves did not attend the mixing of the stereo version. (The mono version is now out of print on vinyl and was not officially released on CD.) The two mixes are fundamentally different. For example, the stereo mix of “She’s Leaving Home” was mixed at a slower speed than the original recording and therefore plays at a slower tempo and at a lower pitch than the original recording. Conversely, the mono version of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” is considerably slower than the stereo version and features much heavier gating and reverb effects. McCartney’s yelling voice in the coda section of “Sgt. Pepper (Reprise)” (just before the segue into “A Day in the Life“) can plainly be heard in the mono version, but is nearly inaudible in the stereo version. The mono version of the song also features drums that open with much more presence and force, as they are turned well up in the mix. Also in the stereo mix, the famous segue at the end of “Good Morning Good Morning” (the chicken-clucking sound which becomes a guitar noise) is timed differently and a crowd noise tape comes in later during the intro to “Sgt. Pepper (Reprise)”.
Other variations between the two mixes include louder laughter at the end of the mono mix of “Within You Without You”, as well as a gush of laughter between the coda of the title track and the beginning of “With a Little Help From My Friends”, and a colder, echoless ending on the mono version of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!”.
Considering the Beatles weren’t even in the ROOM during the making of the stereo mix, I feel that the mono mix is the definitive version, but here, after all these years, I’ve only heard the stereo mix because that’s the one that was released onto CD.