To Troy or to anyone who cares…
If you’re looking at getting just one boxset from the Beatles Remasters series, I will have to vote for the Mono Set after perusing both sets this evening.
A little background from a technical viewpoint…in the early 60s, stereo mixes of albums were made to cater to the elite…there were only fanatics who owned stereo systems. Hence, mono mixes were made first, stereo secondly.
Then over time, stereo gained the upper hand to the point that the final two Beatles albums, Let it Be and Abbey Road were mixed solely in stereo.
Somewhere during the middle of the Beatles tenure, there were both mixes available. You simply picked out the mix that worked with your stereo (although I’m assuming that both mixes would work on a stereo system).
Another important fact to note is that around the time Sgt. Pepper came out, the Beatles became quite interested in the mixing aspect of albums and actually took time to help with the mono mix of the album whereas they didn’t bother sticking around for the stereo mix. Therefore there are differences between the albums…some minor (little sound effects added/subtracted) and some major (entire songs sped up or slowed down which changed the pitch of the song).
So with that knowledge, I would like to think that if there was a definitive mix to listen to, it would be the Mono mixes.
Now, onto the actual box sets.
The mono set is beautiful. Bee-aauuuu-tiiii-fullll. They recreate the albums in the vinyl format they were released in years ago. They come in a plastic dust jacket. You pull the album out and it’s a recreation of the vinyl record…even the back is an exact recreation with the funny little stories about the UK’s biggest band at the moment…The Beatles! If the vinyl was a gatefold, then it opens as such. All inserts to the album are in there…the cut-out badges for the Sgt. Pepper album…the fold out poster for The White Album (although this seems to also be part of the Stereo version as well…). When you pull out the actual CDs, they are in another dust jacket, but right next to them are the actual paper sleeves that they would come in, recreated to the minor details…such as the psychedelic prints on the Sgt. Pepper paper sleeve.
Quite the attention to detail and I can’t rave enough about it. The set also comes with a 44 page booklet full of essays concerning mono mixes as well as photographs.
All in all, I LOVE the Mono Set. A lot of thought was put into it. Granted, the set does not come with Abbey Road or Let It Be (as they were not mono), but you can pick them up separately. The Mono Masters also is different from the Past Masters (in that the Past Masters is the stereo version with a slightly different track listing).
The stereo set is larger in size to accommodate the larger size of each individual CD package. The packages tend to be a triple gatefold design with a large booklet with extended liner notes, historical recording notes and never-before-seen photographs. The other side contains the CD. Did I mention that the labels on the CDs are recreations of what were on the original vinyls labels? Neat!
All in all, the booklets in the stereo versions are better considering they give a lot more information on the historical significance of a particular album, whereas the Mono album has whatever came with the album originally.
The box itself is nothing special…it simply holds the albums in two stacks. If you were ambitious, I would suggest foregoing the stereo box set, but buying them individually and picking up the collectible ‘Box of Vision’ holder for your CDs and it comes with a book with album cover photos in it. The guy at HMV was trying to sell it to me and I said “Ah, $90 seems a little steep for something that simply holds my CDs.” where he commented “Spoken to the man who just spent $500 on Beatles albums.” Nice.
The only bonus that the stereo box set would have over buying the album individually would be that it may be a little cheaper if you plan on buying all the albums and it also comes with a DVD with all the mini-documentaries. The mini-documentaries are on each stereo album, but you have to watch them individually on your computer whereas this is on a DVD. Meh, not a big deal. Did you know ‘meh’ is now an actual word in the dictionary?
So to end off my thoughts, buy the Mono set. You won’t be disappointed. Pick up Abbey Road and Let it Be separately to fill the set.
2 replies on “The Beatles Remasters – Reviewed”
Glad to hear your pre-order was actually there for you to pick up. If it weren’t for a little thing called “work” that delayed my trip to the store, I would have surely snapped up my own copies yesterday.
For now I will have to keep checking back and hope that I will secure the mono set sooner rather than later.
I have a question for you Ryan with respect to the Beatles albums being ‘remastered.’ The Beatles have been used as an example of being poorly remastered again and again, each time with a significantly decreased dynamic range. Have you noticed whether this set you picked up has gone through the process to make it louder?