9-9-9
On September 9, the new remastered versions of The Beatles albums will be released individually and as part of stereo and mono box sets (only stereo mixes will be released individually, mono mixes are only available as part of the mono box set).
What does remastered mean?
I won’t go into the technical details (since that’s more of interest to those who record and produce music) but to explain what it means from the listener’s perspective.
Mastering is the final step in the process of creating an album. Back in 1987, when The Beatles albums were first mastered for CD, digital mastering for CD was still a fairly new concept and so the mastering work done on those CDs (the ones CD fans now have!) Beatles!) is notoriously poor.
In the years since, the art of digital mastering has improved a lot (although there has been a problem with overcompression in recent years, but “loudness wars” are too big a topic to go into here).
Over the course of four years, all of The Beatles’ albums were remastered for CD from the original analog source. This was a painstaking process to get the sound of the albums perfect.
So what that means for listeners is that a new clarity and new detail can be heard. In some cases, there may be parts of songs that have been buried that are now “unearthed” so that we can hear them properly for the first time.
mono mixes
The Mono Box Set would be interesting to Beatles fans even if it wasn’t for the remastered look (but yes, these mixes have also been remastered for superior sound) because this is the first time everyone’s original monos have been mixed together. The Beatles albums. (at least the 10 Beatles albums that were ever mixed in mono in the first place) have been released on CD.
These original mono mixes represent the music as it was originally intended to be heard in the 1960s. And it’s not simply a case of “purity” that should make one curious to listen to these mixes because many claim that mono mixes actually they sound better than stereo mixes in many cases. The most famous example of this is John Lennon’s insistence that the mono mix of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was superior to the stereo mix.
I can’t say for myself that mono mixes are any better because, like most of the younger fans who grew up with CD mixes, I’ve never heard of them! That’s why I’m so excited to finally hear them.