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9-9-9

On September 9, new remastered versions of The Beatles albums will be released both individually and as part of stereo and mono sets (only stereo mixes are released individually, mono mixes are only available as part of the mono set.)

What does remastered mean?

I won’t go into the technical details (as it is more of interest to those who record and produce music) than to explain what it means from a listener’s point of view.

Mastering is the last step in the process of creating an album. In 1987, when Beatles albums were initially mastered for CDs, digital mastering for compact discs was still a fairly new concept and because of that, the mastering work done on these CDs (the ones that Beatles fans now own) !) Is notoriously poor.

In the years that followed, the art of digital mastering improved dramatically (although in recent years there has been a problem with over-compression, but the “volume war” is too big a topic to discuss. here.)

In four years, all of The Beatles’ albums were remastered for CD from the original analog source. It was a painstaking process to get the albums sounded just right.

So what this means for listeners is that new clarity and new details can be heard. In some cases there may be parts of the songs that were buried that are now “dug up” so that we can actually listen to them for the first time.

Mono mixtures

The Mono Box Set would be interesting for Beatles fans even if it weren’t for the remastered aspect (but yes, these mixes have also been remastered for superior sound) as this is the first time that the original mono mixes of all the Beatles albums (at least the 10 Beatles albums that were never mixed to mono initially) have been released on CD.

These original mono mixes represent music as it was originally intended to be heard in the 1960s. And it is not just a case of “purity” that should make one curious to hear these mixes as many claim. that mono mixes sound better than stereo mixes in many cases. The most famous example of this is John Lennon’s insistence that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was superior to stereo mixing.

I can’t say for myself that mono mixes are better because like most young fans who grew up with CD mixes, I’ve never heard them! That’s why I’m so excited to finally hear them.

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Source by Jackson Weinheimer