I know, I know.. the vinyls sound so much better than ANY of the cds released to date.
Hey, even Macca agrees with my stance (re. stereo vs mono).. here's a recent interview with him, talking mainly about the Rock Band Beatles game but they ask him what he thinks about the remastered series -
http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200908/N09.0818.1727.50056.htm?Page=2PM: It's nearer to the actual sound in the room when we made the record. It actually sounds like John is there singing, and I can see the mic, and I can relive the experience. So can fans, is the main thing. When people say, “It was originally made in mono, you should have kept it like that,” I say, “well go buy the mono, it's still available, you can buy it if that's what you want.”
It's got me very excited. Paul is saying in the interview that he actually feels like he is at the session when he hears these new remasters, and that when it was remastered for cd first time 'round, the main objective was to 'get rid of the hiss' but the technology also stripped away much of the character of the recordings.
And I read the Uncut review on the internet where they talk about the 'loudness' and it seems that the recordings sound fine - not too loud - they actually did a brilliant job. -
http://www.uncut.co.uk/news/the_beatles/news/13552The key word is clarity. Not loudness. Clarity. The voices and instruments are crystal clear, pure, human, natural (except, of course, when filtered through psychedelic effects) and stripped of several decades’ worth of detritus and dust. It’s as if we’ve been visiting an art gallery to gaze in wonder at a masterpiece all these years, and then suddenly an attendant comes along with a sponge and wipes the painting from top to bottom. The techniques of mastering have been controversial in recent years, with accusations (and proof, indeed) that music is being ‘brickwalled’: compressed to headache-inducing levels in order to give albums an ersatz loudness. Had these CDs come out in 1999 or 2000, as many of us were hollering for them to do, it’s likely they would now need remastering again.
It’s a weird thing to say, but Apple’s frustrating procrastination has turned out to be a lifesaver for these albums. Remastered by a small team of Abbey Road engineers over a four-year period, the CDs have not been brickwalled or over-compressed (unlike the 2000 compilation 1, which sounds unpleasantly ‘glassy’ in comparison), and nor do they even sound particularly loud (unless you turn them up). The two that have been restored to the point of miraculousness and beyond, The White Album and Abbey Road, are the ones I’d recommend first to people on limited budgets. Abbey Road’s Long Medley is simply a breathtaking musical tapestry. When it has to rock, it rocks. When it needs to be subtle (there is much more to the transition between “You Never Give Your Money” and “Sun King” than we previously thought), it has a warm, heavenly glow.
Of course, one could argue that any old rubbish would sound impressive on Abbey Road’s state-of-the-art, quintessentially expensive speakers. Perhaps we should all calm down a bit, chum. Will your so-called ‘clarity’ be detectable on a normal, high-street CD player, or on an iPod? It should, and it will. It’s not a question of surreptitious noise removal, or peak elimination, or making Magical Mystery Tour sound like Metallica (thank God). Think of it more as a spring-clean for the music and the mind. Changes in texture, atmosphere, the relationship of The Beatles’ voices to the microphone: all of these are evident and undeniable. As a result, almost every album comes as a shock. They haven’t had plastic surgery. They’ve taken their masks off, and we didn’t even know they were wearing one.
This is what we've been waiting for! Simply cannot wait!
