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Beatles Remasters


Zint

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I really dont got the money for this shit. Besides which i have all the beatles albums and...well...all this mono stereo sound quality shit don't mean squat to me, i mean its not like the original albums were recorded in a phonebooth of something. I'm not sure what the idea of having the same album in 7 different versions and 3 different formats is.

I'm a HUGE Beatles fan too with a horrifying encyclopedic knowledge of them, their albums, their lives...all of that. But this i don't see the point of. Or perhaps i don't see the point cuz i don't have the money :lol:

Edited by dirtylenny
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I only have 1 and Love, so I guess it makes sense for me to get this package, when I'd be spending the same amount getting the normal albums, as they're £15 everywhere I go. Plus the DVDs will be worth a watch (He says hopefully).

Edited by Marky
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I really dont got the money for this shit. Besides which i have all the beatles albums and...well...all this mono stereo sound quality shit don't mean squat to me, i mean its not like the original albums were recorded in a phonebooth of something. I'm not sure what the idea of having the same album in 7 different versions and 3 different formats is.

I'm a HUGE Beatles fan too with a horrifying encyclopedic knowledge of them, their albums, their lives...all of that. But this i don't see the point of. Or perhaps i don't see the point cuz i don't have the money :lol:

Maybe this article will shed some light on it for you lenny...especially the importance of the mono releases. :)

................................................................................

....................................

Alexis Petridis

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 September 2009 15.57 BST

The Beatles in mono ... 'they sound taut, vital and surprisingly brutal'.

Something strange happened to the public perception of the Beatles in the 90s. Britpop's open worship finally elevated them to an utterly unimpeachable position – it's impossible to imagine any artist today daring to be photographed defacing a Beatles sleeve, as Johnny Rotten once was – but it promoted a foreshortened version of the Fab Four, one whose career begins with Rubber Soul, or at a push, 1965's Help! These days, their first four albums are invariably vastly outsold by those that came later, when drugs and sitars and the fear of encountering an unexpected vocal contribution from Yoko Ono had caused their more conservative fans to flee: "The Beatles have got awfully strange these days," as famous Windsor-based rock critic Queen Elizabeth II is alleged to have protested in 1967. As a result, the Beatles enjoyed by HRH – mop-topped and besuited, packaged for family consumption – appear to have ended up tainted by a certain naffness in modern eyes.

But at the time, they were clearly anything but. They may be more sophisticated, varied and vastly more influential on current music, but The White Album and Revolver didn't change the world in the way Please Please Me and With the Beatles did. If you believe the late Ian MacDonald's peerless book Revolution in the Head, the latter albums signalled a social change "away from the old class-based order of deference to 'elders and betters' to the frank and fearless energy of the younger generation". Set against that, inspiring Be Here Now and Beetlebum seems pretty small beer.

Nevertheless, if you weren't around in 1963, it's sometimes been difficult to work out precisely why the music contained on the early Beatles albums had such impact. If you grew up in the 70s or later, you invariably heard them in that terrible early-60s brand of stereo, with the instruments bunged in one speaker and the vocals in the other, as if a blustery old man with a bowler hat had covertly crept into Abbey Road and attempted to sabotage the coming youth revolution by making its harbingers seem as pathetic as possible. The 1987 Beatles CDs restored the first four albums to mono, but they still sounded brittle and tinny, as if they'd have difficulty changing a lightbulb, let alone the social order of Britain.

This may be where The Beatles in Mono comes into its own. At first glance, it looks an extravagant frippery: a £240 11-CD box set, featuring perfect miniature reproductions of albums pristinely remastered in a sonic format rendered obsolete almost half a century ago. But until 1969, the Beatles were disinterested in stereo: they oversaw the mono mixes of their albums, then left the rest to George Martin.The mono box set can thus proudly claim to offer "the closest you can get to hearing the authentic sound of the Beatles". On the later albums, that amounts to a handful of cosmetic differences: if it's striking to hear Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds with added psychedelic phasing effects, it doesn't radically alter your perception of the song. The early albums, however, are transformed.

The Beatles sound taut, vital and surprisingly brutal. Plenty of 60s British bands covered material by black US artists: they tended to bowdlerise it, but the Beatles made it more visceral. There's something authentically deranged about their covers of Twist and Shout and Money. Smokey Robinson's fabulous You Really Got a Hold On Me has its emotional compass shifted from melancholy to torment, with electrifying results.

If their debut suffers from a deficit of great original material, that only makes the subsequent qualitative leaps all the more astonishing. Within a matter of months, they had gone from the schmaltz of PS I Love You and Ask Me Why to the accomplishment and forcefulness of With the Beatles' There's a Place and Not a Second Time. Equally striking is how early and strongly the Beatles' respective personalities foregrounded themselves. The kind of anguish that was Lennon's stock-in-trade from Help! through to I Want You (She's So Heavy) is evident from the start: literally his first lead vocal on a Beatles album is "the world is treating me bad – misery". With the Beatles' Don't Bother Me is the first in a long line of George Harrison songs in which people were advised to bugger off.

By the time of 1964's Beatles for Sale, they're confidently pushing at the boundaries of their chirpy image. It opens with No Reply, I'm a Loser and Baby's in Black: utterly downcast, emotionally raw. Listening to them here, they sound not like a relic from a forgotten era of the 60s, but as thrilling and daring as they must have once done blaring from a Dansette in a suburban bedroom. You'd have to have cloth ears not to understand what the fuss was about.

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Just found out that A Hard Day's Night is being released on blu-ray on 9-9-9 as well.

Whats 999?

09-09-09

Super Tuesday...errr make that Wednesday

(the second coming of Christ and all that..) :tongue2:

Edited by zint61
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Just found out that A Hard Day's Night is being released on blu-ray on 9-9-9 as well.

Apparantly the blu-ray release is in Canada only so far.

But if the stats are correct it's 1080i not 1080p...

So I'm holding out for a proper release.

Early reports however say the audio is a vast improvement over the dvd release.

Picture being only slightly better than the dvd (which was pretty damn good to begin with).

anyhoo..

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I hate you for creating this thread zint. I ordered the mono box set. :lol: Credit cards are dangerous, and lethal when combined with the Internet!

It's available at www.elusivedisc.com for those interested. I'm assuming the website reflects the fact that they still have pre-order stock, or maybe it's like ER said, more copies will be pressed. CD Universe is selling this for $651.45! :no: Elusive Disc has it for $230. Shipping may happen as late as Oct 15th. Apparently you get free shipping on your first order from them, international orders get the equivalent discount that a U.S. order would get. The discount doesn't seem to have been applied on my order. They charged me $30. That's decent. Maybe the discount is applied later on. I'll have to call them to find out.

Figured go with the mono and buy the three missing albums separately. Always intended to get into the Beatles, this seems like the chance to do so. Hopefully their early albums aren't all as dorky as some of the songs that are on them. This is my worry.

On a similar note, bought a bunch of Stones CDs over the years, and a few recently. I'm happy to say that for most of these albums, while half the tunes are unremarkable, the other half are fucking great. Expecting more of the same from The Beatles.

Edited by KBear
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It's available at www.elusivedisc.com for those interested. I'm assuming the website reflects the fact that they still have pre-order stock, or maybe it's like ER said, more copies will be pressed. CD Universe is selling this for $651.45! :no: Elusive Disc has it for $230. Shipping may happen as late as Oct 15th. Apparently you get free shipping on your first order from them, international orders get the equivalent discount that a U.S. order would get. The discount doesn't seem to have been applied on my order. They charged me $30. That's decent. Maybe the discount is applied later on. I'll have to call them to find out.

Cheers. I'll be ordering me a sweet mono set tomorrow.

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I was crazy enough to order the Led Zep SHM-CD box set from Japan. I think I paid about $400. Got the GN'R box set too, well it wasn't really a box set, just the CDs, but they came in a box. I need to stop buying shit I don't need for like the next five years.

Edited by KBear
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