There has just been a reissue series of the Kinks Muswell Hillbillies on up through Word Of Mouth on 180 gram vinyl (and the older albums were already reissued on heavy weight vinyl).
Posted on 04/07/2009 11:04:43 AM PDT by a fool in paradise
On September 9, 2009, after a nearly 22-year wait, digitally remastered versions of all of the Beatles studio albums will be released, a press release has confirmed. Each album will feature the track listings and artwork as it was originally released in the U.K. and come with expanded booklets including original and newly written liner notes and rare photos. For a limited time, each of the Fab Four’s 12 proper albums will be “embedded” with a brief documentary about its making. The rereleases will include the Beatles’ 12 studio albums and Magical Mystery Tour as well as Past Masters Vol. I and II, which will be packaged as one collection. All 14 discs will be available with DVDs of the documentaries in a stereo box set, and a set titled The Beatles in Mono featuring 10 discs will also be released.
A crew of engineers at London’s Abbey Road Studios have spent four years working on the remasters using new technology and vintage equipment, the press release says, in an effort to preserve “the authenticity and integrity of the original analogue recordings” and ensure “the highest fidelity the catalog has seen since its original release.”
9/9/09 promises to be a huge day in Beatles lore, as it’s the same day The Beatles: Rock Band will hit stores. This weekend brought a bit of Beatles news, too, as Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr reunited onstage at a New York benefit for David Lynch’s Transcendental Meditation foundation (see photos here). Preorders for the remasters are already popping up on Amazon.co.uk. Demand for Beatles remasters has steadily increased since 1987, when Capitol/EMI first released the Beatles’ discography on CD with what many audiophile fans deemed substandard sound quality compared to the original vinyl.
While it seems like other artists remaster their entire catalog every several years, Capitol/EMI have barely touched the Beatles’ discography since 1987, with the exception of 2004’s The Capitol Albums, Vol. 1 box set, which compiled and remastered the band’s first four American releases in stereo and mono formats. The soundtrack for the Beatles’ Love show also gave listeners a brief tease of how fantastic the band’s songs would sound if properly remastered.
The Beatles in Mono will include the 10 albums originally mixed for mono release, as well as two additional discs the press release says features similar songs to those on the Past Masters compilations. The mono versions of Help! and Rubber Soul will boast bonuses: the albums’ original 1965 stereo mixes, which have not been previously released on CD, per the press release. The mono collection, like the stereo one, will include all original inserts and label designs, and the CDs are designed as tiny vinyl replicas.
The press release didn’t include news regarding a possible deal with iTunes or another digital-music vendor to distribute the catalog digitally: “Discussions regarding the digital distribution of the catalog will continue. There is no further information available at this time,” the press release reads. Both Apple Corps. and Paul McCartney have expressed reluctance to release the Beatles’ music digitally until all the albums had been remastered. The solo work of each of the four Beatles is available on iTunes.
The Beatles Remasters:
Please Please Me With the Beatles A Hard Day’s Night Beatles for Sale Help! Rubber Soul Revolver Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Magical Mystery Tour The Beatles (The White Album) Abbey Road Let It Be Past Masters Yellow Submarine
Great marketing potential... “#9, #9, #9” ... LOL...
I’ve been wanting to pick up the entire Beatles catalog for a long time. In one set, if I could. This seems the right time and effort for what I want, at any rate.
But let’s say they are “milking” their catalog. Well, why not? There’s a new wave of Beatles fans with every generation. If they didn’t work on the recordings to get the best from them, folks would kvetch about why they just regurgitate the same old material without using the newest technololgy to get the most out of those old recordings.
If any group has the time and resources to remaster their material, more power to them. Just so long as the remasters are true to the recordings that made them popular in the first place. It would suck, for example, to have some new guitar whiz anonymously re-record a guitar lick, the studios then try to hide it, and have a die-hard fan catch it.
...But for the Ultra Rare Trax bootleg: how did they get the bootleg tracks to sound better than the label released ones? How do they determine the standard for “better?”
There has just been a reissue series of the Kinks Muswell Hillbillies on up through Word Of Mouth on 180 gram vinyl (and the older albums were already reissued on heavy weight vinyl).
If you listen to the outtakes (they didn’t bootleg released versions of songs, they are alternate takes with some studio chatter) your ears will tell you they are better than the CDs Capitol put out in the 1980s.
Agreed the cuts taken from accetate do not hold up to that standard but the other ones sound like you are in the studio. They are that clear.
There are suspicions about how these tapes got out (someone probably made DAT copies in the 1980s) and some people suspected the author who went through all of the tapes to write a book covering every Beatles studio session.
i will stick with dr. ebbetts’ releases. besides, i’ve probably got at least five versions/copies of each album they put out. plus at least 250 discs worth of boots. and they’re not even my favorite.
There's hundreds of fans out in Beatlesland compiling and remastering the thousands of released and unreleased Beatles recordings available. Dr. Ebbetts and Purple Chick are only two that come to mind. As far as who determines what sounds better, it's a matter of taste, I suppose.
TA (interviewer): In a way you were even thinking about politics when you seemed to be knocking revolution?
JL (Lennon): Ah, sure, 'Revolution' . There were two versions of that song but the underground left only picked up on the one that said 'count me out'. The original version which ends up on the LP said 'count me in' too; I put in both because I wasn't sure. There was a third version that was just abstract, musique concrete, kind of loops and that, people screaming. I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution--but I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution.
On the version released as a single I said 'when you talk about destruction you can count me out'. I didn't want to get killed. I didn't really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few and yet they painted themselves green and stood in front of the police waiting to get picked off. I just thought it was unsubtle, you know. I thought the original Communist revolutionaries coordinated themselves a bit better and didn't go around shouting about it. That was how I felt--I was really asking a question. As someone from the working class I was always interested in Russia and China and everything that related to the working class, even though I was playing the capitalist game.
Good news IF quality re-mastering was done and noise reduction was NOT used - always a killer of the sonic quality. Eager to see the names involved in re-mastering - the ‘87 re-masters are horrible. Can’t wait to compare to my CDR’s burned direct from the master tapes...
There were even Beatles bootlegs that stole the content from those Ultra Rare Trax. And the Ultra Rare Trax name got recycled for other artists’ bootleg CDs and other volumes of Beatlegs. But there is no evidence to tie them to the originals.
I don’t even know if the claim that it is “The Trademark of Quality” Pig really is associated with the famed bootleg label of the 1960s and 1970s. The 1980s also saw CDs from Pig records Swinging Pig and other variant bootlegger names.
There is no honor among theives.
In the 1960s or 1970s, there was one bootlegger (as chronicled in the book Bootleg, The Other Music Industry) who got someone who had some rare recordings to play them through for him twice, start to finish, in his listening room (outfitted with hidden microphones) and then he released his record from those copied recordings.
I always thought they had a pro-individual / libertarian bent. See: "Tax Man", "Revolution".
Tax-Man, yes. They went offshore to make Help to evade some tax requirements by being out of England a sufficient length of time.
By the time of Revolution, they’d “come around” politically.
A few years back the ABKO stones albums were re-released as Super Audio CDs. If you have a SACD player, they sound fantastic - as good or better than vinyl. But yes, a CD remaster would be more relevant.
Ping to post 28.
Come around politically?? Please read the following carefully.
The Lost John Lennon Interview
"Power to the People"
TA (interviewer): In a way you were even thinking about politics when you seemed to be knocking revolution?
JL (Lennon): Ah, sure, 'Revolution' . There were two versions of that song but the underground left only picked up on the one that said 'count me out'. The original version which ends up on the LP said 'count me in' too; I put in both because I wasn't sure. There was a third version that was just abstract, musique concrete, kind of loops and that, people screaming. I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution--but I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution.
On the version released as a single I said 'when you talk about destruction you can count me out'. I didn't want to get killed. I didn't really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few and yet they painted themselves green and stood in front of the police waiting to get picked off. I just thought it was unsubtle, you know. I thought the original Communist revolutionaries coordinated themselves a bit better and didn't go around shouting about it. That was how I felt--I was really asking a question. As someone from the working class I was always interested in Russia and China and everything that related to the working class, even though I was playing the capitalist game.
All that song and dance about being “revolutionaries” and “power to the people” and “the evils of wealth.” The Beatles’ estates are worth approximately $ 1.5B each. So, of course, they must re-issue their moldy old songs to make even more money. Disgusting hypocrites.
At least with the Anthology series, Pete Best FINALLY got an ever so slim cut of Beatles royalties.
I didn’t say John Lennon wised up. I said that he came around to the “Peoples’” politics.
Drugs and gurus and stalking art chicks will do that to you.
In other words, they promoted communism.
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