The Beatles Remasters: Mono or Stereo

^ I really think you'll enjoy it. 

Edited by JLocke - March 01 2010 at 23:27

Let's give the mono a listen. After all, when we grew up with these guys in the 60's we didn't give a hoot about stereo

^ I thank you. I now know how to irresponsibly spend 200 euros when I have them

JLocke's review here: http://www.progarchives.com/Review.asp?id=269037

Probably the best product review I've ever read on PA (where reviews usually focus on the music).

^^that's interesting and then some.

I have heard the White Album

ufff powerful remaster in stereo sounds great to me.

BTW in Helter Skelter did you hear a a sound of a baby toy in 1:32 1:33 and then Paul laugh

amazing


Edited by Alberto Muñoz - October 03 2009 at 23:18

p0mt3 wrote: Padraic wrote: mystic fred wrote: Padraic wrote: Negoba wrote: I heard some limiting was done, which makes me nervous....   I think I read somewhere (please don't quote me ), that at least on the mono version, absolutely no limiting was done.  May also be true for the stereo version, but I don't know for sure.     putting  24bit remasters on 16bit CD's must  involve some limiting   It doesn't. Well, it doesn't NEED limiting, but I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that they did use some limiting on the stereo releases to created the illusion of 'fullness' to compensate for the lower bit rate. I could be crazy, though. Who knows.

Well I wouldn't be surprised if limiting was used to make it more palatable to today's audience anyway.
Technically, you wouldn't even have to do any mastering on a release if felt you preferred it that way.
The Iron Maiden album "A Matter of Life and Death" is completely unmastered, just for an example. Not a wise idea to leave it unmastered IMHO, but ah well, not me calling the shots.
The limiting aspect of mastering is quite useful in heavy metal and generally anything with high gain guitars (so even some instances of pop rock).
Contrary to popular belief this isn't done purely so it keeps in with the loudness wars, but because it pushes the mix engineers to get everything done as good as possible since the more limiting you use the harder it is to pull off a great mix.
Limiting (when applied correctly) also hopes reduce harsh transients from overheads and kick drums too, which is important in metal and stuff that is all about super clarity.
Of course in metal generally it isn't the most dynamic kind of music so it's not so much of a bad thing to limit it in the mastering phase pretty hard.
The Beatles on the other hand is probably not something which would be benefit from having the sh*t limited out of it, and even though I haven't heard the remastered I imagine they haven't been smashed.

Does limiting add fullness? I really don't think it does and if it does it's minimal at best.
Getting the fullness is all about getting it from where it really matters, the tracking and mixing phase (production), not mastering (post production).
Occasionally I will have obtained leaked albums and sometimes they are in fact totally unmastered.
I'll end up comparing them to the legit mastered copy later on and what I find is turning the volume up on the unmastered copy to match that of the mastered copy doesn't seem to yield a massive difference. The unmastered copy can still sound pretty punchy if the tracking and mixing phase were done right.
There might be a bit of mastering phase EQ, stereo image widening etc, but otherwise I don't find a great difference between the unmastered and mastered copies as I said.

this is what George Paul and Ringo had to say about mono - stereo..

I just listened to Helter Skelter mono and it has some squeekes and bleeps in it plus it doesn't fade-out and then come back. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this mix included in the Beatles Rarites LP? Ages sinces I heard that album.

Well, I'm now listening to the White Album mono which I've never heard, so far not too much noticable differences between the 2 mixes. Don't Pass Me By sounds a bit faster. There's a different coda ending with the fiddle though.