Beatles Remasters on Vinyl (part6)

My Box arrived yesterday from Amazon UK.No complaints about the Box and presentation BUT 5 lps were warped to hell...Amazon were very good today and I should receive a new box tomorrow plus they have arranged a courier to collect the defective box..Hard Days Night was the worst warped..Rubber Soul,Yellow Submarine,Please Please Me,Revolver were nowhere near flat !! Please check your LPs if you have bought from Amazon UK..There are a few reviewers on Amazon Uk who have had a similar problem.Hope this is not a Warped Run ..Fingers crossed for a Mint set tomorrow?

 

I own most of those, and have needle dropped a few of them.

Here's the weird thing about those Doors LP's -- there IS a hard line at ~21khz, so if someone told me that they were 24/44.1, it wouldn't surprise me at all. But these Beatles LP's don't look like that. I simply cannot explain it.

EDIT: On the other hand however, I'm not going to labor over it. I wish I understood what was going on because assuming that the Abbey Road engineers officially state 24/44.1 outside of this forum (have they yet?) then I just cannot judge 44khz sourced LP's from Spek anymore. But if that's the case, I'll just move on. It was, in the end, only a tool and my ears trumped everything else.

 

Almost every LP in my set was warped, some not playable, not a good start. Amazon shipping a new one now. I'll cherry pick before I send one back and hopefully get a complete set.

I spot-checked for sound.. this may take some getting used to. Definitely a different presentation than the gazillion other versions of these I have.

 

Picked up SPLHCB, Yellow Submarine (yes, I'm that guy), Revolver, Magical Mystery Tour and the "White Album" today.

I'm spinning Yellow Submarine right now, liking the sound quite a bit.

Most of all, it was just nice to pick up sealed copies of these. Something's right with the world again.

 

I totally agree. I have a nice BC-13 set and just finished Sgt. Pepper and it was great. Dead quiet. Only got Pepper, MMT, PM for now. No complaints at all.

 

I've been busy but I support you 100%. Anyone who thinks these sound good just lacks experience with early pressings.

I will say one positive thing: If you don't have originals these are decent for $24.

 

I'm sorry, did I miss something? What's this about 44.1k???

I thought the press release said they were creating new vinyl masters using the raw 24 bit 96k transfers as their starting point.

The 2009 CD masters with would have been mastered at 24/96 before being bounced down to 16bit 44.1k, as with the 24/44.1 FLAC files (I'm guessing they went with 44.1k as the sample rate because it's the easiest to playback on most peoples media players without having to tinker). So since they are creating new masters with less limiting, would be weird to down convert them to 44.1k and then transfer them to analogue when they don't need to. Just a lot of extra work for a lesser result .

The highest sample rate Pro Tools could work with as of 2009 was 24bit/192k.

There is a lot of debate on whether there is a lot of audible difference between 192k and 96k. But I can tell (IMHO as an audio engineer of 15 years) definitely an audible difference between 96k and 44.1k. Some engineers even prefer 88.2k, because they say it folds down better into 44.1k.

I've transferred plenty of 2" tape sessions to 96k myself and the captures have been pretty accurate when I A-B'd them. So I trust them when they say they stuck with 96k. I'm also sure they would have used the same Pro Tools session templates so they didn't need to repeat the same repairs (makes sense), but they have stated (and I believe them) that they didn't use the same limiting as on the CD's. They couldn't even if they wanted to, as vinyl doesn't have the same headroom as CD.

In short, if your losing sleep over Abbey Road working in 44.1k - DON'T.

 

and I was beat up LONG before that and left the discussion

 

Mine is an individual U.S. LP too. I thought it sounded like a horrible record from the dollar bin. It looks thrashed like one too. Side one seems to sound worse than side two -- at least what I could tollerate listening too.

I also bought the following:

Revolver
Sgt.Pepper
Magical Mystery Tour
Past Masters

 

Individually. U.S. pressing.

 

Yes. It is confirmed that the new vinyl is cut from 24/44.1k

 

Well, Thurenity posted samples that were 24/96 and they sounded a lot better than the digital versions (both the CD and USB).

 

I Already listened to Revolver and I thought it was decent sounding, the vinyl was flawless (some of the best i've seen recently) and flat. But Pepper is kinda blowing my mind, at least side one is, so far. I don't even have to put my Mofi or 2 box on to know that this is by far the best version I own.
I am also using a modest system (Rega p3, Marantz, Audioquest) but this record represents the best $23 I've spent in a while.

 

Could just be a bad batch that showed up in our general area, I don't know. I have the foresight to NOT exchange my AR with another AR, as I afraid it could have been more than the one-off bad pressing. If there's a lot of them, I assume that we'll hear about it in the next week or so.

As I get more of these LPs, I'm going to stick with 24/96. Storage is cheap and even if this is just distortion, it could still be a better idea to record at 96 vs 44.1 or 48k. I transcode to 48k AAC 320kps anyway for my on-the-go copies.

 

Starting to believe I'll make it fine through life without ordering this set. Maybe the mono will be better overall.

 

heres the Michael Fremer interview with Sean Magee http://www.analogplanet.com/content...an-magee-talks-about-mastering-beatles-lp-box

 

Yeah, I'm hoping that J&R will offer me a refund as it seems we're both experiencing the same issue. I's too bad, because side two sounds pretty good so far.

Anyone else have a defective Abbey Road U.S. individual side one?

 

Beautifully put!!

 

Sean Magee, who's an Abbey Road engineer, posts here as "third" and confirmed that these are uncompressed 44.1. At least, we think it's Sean.

But then there's Thurenity's spectrograms, which truly seem to indicate 96.

Here's an interview with Sean, by the way. http://www.examiner.com/article/int...ineer-says-vinyl-set-closer-to-original-sound

 

I take this back. As it gets into the more rocking tracks it becomes evident that something still isn't quite right. Hard to "get lost" in this. Noise and distortion galore on side two too.

 

People! When shortening the name of SPLHCB the correct spelling is Sgt. Pepper, and not Sgt. Peppers which make no sense. Sorry, been bugging me.

 

Hallelujah!!!!!!!!

Finally - what Sean said & can we put it to bed now!
Fremer says--
I spoke today with Sean Magee about the just released Beatles LP box set. Magee's resume is impressive. He's cut both lacquers and DMM and does a great deal of AAA cutting for Pure Pleasure among other labels. Magee produced the lacquers from which the LPs were sourced. The first interesting thing I learned was that the lacquers were cut from 44.1k/24 bit masters not 96K/24 bit masters as I'd originally been told.

 

I'm hoping some audio snob dumps some of these seperately so I can pick them up.

I'm interested to see how Beatles for Sale sounds.

 

[/quote="paulisdead, post: 8241368, member: 3081"]I'm sorry, did I miss something? What's this about 44.1k???

I thought the press release said they were creating new vinyl masters using the raw 24 bit 96k transfers as their starting point.

The 2009 CD masters with would have been mastered at 24/96 before being bounced down to 16bit 44.1k, as with the 24/44.1 FLAC files (I'm guessing they went with 44.1k as the sample rate because it's the easiest to playback on most peoples media players without having to tinker). So since they are creating new masters with less limiting, would be weird to down convert them to 44.1k and then transfer them to analogue when they don't need to. Just a lot of extra work for a lesser result .[/quote]
The 2009 re-issue was mastered at 24/44.1k. That was publicly revealed by the Abbey Road team back in 2009.

The vinyl re-issue uses the 2009 master (pre-limited). It says so right on the album - I saw a stack of them at JB Hi Fi and each one has a sticker stating that is is form the 2009 master (except H! and RS, in which case the sticker says that they are from the 1987 CD master). So why would anyone expect that these are 96k?

Its good that Sean has been on the forum and shared what actually happened (thanks Sean) but the press release back in October said that they were using the 2009 master, the label says it as well - sheesh, we would all love a higher sample rate (and analog is the highest sample rate) but I don't really understand why anyone was actually expecting anything but 44.1kHz. The truth is (and always was) out there.

 

Has someone confirmed that Third is Sean Magee?