Do You Agree With George Martin On Re-Mixing Analogue Recordings for Digital Audio?

I think the Peppers album is one of the nicest most organic sounding recordings I have ever heard, far as the sound of the various instruments being captured. Especially the bass.
The White Album, not so much. I think that entire album could have been better. But it still stands on its' own. Where it shines it really shines.

 

Okay will agree with that. White album, is very inconsistent to me, a bit muffled, here and there. Just a mild mess sonically. Some is really good, some not so good.

Peppers, not bad for sure, but more a great production to me. ugh you are gonna make me listen to both now....!! LOL

 

I always thought the White album had rather drab production.
In fact, I have always thought that it was a very disjointed album, as if it was a collection of songs recorded at various times with a different mindset than being part of a particular project.
But now that I think of it, perhaps it is because the production is so inconsistent, and the songs are sonically all different from each other.
As opposed to Sgt Peppers, Revolver, or Abbey Road, all if which the songs on sound like they belong on the same recording, as if they were all mixed on the same console in the same room back to back on the same day.

I may have to change my mind about this. Perhaps it would be cool of Mr McCartney did "The White Album Naked".

 

Mileage. I've never thought the Beatles catalog - apart from Rubber Soul and Abbey Road (god bless you, Alan Parsons) - sounded very good, even for the time at which most of it was recorded. The Beatles seems decidedly lo-fi for the most part, although the somewhat stripped back production (compared to its immediate predecessor) helps to keep it sounding pretty neutral and clean. Let It Be is all over the place - some tracks are alright to borderline great ("Two Of Us"), others a muddy mess ("Across The Universe", "I Me Mine"). In the end I do like the "old" sound of the record, but it ain't exactly hi-fi.

It's hard to believe a record like Dark Side Of The Moon was cut just a couple of years after The Beatles folded. Sonically it sounds like a decade separates it from Let It Be.

 

I can't say I would call anything in the Beatles catalog lo-fi.
Tommy was quite an impressive recording feat too. I consider Abbey Road, Tommy, and Dark Side to be the three biggies as far as amazing recordings go.
Technology was moving very fast at the time, huge leaps were made quickly just on the basis of one invention at a time.
Although I can't show any sources for this, if I remember right at the time tape manufacturers were experimenting and coming up with superior tape formulas to match the growing technologies. It was an industry in which various corporations who were inventing and marketing the goods were all working in tandem with each other rather than just taking part in good old cutthroat competition.

 

Isn't that around the time Dolby NR came into the picture?

(Yup, Dolby B was introduced in '66 - I'd imagine it took a few years to become common in the studio...)

 

You also have to remember that the UK was always years behind the US in audio tech advancement.

There's no way anybody in London had access to Dolby NR before the early 70's...

 

By 1969 Dolby made it across the pond, but I don't think Abbey Road had it right away.
I suspect most of the time the UK was months behind in technology, not years.

 

Didn't Olympic Studios get it by 1970? The professional Dolby units for studio use were made in England I think...

 

i think that is the definition of mastering and the principle under which it occurs across different media. In terms of mixing... that is the principle under which George Martin was operating in his 1987 remixes and he is expressing here the difficulty of doing so... that ultimately they won't sound the same with different types of equipment. Of course.. if one were to spend a year or two or three with the objective being to make them sound the same.. then that would mean you're operating under different principles!!!

 

Why do the Beatles need to be remixed . I hated that Love compilation , I took it back.

 

That's why I think there should be no new stereo or mono mixes... they are all in print now and have been excellently presented on CD and vinyl. The next thing should be surround because indeed we were on the verge of surround in the era of the Beatles breakup. QUAD was on the boards for years before its failed rollout occurred. Now we have Dolby Digital and DTS and readily available formats and standards and one can get a decent surround receiver at best buy at a variety of price points and speaker setups too. So let the remixes be the surround mixes. They can be mere ambient replicas of the recordings in the studio 2 acoustics like Love Me Do and She Loves You to slightly spread out mixes based on the submixes of the Revolver/Pepper era to the 8 track mixes of Let It Be/Abbey Road. No need to get mixed up with the NEW stereo mixes or multiple editions of the same technology. Just the Beatles in Mono, The Beatles Stereo Box, and The Beatles in Surround.

 

The Beatles should be remixed because the principles upon which the original mixes were based were too wedded to the limits of technology commonly available to pop and rock fans in their day. If the original Beatles mixes had been high quality uses of recording technology of the early 60s Hi-Fi era.. one could argue that these historic mixes shouldn't be fussed with. But these are not Living Stereo state of the art productions with great attention lavished on them by the engineering departments of the golden age of Hi Fi. These are relatively primitive recordings of a rock band whose access to the expanded bandwidth that such a band should have enjoyed was restricted by limitations in recording and reproductive technology(and limited access to the available technology by the companies they recorded for) which no longer exist. The Beatles music should be tastefully remixed to the extent possible to give them a less limited soundstage more representative of the music they were actually playing. While you may have rejected the LOVE soundtrack... the fact is that the reproductions of Revolution, Back in the USSR, and a few other songs were a lifting of the screen on those performances. Also... the Yellow Submarine Songtrack remixes lifted the screen on songs like It's All Too Much and Only a Northern Song. While it is important to retain the subtle ambiences that exist in the mixes we have already been presented with.. and it is important not to misuse the nature of surround to create bizarre "fake surround" constructions... some of what we have heard like the 5.1 remixes of Penny Lane and Paperback Writer, and the recent Help and Hard Day's Night Blu-Ray reissues are what should be the model for how the entire Beatles catalogue should be presented in surround.

Let the current reissues of the MONO and STEREO be the definitive remasters(though perhaps there might be an improvement in the digital MONOS & STEREOS along the lines of the recent analogue sourced MONO vinyl reissues) and then let there be a 7.2 remix from a DSD master created with the same care paid to the MONO vinyl and then you have Beatles in MONO... Beatles Stereo... Beatles Surround.

 

"Organic" isn't the word that pops into my head when I'm listening to Pepper's....sometimes it sounds quite ''natural'' (Within You Without You), but most of the time it sounds phased (Lucy In The Sky), compressed (the horns on Good Morning Good Morning) or sped up (When I'm 64). Bit it's the sound we're (or I am) used to, including the bass which was added as the last element, so it's sounding nice and not compressed as much. I agree about the White Album; soundwise it's all over the place, which, in a strange way, makes sense.

A matter of taste, I think. I loved the sound on some of the tracks (especially Back In The USSR and Revolution), but I don't care too much about the mash-ups. I think many tracks could benefit from
a) lifting some of the compression that was used
b) re-arranging the quirky stereo-panning
c) more low-end in the bass and bass-drums.

 

... Hey... the case could be made that even in the 70s you had a decent environment for some stunning remixes of at least the later Beatles material considering the amazing equipment available in production studios AND to the music consumer in that era. Now that era has passed and we are entering what might be argued is a new AM radio dark ages precisely BECAUSE remixes like this aren't being done. ABKCO's relative failure with the Stones catalogue last decade meant that few other attempts have been made to explore and thus support the SACD and DVD audio remix in the music marketplace. Now people are using smartphones with cheap earbuds or blue tooth cylinders on a table. The Hi Fi era has come and gone and so there is a "use it or lose it" context that makes me wonder if NOT a Beatles surround remix NOW.. then WHEN?

 

George Martin after explaining his actions in 1986 in the interviews cited said later on that the Beatles mixes are a part of history and should just be reissued as they are. Later Giles Martin said that George Martin didn't even regard or particularly remember the remixes of 1986 and the EMI reissues of these remixes are based on the perception that they are regarded as definitive or necessary remixes. George Martin was trying to help out by doing what he saw at the time as corrective work to what were for years highly criticized Beatle mixes ... the weak and muddy HELP and the primitive stereo spread on Rubber Soul .. in the end he didn't think it was that important at all.

In the end... the original 65 mixes are now available digitally. Maybe if the STEREO box is redone the 86 mixes should be put to bed entirely and all the original mixes remastered from the original stereo and let's get on now with the Beatles surround sound masters. Only let's not get caught up in the 5.1's that have already been done.... start again with DSD remasters of the original master tapes with the same care as the MONO vinyl remasters and then do a new 7.2 remix for surround!

 

The reality is, the mono versions are the definitive '60s versions of most of their records, at least thru Sgt. Pepper's if not all the way thru The Beatles.

I personally think the '80s stereo remixes of Help and Rubber Soul are far, far superior to their '60s counterparts, which always sounded like what they were - an afterthought.

 

How do you take back a CD? (A moot question now anyway).

This is a question of taste so different opinions can't be proved or not. However, all the music on Beatles Love sounded much better to me than as originally released. The band sounds more real - perhaps more live - and you can appreciate their talent much more.

 

Same here. I liked the "non mashup" tracks on Love.

 

I think the problem is with their mixing. Listen to Helter Skelter from Anthology. Much more dynamic and presence than the White Album version. When Ringo hits that crash, it sounds like he's in the room with you. Yellow Sun Songtrack, Love, and LIB naked sound much better than their counterparts. Granted, they will never sound like DSOTM.

 

Me too but the value of the non-mash ups was to see how good remixing of the catalogue would sound. Even the mash-ups (which I still liked too) sound great for the parts of songs that are more or less integral to the original, e.g. What You're Doing.

 

Right, but that had things like foot stomps on Lady Madonna.

 

Liked it.

 

How or why would one ever "Take back" a recording.

Anywhere I have ever shopped, you could not return music recordings or movies unless it was defective and for another copy.

The idea was, one could buy it, record it and then return it, and have a free copy.........................so NO returns.

 

I made a mistake in this post. It was Help! and not A Hard Day's Night that was remixed in 1987. I always get those two mixed up as they're both film soundtrack albums. It was the original mix of Help! that was sent to me to listen to, as well as Rubber Soul and not A Hard Day's Night.