DCC Archive mono beatles cd question for Steve and Board

So tell me, if the original parlophone mono pressings of the Beatles sound fantastic, why do the original cd mono releases put together by George Martin sound so bad? Is it that wonderful 16-bit 44Khz demon rearing its head? Or did something else happen?

 

I don't think they sound so bad, but talking about the stereo mixes, a lot of them sound better in the earlier period, argueably. PPM->AHDN still sounds good in mono. I hardly ever listen to them though in mono.

Mostly, from what we've talked about in the past, it's usually the albums in opposite format, stereo-mono, mono-stereo. We're a frisky bunch.

 

I have to agree with Sckott about AHDN in mono. The mono mix of I Should Have Known Better doesn't have that hiccup in the harmonica intro that the stereo mix has. Also, Paul's harmony vocal cuts out in If I Fell towards the end. It doesn't in the mono mix though you can hear him sounding strained.

However, Beatles For Sale needed to be in stereo. Like AHDN this was done in four-track. Beatles 1962/1966 has Eight Days A Week in stereo and sounds better IMO. BFS just sounds flat to me.

The reason for the argument for the early two-track tapes being in mono is that the vocals are at the left, instrumentation is at the right. Then when combining them to mono, the vocals can be mixed up or down. With I Want To Hold Your Hand (or also Money from With The Beatles) the Beatles went to Four-track recording.

 

Both of which are *easily* fixed by very small edits. I've done it myself...

Money wasn't a 4-track recording - still twin-track. They just did some crazy stuff when bouncing those two-tracks.

 

You guys are missing the point. I'm not talking about differences between DIFFERENT takes (mono vs stereo mixes). I'm talking about SONIC differences between THE SAME mono tapes on original parlophone pressings and their MONO cd brothers put together by George Martin. I don't think there is one person here who would say the cd's are equal to the original mono pressings. And my question is WHY? If Mr. Martin used the SAME mono tape that was used on the original pressings, what changed the sound do much? I once owned the cd of "Hard Day's night" in mono and IT WAS BAD. I MEAN HARSH, FORWARD, BAD SOUND. Oh, was the mofi stereo a relief. So what made is so bad? Early cd?

 

I don't think they were using the original tapes at all...LP production tapes, at best. Does anybody else hear, BTW, the marked improvement between the Please Please Me CD of PPME and the later occurence of the same mix on the Red Album? (it possibly might have been upgraded in the interim like SHe Loves You on either the Singles or EP collection, but...)

-D

 

I remember Steve saying that for most of the music, the original master tapes were used (see below for exceptions), but they all sound like dubs for numerous reasons. One, everything was recorded on a tube system, and all the original Parlophone Lp's are tube cuttings. However, for some reason, George Martin recalls everything being done on solid state consoles, even though that isn't possible. So, every CD, and many Lp pressings made before that, were mastered with a solid state console. Not just any solid state console, either, but supposedly the worst kind: the German ones Abbey Road got AFTER the Beatles stopped recording together. To steal an analogy from Steve, this is like putting a three-strip Technicolor movie on the crappy color stock Kodak made in the 70's.

(Just a sidenote here, Steve once talked about one instance when he and several other Beatlemaniacs came together to find the best sounding "Beatles For Sale" ever pressed. The winner was the original stereo Parlophone pressing. Part of the reason it sounded so good was that it was a tube cutting, maybe the only one, but my memory isn't that good.)

There are numerous other problems with the CD's as well. A few have alignment problems, aside from the compilations released in the last 8 or 9 years, NoNoise has been applied to a few spots like on parts of Abbey Road, and I think the mono CD's may have been played back on a stereo head rather than a full mono head (can anyone confirm this?). That last thing will cause a slight phasing every revolution of the tape reel.

There's of course the remixes on Help! and Rubber Soul, but that's old news.

Going back to the original tape question, as mentioned in the past, "Please Please Me" and "Love Me Do," and I think "P.S. I Love You" and "Ask Me Why," were mastered from the Lp master tape. These songs were originally released on 45's, and when time came to cut an album, they took the master tapes for the 45's, did some EQ work, drenched some reverb on them, all to match the sound of the other songs on the album, and spliced these new masters into the tape that was to be used for the Lp. Supposedly no one has touched the true, original 45 master tapes of these four songs in over 30 years.

Also, a copy was used for Sgt. Pepper when it was first put on CD because the original tape couldn't be found. They eventually did, but I'm not sure if the album was quietly remastered upon this discovery.

And just one more thing...the red and blue albums also use a lot of processing, so they don't sound as good as they could, either.

Steve always said the Beatles got the worst treatment on CD.

[ November 20, 2001: Message edited by: Camarillo ]

 

Should we put a FAQ on this website? Just wondering because the Beatles and Stones questions, among many others (like Who's Next, CCR, etc.) seems to come up every once in awhile.

 

Camarillo,
I'm into doing FAQ's...I keep one on Steve Hoffman. How would you want this on to be structured. Simply a list of the best versions of Stones, Beatles and Who CD's, LP's so that doesn't have to be asked...or should it be a Stereo versus Mono type thing.
Whether it is posted here on SteveHoffman.TV or my site, I think FAQ's are handy and I'm just offering to lend a hand.
Doug

 

I guess it would be nice just to cover all the bases, since just about everything comes up. Not just the best Lp pressings, but the best CD pressings, too, since some may not have, or ever will, a good turntable.

I've got print-outs on dozens of different posts somewhere. Other topics I've printed include the situation with Hotel California, CCR engineering, the Everly Brothers, the Ella Fitzgerald Songbooks, and lots of others.

I could send you some of this after Thanksgiving; it may take awhile, since there's quite a few posts I've saved, and it's pretty messy.

I could also Xerox everything and mail it to you; it would be a quick way of sending the information, but it will still have to be typed in.

[ November 20, 2001: Message edited by: Camarillo ]

 

Personally, I think the Red and Blue CDs sound fine, but I must be wrong because all NR is evil evil evil.

 

Of course you are wrong. Heretic.

 

Some tracks are a tad bright/harsh, but yeah, I think those are some of the best uses of noise reduction I've heard. I should really listen closely again sometime, but those really don't sound that bad. Much better than "1"...

 

In talking about mono CDs versus their vinyl counterparts....I had a question (Luke, Sckott, please chime in here):

I know Camarillo, that Steve states the original tapes were used, yet, I noticed if you turn up your volume a bit at the tail end of And I Love Her on the AHDN CD, it sounds like a distrortion, almost like a scratch, very faint, but it repeats about three times until the song ends. I noticed a similar noise on the original Moddy Blues Seventh Sojourn CD between For My Lady and Isn't Life Strange. When Seventh Sojourn was remastered a few years ago, the noise was gone.

Does the static I'm hearing come from a poor source tape, like a production master?

I definitely think the mono CDs could be remastered to sound a whole lot better w/o the No Noise, please!!

 

My name is not "Luke" nor "Scott," so you may wish to ignore me.

If not, Camarillo's post is on the money. On one of the old forums, Steve outlined what goods were used in the mastering chain for BFS (if memory serves), and that has a lot do with why those CDs are what they are. I think the tape sources used were generally OK.

BTW, are you sure the original albums on CD *have* NoNoise? These were done in '87, right?

 

Actually NoNoise was started being in use in 1987. Some of the tracks on the common Abbey Road CD were NoNoised.

 

Patrick M wrote:

No chance of that happening! Thanks for the valuable input Patrick!

 

I have heard of NoNoise with regard to Abbey Road only. What about the others?

 

The others were EQd to some extent. Abbey Road was no-noised, but a lot of Anthology suffers as well, if you want to call Anthology a part of the Beatles catalogue lineup (some don't). This is kinda dumb, since "Come Together" has audiable hiss on it, but not from tape. They could have chosen to "black out" the silent spots in between songs and left the rest to just transfer to digital PCM. In thier defense, at that time, a job was usually done in real time with little chance of "going back to correct" things. Course, now we can do lots of crazy patch-ups that justify, even at the home PC. No-noise was a lazy way to remove the leader-tape noise, but it royally screwed with the midrange and high end in opposite directions. You can tell they just let it "plow" through the whole LP with no programmed or individual adjustments. You also have to remember, all of those songs were not recorded in the same way or on the same machienes, lots of overdubs brightened the subtle sounds so you can't just treat it like "one" product throughout. Some subtle sounds were also drained of what little power they had with the No-Noise, and it shows up in a few places on the 2nd half of the album. Course, this is me being picky-ass-complainer about the stock copy. It could have sounded worse.

The airy natural sound of "Here Comes The Sun" was ruined. Grrr.

You have no idea what you've missed unless you attentively and analy listen to the Odeon Japanese CD (1st one). At first, you catch something here and there, but after a few plays, you go back to the US stock Cd (or the Apple/Parlaphone UK CD) and suddenly you "get it" and you-know what copy goes flying out the window.

No-Noise is not only a heavy handed noise-killer, but also reshapes the sound that goes along with it. The best way I can describe it, is hearing the way bad MP3-ing can horribly ruin string sounds.

To finally hear that the 1st "tom-tom" hit was actually full strength on "Something" kinda makes you sick of the stock copy immediately. That's the no-noise working like a gate, opening too late. They didn't notice to fix that. Ah, who's gonna care about that, right??

[ November 21, 2001: Message edited by: Sckott ]

 

Well it seeems to me that when EMI finally issued the first four Beatle CD's in 1987, that they all were such a rush job once they got George Martin's (unsatisfactory) involvement the end result was crap. They wanted to get the earlier ones out first so they could get Sgt. Pepper out by June 1st, the 20th anniversary date.