Best Sounding Beatles CDs

Im going to have to do a blind test with that japanese Rubber Soul and US Rubber Soul. See which one sounds less crappy lol.

Seriously though, my girlfriend loves to make me look stupid on these tests so it will be honest at least.

 

They shouldn't sound different as they have the same mastering. Here's Steve's post from earlier in the thread..

JPN CD pressings are the same as any other country, sorry. Same PCM master.

 

Yep, and I can't see a "better pressing plant" making a difference to a bunch of ones and zeros.

But hey, people hear what they wanna hear. Maybe the Japanese plants run green marker around each disc!

 

Possible but the JPN discs are digitally identical to their US counterparts. If they had ran them through an analog board and EQ'd them they would not be digitally identical. The US discs and the JPN discs (save for the early AR) null out..

 

I'll take it back

 

re-EQed it!

 

John, I'm talking about discs that have the same mastering. If the discs have the same mastering it doesn't matter when they were made. The Sgt Pepper CD I bought in 1993 at the local indie store will sound the same as the one I order from Amazon today..

 

Asking a question, not suggesting anything (as I don't know):
Could it be that the Japanese discs are manufactured to closer tolerances, reducing the number of read errorswhen the CD is played back. I guess a way to test this would be to try the null test on recordings of the analog outputof the two discs.
Or, somebody with a Squeezebox (or something similar) could compare the two versions through the device, effectively eliminating any error correction done by the CD player.
BTW, I love using my Squeezebox to compare different pressings of CDs.

Cody

 

I think that's a good idea but IMO people are just hearing differences that are not there. It happens to the best of us. Famous recording engineers have reported hearing differences when adjusting the EQ only to discover that the EQ wasn't even patched in.

 

I don't know where that theory that there was any Beatles involvement whatsoever in the compilation of 1962-1966 and 1967-1970 comes from, but I've seen it more than once. As far as I know, there was no Beatles involvement whatsoever with those compilations.

They were compiled in 1973, in America, by ABKCO, which was still the Beatles' management group in the U.S., and the original release used American masters (with the possible exception of "From Me to You," which saw its first U.S. stereo release on 1962-1966). Thus, everything (else) that had only come out in rechanneled stereo in America was in rechanneled stereo on 1962-1966 and 1967-1970.

The albums were released in the U.S. several weeks before they came out in England; April 2 was the American release date, April 20 in the U.K., which speaks to the American origin of the albums.

The albums filled a gap in the Beatles' LP discography because there were no legitimate career-spanning Beatles "greatest hits" collections available in the States (A Collection of Beatles Oldies was never released in the U.S., and Hey Jude was more like the later Past Masters series in collecting singles that had not appeared on LP). Also, they were put together in part as a response to several bootleg compilations that were sold through magazine and TV ads in the United States, the most notable of which was The Beatles Alpha Omega.

 

I honestly had no idea who sequenced those albums; the "safe" song selection suggested to me that some EMI (or, as tim neely suggests, ABKCO) bean-counter was responsible.

I like Neil Aspinall.

An aside: does anyone here recall a TV segment around the time Double Fantasy came out, that (among other things) had Lennon in a NYC record shop, picking up a copy of the "blue" album and looking surprised?

 

Doesn't matter. All JPN discs come from the same PCM master.

 

Murray Wilson?

 

How about the "fairy dust" on my Toshiba AB (not the first one) but the 87 or after one?

 

While we're on the subject, what audio qualities make the Toshiba "black triangle" Abbey Road so desirable?

 

I've heard that it's the bass response for one thing - the bass on Come Together is supposed to knock you out of your seat.

 

It's the only existing CD pressing of the album that is a flat transfer from the master tapes. To me, every instrument is flawlessly represented and the vocals are warm and natural. It sounds purty.

 

More seriously: maybe the Japanese CDs are enhanced with that special green ink around the edges?