Blast From The Past - 27/02/2011

The Beatles 2009 Remaster Box Set

I go in and out of phases where I can listen to the Beatles and not. It's a whole lot different when you grow up listening to the Beatles looking up to them and to being older than the Beatles when they wrote the songs. One's own transition into middle age makes it harder to stay attached to the Fab Four especially when you end up with other bands that mean more to you in so many other ways. The being said, any opportunity that gives you a reason to go back and have a close listen has got to be welcomed.

For years the 1987 set of remasters has bee the standard that is readily available as a bench mark. Prior to that, you'd have to go back to the LP releases, and scour trans Atlantic catalogues to fill out the missing tracks that appeared as singles, which got collected in the 'Past Masters' double CD set. The 1987 set was interesting in that George Martin had turned his hand at re-mixing some of the material to bring it up to date to late 1980s tastes which in hindsight have turned out to be rather a particular kind of use of digital. It was also ever so possibly hampered by the relative lack of tools to polish things up in a way that modern digital audio workstations can do. In any case the reputation of the 1987 set has been sinking for years, with some fans demanding yet another re-master.

I have to admit I've been sceptical of these demands because if it meant they were mastering to late 2000s standards, we were likely to see a highly compressed set with limiters being pushed hard to squeeze out ever more volume. My view had been, if the 1987 doesn't seem quite loud enough for you, then all you really had to do was turn up your system. In other words, my suspicion had been that the crowd demanding a re-master were wanting the Beatles to be brought up to date in a way that doesn't help the musicality of the recordings at all.

'Let It Be - Naked' didn't exactly make me feel like I needed to hear anew the Beatles from the beginning to the bitter end. While it was nice to hear the stark arrangement for historicity's sake, there was something really un-inviting about that album - A bit like revisiting the hotel where you once had a dirty weekend. It might have been a great experience once but what the hell is it to you today? Do we really need to relive Beatlemania once more? The Beatles get better in every fan's living memory each year, but it's only natural that the recordings become more outdated with time. The gap that ensues is actually our growth as listeners. I felt it's something we should be resigned with. "You want all this with more slam on the limier?"  I thought.

Fortunately the people who undertook the 2009 remastering were a lot more sensible than to take the whole lot and slam limiters on them all to make them all louder. The albums that have benefited the most are in fat the middle period albums from 'Revolver' through to 'Magical Mystery Tour' where all previous versions have sounded murky. I used to put a lot of that murk down to the fact that the Beatles pre-mixed parts of their arrangement to get down to 4 tracks and 8 tracks, and the murkiness was a result of the loss of fidelity and build up of tape noise. The 1987 remaster of 'Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band' is particularly murky through the slow numbers and the reverbs all seem to wash the beat obscure. 'Magical Mystery Tour' has always been a mystery tour through some hazy sounding recordings including the masterpiece, 'I Am The Walrus'.

The good news is that it is these albums that have scrubbed up incredibly well. Suddenly you can hear the nuance of various percussion instruments and sudden surges of effects much better. The texture on the sitar in 'Within You Without You' cuts through the mix in a way that adds so much more definition to the song. It's funny because I remember being quite happy listening to these albums on a standard D-90 cassette recording with tape hiss through some cruddy walkman, so it behooves me to be writing about sound quality in some ways, but it's nice to find a new tangible benefit in listening to this new set.

There seems to be much discussion about the frequency response across the board and what is natural and what is not, but to my ears the biggest difference is just how much you can hear the guitars and bass guitar clearly. Whole passages come alive with the immediacy of their playing their main instruments. While the mix hasn't changed, the overdubbed instruments have been placed further back in the sound, which is a great improvement. It's nice to hear the detail in John's strumming, the snap of Ringo's drum heads, George's picking on his Gibson SG, and the body on Paul's Rickenbacker 4001 bass. Especially when I don't feel I need to hear so much of the damn trumpet or the cellos. In other words, it brings you so much closer to the Beatles as players, and that has got to be a big bonus with this set.

And you know what? It's so unmistakably, definitely, 'Cranberry Sauce', and not 'I buried Paul'.