The Audiophiliac

The Mono Box may be the preferred option for hard-core Beatles fans.

(Credit: Apple Records)

Tone Audio's Bob Gendron scored advance copies of "The Beatles Stereo Box Set" and "The Beatles Mono Box Set" of the complete Beatles catalog. Four years in the making, Gendron thinks the remasters are a feast for the ears.

Tone Audio is an audiophile Web site, so when I read Gendron's claims of "Near-miraculous improvements in the key areas of information retrieval, hidden details, palpable physicality, expanded midrange, transient presence, and frequency response" to the remastered sound, I was jazzed. Bass, never a strong suit on Beatles recordings, has been improved, so we get to hear more oomph from Paul McCartney's bass and Ringo Starr's percussion. I can hardly wait.

Gendron seems to favor the mono box, mostly because the Beatles and their producer, George Martin, lavished their attention on the mono mixes of the original albums; stereo was an afterthought. Me, I'm a stereo kind of guy, so I'll start with the stereo set. And yes, I'll report back after I've had time to mull over the sound for myself. The Rolling Stones' recent remasters are nothing to write home about, that's why I've remained mum about them. Remastering, all by itself, is no guarantee of improved sound quality.

One speaker can do it all

(Credit: Klipsch)

Mono was the one and only way to listen to music and movies for decades.

But it's not ancient history. Mono's on something of a comeback, and the upcoming remastered Beatles catalog will be offered in an all-mono box in September. You can listen to mono over just one speaker, or with two or more speakers. But mono at its purest is a single-speaker deal.

A fringe segment of the audiophile community still buys mono phono cartridges to get the best sound out of mono LPs. Over at BuyMeGetMe they're listening to an all out single speaker mono system with a mighty 175-pound, all-American Klipschorn speaker ($3,999).

Yes, you could use any speaker, but since you're paying half the price of a pair of speakers, you might as well get a nice one. The Klipschorn was originally introduced some 60 years ago. It's still an amazing speaker.

A ticket to ride, $5 to see the Beatles, not bad.

(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)

I have no idea why, but "The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl" has never been released on CD in the U.S.

Worse yet, I don't think it's going to come out on CD or download when the remastered Beatles albums are released later this year. "Hollywood Bowl" came out on LP in 1977, before the CD was invented, and long after the group broke up. In 1977 all four Beatles were still alive. Luckily enough, it's not at all hard to score a decent "Hollywood Bowl" LP now.

I can't think of another major sixties band that didn't eventually put out a great concert LP. For reasons lost to the mists of time the Beatles live recordings were all pretty poor quality, and these Hollywood Bowl dates are less than stellar-sounding. But the thing is, the performances rock harder than the Beatles ever did in the studio.

Will the new CDs sound better than the LPs?

(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)

I read the news today, oh boy: The entire Beatles catalog has been remastered for CD and is coming September 9 of this year. Sounds like deja vu all over again; these rumors pop up all the time, but this time it's for real. Maybe.

That said, I'm happy no one's saying the phrase "Remastered for MP3." That's too scary a concept. MP3 sounds so awful, remastering hardly seems necessary.

Each CD will be packaged with replicated original UK album art, including expanded booklets containing original and newly written liner notes and rare photos. For a limited period, each CD will be embedded with a brief documentary film about the album. Two new Beatles boxed CD collections will also be released, one box features the mono mixes favored by some die-hard Beatles fans. Why, I have no idea.

The original (British) versions of the twelve albums were first released on CD in 1987; they sounded thin and bright, without a hint of the LPs' analog warmth. It was hardly an auspicious beginning for the digital Beatles music.

The "Let It Be... Naked" CD, released in 2003, was remixed and reedited, there was no attempt to be faithful to the original album. It sounded a bit better than the 1987 version, but just barely. So all we can do is hope the newly tweaked versions are worth waiting 22 years for.

I bought the two Capitol four-disc sets, "The Beatles: The Capitol Years Volumes 1 & 2," when they were released a few years ago. They sounded fine, though hardly revelatory. My original American, British, and Japanese mastered LPs sounded better.

Actually, the best sounding Beatles CDs so far are "The Beatles Anthology" releases from 1995. Those were cleaner, more dynamic, with more extended bass, and clearer treble than the earlier CDs.

Whatever, here's hoping the new CDs sound more like the Anthologies. No matter what, I'll buy 'em and see for myself.

(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)

I'm not sure why, but there's a never-ending stream of articles cheering on vinyl's comeback. I guess if it's a slow news day, editors can't resist plugging in yet another story about booming LP sales, and they always claim something along the lines of "Kids are digging the grooves, they've seen the light, and now crave analog sound!"

Puh-leeze!

Don't get me wrong; I wish it were true. Maybe in some alternative universe, vinyl is flying off the shelves, and kids are ditching their iPods and buying turntables.

Back here on the Earth we know and love, 2008 sales of LPs were up 89 percent, from 990,000 in '07 to 1.88 million in '08. That's hardly a boom, now that CD sales are in the hundreds of millions. The best-selling LP of 2008 was Radiohead's "In Rainbows," which sold a piddling 28,800 platters. Second-place honors went to another British band, The Beatles, which sold 16,500 "Abbey Road" LPs. If those numbers are accurate, and Radiohead's Thom Yorke and company were trying to live off LP sales, they'd have to get day jobs.

So sure, there's more and more new and reissue vinyl, and that's great, but only a teensy-weensy number of people buy new vinyl. Most of my vinyl-loving buddies regularly score free records on the street, or pay a buck or two for used vinyl to play on their megabucks high-end turntables. Again, no problem there, but it's not the same as a true vinyl resurgence. That's just media hype.

I love vinyl because it looks cool and sounds great. I own around 4,000 LPs. And I'm hoping that the vinyl revival keeps growing. But the market for physical media--CDs and LPs--has nowhere to go but down. More than anything else, people want cheap or free music, playable anywhere they want.

Update: Later in the day Monday, YouTube took down the video due to a copyright claim from EMI Music; it's gone for now.

Britain's NME reported on Monday that unreleased Beatles material has surfaced online. An audio-only YouTube video, right, is claiming to be an unreleased take of the song "Revolution." It's take 20, and it starts out sounding like "Revolution 1" from the band's "White Album."

The 10-minute, 47-second running time is 7 minutes longer than "Revolution 1," though after some in-studio chatter by The Beatles, what you hear sounds awfully familiar. It's much like "Revolution 1," but then it breaks into freak-out noise and backward loops, similar to "Revolution 9," also from the "White Album."

That said, I think that "9" is way more interesting and creative.

I think that the video is a hoax. It seems like work of a fan who manipulated various Beatles songs' bits and pieces, and assembled the freak-out portion of "take 20." Yes, you can clearly hear the recording engineer, probably Geoff Emerick, announce "take 20," but I think that the freak-out section is fake. Still, there are bits of John Lennon vamping and screaming his guts out that I've never heard before.

What do you think?

Went to see Martin Scorsese's new concert film Shine A Light with the Rolling Stones, and I have to admit the aged rockers put on a good show. Sure, Mick and Keith's life-long love affair with the blues is still going strong, but their music has become strangely soulless. They jump around, make faces, and the energy level is high, but I didn't care. I've seen it all before, better--the Rolling Stones are now just a machine, reveling in their own outlaw, devil-may-care ethos, a mere simulation of their former selves. Kinda makes me glad the Beatles never got back together, that band stays forever young. The Beatles' music remains fully intact, pure, and blemish free.

The Beatles' film catalog is uneven all right, but as musical documents, they're all pretty amazing. A Hard Days Night remains a light romp; the tunes come fast and furious, the Beatles are having a blast. Help hasn't aged as well as a film, but the song sequences are still fantastic, Yellow Submarine is still trippy as all get out, Magical Mystery Tour is mostly awful cinema, redeemed with strong tunes. Let It Be has yet to make it to DVD, but even in the Beatles' twilight, the magic was still there.

If you want to see the Stones at their peak, check out Gimme Shelter, a documentary film covering the last days of their 1969 tour. Scorsese's high-speed editing of Shine A Light doesn't help the film, it just fritters away the band's true grit. Scorsese spends way too much time dishing out close ups of Jagger, and rarely covers the complete band. They're mere backup musicians to the star. That's sad, because the Rolling Stones, even now, are much greater than the sum of its members.

The Master at the controls.

(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)

If you read CD or LP credits you've probably seen "Mastered by Greg Calbi" a bunch of times, but don't have a clue exactly what Calbi and other mastering engineers do. I don't blame you--it's a mystery to most music lovers. When I heard that Calbi was going to cut some LP masters I made arrangements to drop by Sterling Sound and watch the master masterer at work. He's mastered thousands of records--everybody from Bob Dylan to Talking Heads to The Roots, to the High School Musical soundtrack, and one of my favorite records from last year, Yo La Tengo's I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass. As a matter of fact, he's mastered all of Yo La Tengo's CDs and LPs of the past 10 years. He must be doing something right.

In the early days CDs were typically mastered from the LP master, Calbi explained. "It wasn't until the mid-'80s that we starting mastering for CD. Vinyl was still No. 1; CD and cassette masters were taken from the LP master."

Nowadays, remastering can refer to a redo of a CD master, going back to the original tapes/files and giving them another listen and eking out better sound. Calbi remastered Bob Dylan's Oh Mercy CD a few years ago, but he also mastered it the first time in 1989. The first mastering was digital all the way, but for the remaster Calbi introduced analog tools (equalization, analog tape machines, etc.), and that resulted in a much better sounding Oh Mercy CD and SACD.

In any case, Calbi works from the final mix and fine-tunes the sound with equalization, dynamic range compression, and volume level adjustments. The mastering engineer's entire signal path--playback machines, equalizers, black boxes, etc.--all influence the finished product's sound.

Still, you might wonder why the engineers don't just transfer the final mix and master CDs or LPs from that. But the sound benefits from a fresh set of ears. The mastering engineer perfects and completes the mixes, or as Calbi put it, "Mastering is finishing for a specific format, CD or LP." What about MP3? "That's very different, and not just from a sound quality point of view," he said. "It's assumed that MP3s will be heard in shuffle mode, competing against unknown music." Right, and that leads to extreme dynamic range compression; so all of the music's natural soft-to-loud dynamics are squashed flat; MP3s have to be loud all the time because with MP3s everyone is screaming for attention in a crowded market.

CDs and LPs are also different in that they're conceived as complete works, and their mastering balances are affected by the songs' sequence--how the songs sound next to each other, the key changes, the rhythm--all sorts of things are compensated for by the mastering engineers. They have to see, correction, hear the big picture.

The mastering engineer is the final critic of the mix, and uses his or her knowledge to try to improve it. And now that so many projects are recorded in home studios by inexperienced engineers there's even more of a need for a fresh set of ears to tweak recordings.

Cutting the Michael Powers' record at Sterling Sound.

(Credit: Steve Guttenberg)

What about iTunes? I asked Calbi about the rumors about the Beatles catalog being remastered for iTunes. He was ahead of me, "They're not being remastered just for iTunes; they're being remastered because they got a deal with iTunes. I was partially involved in the discussions leading up to the remastering sessions; most of the Beatles catalog hasn't been remastered in 20 years." It's likely the new remasters are destined for CD release.

Watching Calbi at work, mastering this killer blues rock LP, Onyx Root, by Michael Powers, there's no doubt the man enjoys his work. Calbi's grooving to the music, swaying back and forth in his chair. His playback system is very audiophile--with massive Energy speakers and an Audio Research vacuum tube amplifier the sound is so good I feel like I'm listening to a live performance.

The Sterling Sound LPs will be available from selected online vinyl retailers, and on Sterling's site in a few months. I can't wait.

The one and only Beatles DVD-Audio release

A reader responding to my The Beatles on iTunes? Who Cares? rant came up with this great summation: "iTunes are to audio what McDonald's is to hamburgers, but if this is how the public wants to buy music, then let 'em have it." Right on! Sound quality doesn't matter anymore, just the so-called convenience of downloading 1s and 0s at the cheapest possible price, or better yet for free. Why buy the complete "Sgt Pepper" when you can just get "With A Little Help From My Friends"? That's where it's at.

If a remastered recording sounds "better," but no one can hear it, does it sound better? No, not really. I get the feeling that the remastered tag has just been reduced to a catchphrase, something to connote goodness. Hey, it's been remastered, so it's got to be better. Yeah right, maybe, maybe not. I think Apple did a lousy job on the Beatles "Let it Be... Naked" CD a few years ago.

It's curious, the Beatles' Apple's supposed "remastering" for low-fi iTunes was mentioned again and again by The Audiophiliac's readers, as if the new digitalization would reveal new sound from the old tunes over 128 K iToons. Puh-leeze! Yes, sure, maybe they'll also put out remastered CDs or DVD-Audio like Apple did with last year's Love release. Maybe we'll get multichannel, 5.1 Beatles on Blu-ray, sure, why not? Now that would be something. We audiophiles can dream, but the market will collectively yawn.