DJ Equipment Reviews

Now’s the time to start listening to The Beatles again

It’s a time when all 4 members of The Beatles (if all would still be alive) should witness their music coming back into the present, like all great music that withstands the passing of time does. Sure, you’ll hear a song today and you’ll think it’s the greatest thing ever since the invention of toast, but if a couple of months later or a year or so it’s gone, then I’m sorry to say, that’s not memorable music. The Beatles, on the other hand, are going to be remembered for a long long time, as people today still get their albums like they just came out.

What’s interesting is that although The Beatles are such a big part in today’s music, once they got their grand opening on CDs, which happened 22 years ago, that’s where it all stopped for them, even with all the intense technological advancement that took place in the audio industry. In other words, a lot of artists have witnessed their music being remastered and repackaged and in some cases improved with the passing of time, The Beatles songs stayed the same since they were first released on CD. That’s at least annoying for any Beatles fan, especially with the fame the band enjoyed in its time.

All that just changed in 2009, when The Beatles are coming back into fashion strong, with appearances in more than one place. The two things I’m mainly talking about are:

• EMI and Apple Corps just released the entire Beatles catalog remastered from the original mono and stereo masters and is now available in two different packages: The Beatles Stereo Box Set and fairly unsurprising, The Beatles Mono Box Set
• as I mentioned in one of my previous posts, The Beatles is making a grand entry in the video game industry, with the Rock Band game releasing their The Beatles version, which scores pretty high on all accounts, making it a very worthy music game

I’ll keep it mainly on the remastering of The Beatles’ music, as it’s something that needed to be done a long time ago. Actually, even after 22 years, the whole process was still in the hands of a select few, making it not only fairly discrete, but also a huge undertaking for those people. The guys involved were the sound engineers at Abbey Road Studios, with Alan Rouse as the team coordinator and Guy Massey as the senior engineer. Here’s what Alan Rouse has to say about it, now that their work that took over 4 year is finally done: "The whole process was spread over a few people to try and achieve, what we hope, at the end of the day, is going to be the best we could get,…No one person was going to take the blame for getting it wrong, so we can spread the blame amongst all of us! We keep everything at Abbey Road, so it was a very long process—mucking about with machines, A/Ds, test tapes—trying to determine how we ended up with what we ended up with. We did blind tests, as well, after that".

The transfers were done from the original EMI tapes, and fortunately, all the sound engineers at Abbey Road Studios had to deal with were the normal dust speckles, as the tapes were not only kept in good condition, but were also great quality.

And their work shows in the process, because if you thought The Beatles have no more revelations for this day and age, think again, as these remasters are worth all the work gone into them, and hopefully, you’ll think the price paid too. What Abbey Road Studios tried and succeeded was not to limit or ruin the original recordings in any way, and keep the songs dynamic and transparent.

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