How these reissues sound to you in that regard will depend upon your system's bass performance.

Without hearing the tapes I'll never know. Because forty and fifty years of playing these records have worn grooves in my mind as to what they should sound like? Or because the mastering engineers went overboard?

Sometimes it sounds welcome but at other times it sounds heavy-handed. There are those who argue that EMI insisted on attenuating bass on pop and rock records as a matter of sonic policy and that bass was rolled off on Beatle albums so why not restore it on the reissues?Ĭlearly there's more bass, in my opinion a lot more bass, throughout this reissue set. It was more a 're-imagining' of the Beatles catalog than a 'reissuing.' The best way to do that, the producers felt, was to digitize at high resolution and use that as the starting point for the 'restoration'. The goal here was to improve the originals without upsetting their essence. just as did Kevin Gray's Nat King Cole reissues for Analogue Productions. Mistakes-all of them-would be left in, including popped 'p's etc. Mistakes would not be corrected, the 'de-essing' would be done using the old school real time method as it's done when necessary today by the guys who cut from analog tape. It would be done in the analog domain and every attempt would have been made to match the original LPs' EQ. Not so the reissued LP.Ī reissue in the strictest sense would be as close as possible a reproduction of the original. master tape with the original Parlophone pressing. Clearly they don't as I demonstrated to myself comparing a CD made from the Sgt. Were that the case, they would sound far closer to the originals than they do. Now let's put it all in perspective in terms of concept, presentation, sound quality and value.Ĭlearly the concept here was not to reissue the original albums as heard in 1963-1970. Had I done all of the listening and writing first, it would have been old news by now, so I chose to go album by album. My point is that I felt obliged to take this Beatles box apart and examine it more closely than was probably necessary and be as critical as necessary, from my perspective, which might not be the same as yours. She smells it in front, she smells it in back, she smells it all over and then hands it back to the butcher saying 'Mister, this chicken stinks!' The butcher replies 'Lady, could you pass a test like that?' She says 'Can I see that chicken?' The butcher hands it to her.

Beatles box set lp