ARTICLE ON THE BEATLES REMASTERS from ROLLING STONE
August 19, 2009
Meet the
Beatles, Again
Inside Abbey Road, as the Beatles' albums get
their first sonic upgrade in 22 years.
By Bryan Hiatt
Ever since the Beatles' albums first appeared on CD, in 1987, fans have
complained about the discs' anemic sound quality. After a 22-year wait, the
caretakers of the band's legacy are finally doing something about it - with
remasters of all 14 albums hitting stores on September 9th. "I remember going
into a museum and seeing Winston Churchill's old papers, and they were getting
yellower and crinklier," says Paul McCartney. "And what the joy for me is, our
stuff is going the other way. It's getting clearer, and as long as the mixes
and stuff are carefully followed, which the guys at Abbey Road do, you know
it's not as if it's just a bunch of people in China doing it."
Rolling Stone's July 1987 review of the original CD releases complained that
they were "shriller and more grating" than the vinyl versions. And as digital
sound improved over the years, the CDs' shortcomings only became more obvious.
(In contrast, the Rolling Stones' catalog has been remastered at least three
times since its original release.) But it wasn't until four years ago that
McCartney, Ringo Starr, and Beatle widows Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison finally
approved the idea of remasters - and a team of Abbey Road engineers (headed by
Allan Rouse, who worked with George Martin on 1995's Beatles Anthology)
immediately went to work.
The first step was to transfer the original master tapes - housed in "a vault
with two steel doors, both with combination locks, an alarm, two cameras, and
a smoke detector," says Rouse - to digital files, one song at a time. The
remastering team spent much time debating how much to clean up the recordings
by removing hiss and other flaws. "What we did agree was that if it was part
of the Beatles' performance, we weren't going to remove it," says Rouse. "The
squeaky chair at the end of 'A Day in the Life,' breaths, coughs, anything
that was actually really part of the performance, those stayed. Anything that
we considered to be technical - clicks, sibilance, pops, bad edits, drop-outs,
hum, things that were a technical problem - we would either try and improve
them, or, if possible, remove or repair them."
One of the most fraught issues was loudness. The 1987 CDs are dramatically out
of step with current trends in mastering - they sound puny next to more
current rock releases, which make extensive use of audio limiting to reduce
dynamic range and make songs seem louder. After extensive debate, the
engineers ended up using a "tiny amount" of limiting - which still had a major
effect on the sound: "I Am the Walrus," the title track from Sgt. Pepper's
Lonely Hearts Club Band, and other rock tunes have a newfound heft and thump.
"It gave it a little lift," says Rouse.
The remasters mostly offer improvements that are subtle but noticeable. "Love
Me Do," for instance, loses its dusty, distant haze of age, and "The Long and
Winding Road" no longer has what Rouse described as a "muffled" quality to it.
Otherwise, it's a matter of suddenly noticing details: McCartney's nimble bass
line on "And Your Bird Can Sing," the vivid three-dimensionality of Starr's
opening and closing hi-hat on "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," the cinematic
quality of the choirs and orchestra on "Good Night."
But even before the engineers began tweaking them, the digital transfers
immediately sounded better than the 1987 versions, for two reasons:
Analog-to-digital converters have vastly improved since then, and they were
also able to work at a higher resolution than before: specifically, 24-bit,
192 kHz, which is used in the Blu-ray audio format. At that bit rate, the
engineers say, the digital version is indistinguishable from the original
masters - but, alas, there are no plans yet for a Blu-ray release. ("There's
plenty of time," McCartney says.)
The engineers were well aware that many listeners won't even spend much time
listening in CD quality, let alone Blu-ray - they'll rip the CDs to their
iPods and listen to them in lossy MP3 and AAC formats. "It's like if you clean
up a painting, and then you photocopy it or something," says engineer Paul
Hicks. "The thing is, it's still going to look better, even though it's a
photocopy. It was definitely worth doing this, because the resolution might
not be as good, but it will still be clearer and better, and hopefully there
will be things people are going to hear that they haven't previously."
In addition to the stereo remasters, the team assembled a box set, The Beatles
in Mono, which collects every existing mono mix of the band's music. It's the
first time that the mono mixes of Sgt. Pepper, the White album, and Magical
Mystery Tour have been released on CD. (Confusingly, the 1987 CD releases of
the Beatles' first four albums - Please Please Me, With the Beatles, A Hard
Day's Night, and Beatles for Sale - used the mono mixes. The new releases will
use the stereo ones instead, with the monos relegated to the box set.)
The mono versions are no mere curiosity. They can be radically different, to
the point where there's entirely different vocal effects on, say, "Lucy in the
Sky With Diamonds" - and rock songs like "Helter Skelter" hit with a
revelatory, garage-y force. Up until Abbey Road, the Beatles themselves
focused almost entirely on mono versions. "In the main, we thought mono,"
McCartney says, noting that the band spent weeks on the mono mix of Sgt.
Pepper, and then left the stereo to George Martin and engineer Geoff Emerick.
"The stereo mix wasn't really important to us - we figured, well, you just
spread the mono."
Some Beatles fans will be eager to compare the new remasters to their original
vinyl - but while the engineers did make their own comparisons to the LPs,
matching them wasn't the point. "No one's heard the master tapes apart from
us," says Guy Massey, one of the engineers. "And you have to remember some of
the limitations of vinyl - they had to cut some of the low end off to master
it." Adds Rouse, "These releases are closer to the master tape than you've
heard before."
McCartney judges the reissues by an even higher standard. "It sounds like it
did in the room when we recorded it," he says. "We had this pure sound, then
the minute it goes down a bunch of wires it's going to get ****ed up to some
degree. So now it sounds like I'm back in the room, in the session."
The remastered albums come with new liner notes and mini making-of
documentaries. After the outtakes-filled Anthology release, the Beatles are
reluctant to dig deeper into the vaults - which include hundreds of hours of
unreleased recordings, from unheard Beatles tracks to early versions of tracks
that ended up on solo records. "George Harrison and I were joking when we did
Anthology - we were saying, you know, the next album should be called
'Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel," says McCartney. "Because there is that
element to it like, 'Come on, guys, ****, we made all these Beatles records
sound lovely and shiny and terrific, and now we're looking for the outtake
that got away.'" Still, there is material McCartney would like to release,
including "Now and Then," an extra Anthology-era song that (like "Free as a
Bird") found Harrison, McCartney, and Starr adding to a John Lennon recording.
"George didn't like it - basically, he didn't think it was good enough," says
McCartney.
McCartney admits he's no audiophile. "I can listen to a record on the radio on
the beach and it sounds OK to me," he says, sitting in Abbey Road studios,
where he's co-producing a new album by his son James' band, The Light. "I'm
probably the least tech person in the universe, you know. And John wasn't an
audiophile either. It was always George Harrison who spotted when Capitol re-EQ'd
our albums [in the Sixties]." So McCartney sees the remasters in emotional
terms, not technical ones. "Now I hear John and think, 'There he is,'" he
says. "Like, you can almost close your eyes and you can kind of see him,
because the quality is so real. So I like that about it."