The Beatles In Mono

Product Information

When I started my hi-fi journey, I had gone from a mono record changer to a stereo system with two small speakers and was very happy with it. The new digital remastering offers the discs in stereo, but the big news is the box with the discs in mono, that is, the original sound as producer George Martin intended it.

In the last few years, I've been listening to a lot more pre-stereo recordings on LP and on 78 disks. It is important for people to realise that when Beatles fans say they prefer the mono mix to the stereo, they are not simply referring to the stereo version “crushed down” to mono. The box contains a new two-disc compilation album titled Mono Masters, which compiles all the mono mixes of singles, B-sides and EP tracks that did not originally appear on any of the UK albums or Magical Mystery Tour. By the time the White Album came out the band was in the studio giving input on both mono and stereo mixes, to please the fans who wanted to own both.

My opinion is they should not have tried to make them stereo in the first place as it did not work well at all. If something was originally recorded and made for mono, then later trying to reprocess it for stereo isn’t necessarily going to produce better results, sometimes the result could be a disaster.

There's a complicated answer there, but you can hear for yourself what a good stereo Beatles mix sounds like if you decide to listen to a later record, like Abbey Road. Where exactly the stereo mixes of The Beatles become 'good' is argued by some (OK, many), but by the time of Sgt. Your ears are getting more auditory information than you get with mono, but more information does not as a rule make for a better listening experience or even better audio quality. All of the USA albums were released individually on CDs containing both the mono and original stereo mixes; this is the only other way to acquire the mono mixes on CD. In Japan, it debuted at number 10, selling over 20,000 copies in its first week on the Oricon album charts.Thus, the songs that were originally released on stereo singles in the UK are omitted on this release. Naturally, this kind of added complexity to music wasn't really possible to the same extent with mono, which just has a single channel, so whatever sound you're hearing come out of your left earbud/speaker will be identical to the sound coming out of your right earbud/speaker, meaning you're taking less advantage of humans having two ears.

The set debuted at number 40 on Billboard's Top 200 chart and the magazine reported that 12,000 copies were sold in its first week of release.The two 1960s mixes are generally very different indeed, and Sgt Peppers may be the most different of the lot because of the dizzying layers of special effects that were presumably very difficult to reproduce in stereo afterwards (the mono version was made first, and regardless of who did the stereo version later, even attempting to reproduce all those effects must have been a bitch). The stereo mixes are quaint, with a lot of hard panning common to stereo mixes of rock music at the time.

As our test case, look up something off the first couple of Beatles records, like A Taste Of Honey off Please Please Me. When I bought my first box set of the collected works of The Beatles, I got it in stereo, because why wouldn't I? Stereo recordings were a fairly new concept for pop music in the 1960s and did not become standard until nearly the end of that decade. Plus a 44 page booklet which includes an essay on the important role that these mono mixes played in The Beatles recording career plus a track by track rundown of the recordings contained in the Mono Masters 2-CD set.I now noticed that it was in fake pseudo-stereo, which I don't think I even noticed when I first got it. A significant amount of musicality just evaporates instantly when you load up a stereo version of an early Beatles track. A new Mono Box, containing remastered monoural versions of the Beatles' core albums (with the exception of Yellow Submarine album) plus Mono Masters compilation, was released on 9 September 2009 along with Stereo Box and new stereo reissues of the individual albums, including the first four albums given their stereo debuts on CD.