The Early Beatles: Down and Digital

Last time around I prattled on at length about the packaging of The Beatles Stereo Box Set. I think I might have even gotten a bit of drool on my keyboard, but it seems to be working okay nonetheless.

This time around I'm going to start talking about the remastered music itself. The set I have is in stereo, but there's also a mono box set—called The Beatles in Mono—that includes the ten albums that were released in mono in the UK (Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road, and Let it Be were never given a separate mono mix) along with Mono Masters, which includes the mono mixes of the singles and EP tracks that were not included on the albums.

Why all the fuss? What's the big deal about mono? Isn't stereo better? Well, you might think so, but remember, back in the early sixties, stereo was a relatively new phenomenon. Mono was still the preferred format, and stereo mixes of LPs were usually only purchased by true hi-fi enthusiasts.

As a matter of fact, I've read in several places that the Beatles themselves participated in the mixing sessions, but only for the mono mixes. They apparently didn't care about the stereo mixes and went home once the mono mixes were done. I've also read comments from other reviewers that the mono mixes are better than the stereo versions, even on an album as complex as Sergeant Pepper.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Let's back up and start with the first two albums, Please Please Me and With the Beatles. Both of these albums were recorded on two-track tape machines at EMI studios in London. The main reason for using two-track machines was to capture the vocals on one track and the instruments on the other to allow for at least some control over the balance between the two.

But this works best on a mono mix. In stereo, you basically get the vocals on the right side and the instruments on the left. Adding some reverb to the mix helps to blend the two together, but the tracks are still essentially separated spatially.

Listening to the stereo remasters bears this out. For example, the first track on Please Please Me, "I Saw Her Standing There", has the vocals and one of the guitars in the right channel and the drums, bass, and second guitar in the left. The separation is marked, and there's nothing "in the middle". I tend to listen with headphones, which makes the division even more dramatic. It's a good thing they recorded one of the guitars over with the vocals, because if they hadn't, there'd be nothing on the right during the instrumental break.

Now, don't get me wrong. The sound is incredibly clear and crisp for something that was recorded forty-seven years ago. You can hear every note, every strum. You can almost hear the boys breathing. Well, almost.

This is good most of the time, but it does offer some interesting anomalies. For example, in "Misery", the second track on Please Please Me, George Martin overdubbed some piano phrases in between some of the vocal lines in the song's bridge (or middle eight). With my headphones on, I can actually hear the change in ambience when those piano bits kick in. The piano is primarily in the right channel, but there's a weird echo of it in the left. The rest of the song is pretty well separated out, though I must say the vocals sound a bit muddier than they do on "I Saw Her Standing There".

Now, I don't have the mono box set, so I can't really do any kind of real comparison, but two of the tracks on the stereo release of Please Please Me are in mono, so that affords at least a glimpse into the other world. The original twin-track tapes of "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You" (the A and B sides of the Beatles' first single) were lost, due to the common practice at the time of wiping and reusing master tapes once they had been mixed down to mono, so there was nothing available to the engineers of the remasters that would allow them to create a stereo mix. Hence, the mono mixes of the two songs are included on the remastered stereo CD.

And I'm glad they're there, because the difference between mono and stereo here is quite dramatic. I found "Love Me Do" and "P.S. I Love You" to be much punchier than the other tracks on the CD. The bass is more audible, and everything's in the middle, which means the sound is much more balanced.

Sigh. I may at some point have to get a copy of the mono box set.

The rest of the tracks on Please Please Me have pretty much the same acoustic characteristics as "I Saw Her Standing There", though it's worth mentioning that "Chains" has a bit of distortion here and there in the left channel, which is oddly charming, really, and "Boys" has the drums on the right channel, which is probably due to the fact that Ringo is singing lead vocal.

The stereo mix of the second album, With the Beatles is very similar to that of Please Please Me, except there are no mono tracks. Interestingly, I actually found the right and left channel separation more irritating on this album than on Please Please Me, which may be due in part to the fact that I listened to the two albums back to back in preparation for this post.

Again, I found the instruments, particularly the guitars, really crisp on this second album. "It Won't Be Long" has an escpecially clear, and deliciously rubbery, guitar sound, and the acoustic guitar on "Till There Was You" is rich and smooth.

Two of the Beatle's lesser known songs, "Devil in Her Heart" (a cover) and "Not a Second Time" (by Lennon/McCartney) are two of the best balanced tracks on the whole disk. I'm not sure what was done here, but the left and right separation doesn't seem as pronounced on these tracks, and the blend is really nice.

Again, little things come to the forefront. There's a bit of distortion on the bass drum in "All I've Got to Do", which isn't nearly as charming as the distorion in "Chains" on the previous disk. "All My Loving" is notable for its complete lack of instruments in the right channel. Other tracks have this lack, I'm sure, but here it was obvious. "In your face" obvious.

"Don't Bother Me", sung by George, is a bit muddier than most of the other tracks, and the vocal has a bit more reverb than the other tracks. The vocals on "Hold Me Tight" are also a bit muddy and sound a bit far away. In "I Wanna Be Your Man", sung by Ringo, the instruments, especially the drums, sound a bit thin. Also, the drums are back in the left channel again, unlike the Ringo-sung tune on the previous disk.

And one of the oddest things I found about the album was on "Little Child". During the instrumental break, the bass sounds like it's in both channels. Then, suddenly, when the vocals come back in, the bass abruptly leaves the right channel and drops in volume on the left. It's really quite jarring when you listen to it with headphones.

But really, these are all nitpicks, and likely have nothing to do with the remastering process. Recording techniques were not sophisticated in 1962 and 1963, and we can't expect albums from that time to live up to our high modern standards. In fact, the sound on these first two remastered CDs is exceptional. Taking a two-track master tape and turning it into a digital stereo CD is no mean feat, and the engineers have given us a product of which they can be proud.

But the best is yet to come. With the next album, A Hard Day's Night, the Beatles moved from two-track to four-track recording. And that gives a digital remastering engineer one helluva lot more to work with.

That's up next.

Stay tuned.