The Beatles 2009 remasters
Posted by judamasmas on 2009/10/07
OK people! I was really expecting for these to get released since a long time ago, I grew up listening to the Beatles and I have almost all their albums in compact disc. The Beatles as opposed to other major British artists like Pink Floyd, David Bowie or The Rolling Stones, have not had a really digital remaster release of their career, it was a shame really, that all we had as standard editions were the first 1987 masters, the first and only release of their music on CD if we don’t count the Anthologies, Capitol Years Box, and the most recent Love. After Love was released with this very fresh sound everybody was expecting new remasters for the Fab Four albums. I myself had to buy the album Love via an Internet store we have in Venezuela and pay more than 5 times its price because Venezuelan music stores went insane before this and they were always crazy about pricing The Beatles music, the album Love was priced about 15 times its normal price (about $100). But the rants against overpricing in my country are material for another post.
This music is great I have really fond memories of listening to The Beatles throughout my life, great moments enjoying with my friends especially the tracks A Day in the Life form Sgt Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band and Strawberry Fields Forever form Magical Mystery Tour. It’s funny that I even thought of a classifying system for people who listen to the Beatles, in a broad sense you have the people who likes the first part of their career from (Please Please Me to Help) and the people who likes the second part (from Help to Let it Be), they have two very differentiated stages, you know, when they started “experimenting” when I really think the music turned a lot more interesting, when I started listening to them I really liked the first stage of their career, but from some years ago I prefer the second stage by far. So my theory was like: the first stage is more likely to be liked by children and people in their 60s or more and the other part to people below 60s, of course, this is no proven truth, it’s just silly speculation. I also have my friends who don’t like The Beatles at all and prefer The Rolling Stones over them…
About this 2009 remasters themselves, I haven’t listened to everything there is yet as I wait to buy it all later this year as a boxset, but I can tell you that so far I heard, the music sounds louder, and maybe sounds a bit brighter. Maybe, the expectation and anticipation was too high that I was expecting something more impressive, but don’t get me wrong, I love the music and must probably will buy the full boxset of the remasters, I also have to compare the two editions with more equipment, I have heard just a couple of albums with my laptop with its own speakers (Altec Lansing) and the iphone default headphones using Winamp. I would like to share with you an experiment I made putting 3 tracks from both remasters in Soundforge (click to enlarge), we can see that the soundwaves are indeed different, but its only a question of volume that’s changed? Or there’s more to it. Please comment your experience with the 2009 remasters.
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ashley said
i love it :]
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