*PRISTINE* 1980's-era US Beatles LP rips 2021 (THE WHOLE BLOODY SET! + BONUS)
Posted: Fri Aug 06, 2021 6:08 pm
Hey, Gang -
Well, since the great and generous Lord Reith has successfully completed his BBC set
, I figured it was time to create a reason to look forward to Fridays, with the re-release of my complete - and newly revised - set of PRISTINE 1980's-era US Beatles LP rips. 
Each Friday for the next 20 weeks (
!), I'll upload a newly "revisited" version of these classic US LPs, drawn from my original BZ rips. I have painstakingly gone through each rip again with a fine-toothed comb and attempted to create an LP listening experience that resembles as closely as possible what you would have heard from your home turntable back in the 1980's, just without all of the clicks and pops and whatnot. That said, please delete any previous versions of these rips that you might already have.
Please note that I have not used ClickRepair or any other software to clean these up. As before, I did it all by hand, but with far more attention to detail this time around. Also new: I have included both a 16-bit CD Quality version AND a 24-bit Hi-Res version of each rip. Artwork was provided primarily by our friends guthera and powerPC, among others.
As I said the last time around (special thanks to Beezer for finding the original BZ thread, which I'll provide in full later):
hxxps://we.tl/t-oSm0GNZvIH
Well, since the great and generous Lord Reith has successfully completed his BBC set
, I figured it was time to create a reason to look forward to Fridays, with the re-release of my complete - and newly revised - set of PRISTINE 1980's-era US Beatles LP rips. Each Friday for the next 20 weeks (
!), I'll upload a newly "revisited" version of these classic US LPs, drawn from my original BZ rips. I have painstakingly gone through each rip again with a fine-toothed comb and attempted to create an LP listening experience that resembles as closely as possible what you would have heard from your home turntable back in the 1980's, just without all of the clicks and pops and whatnot. That said, please delete any previous versions of these rips that you might already have.Please note that I have not used ClickRepair or any other software to clean these up. As before, I did it all by hand, but with far more attention to detail this time around. Also new: I have included both a 16-bit CD Quality version AND a 24-bit Hi-Res version of each rip. Artwork was provided primarily by our friends guthera and powerPC, among others.
As I said the last time around (special thanks to Beezer for finding the original BZ thread, which I'll provide in full later):
So, without further ado, here's the first in the collection... Meet The Beatles!Back in the '80s, disappointed by the quality of the sound I was getting out of my beat-up '60s and '70s pressings of the US Beatles LPs, I decided to augment my meager collection with a complete, BRAND NEW set of their albums. Slowly, but surely (after all, money didn't grow on trees like it does now!), I bought them (or was occasionally gifted a few) one at a time. After many months of alternately buying and saving, I managed to "collect them all" (not to make them sound like cheap toys in a cereal box
).
Here's the kicker though - and an unexpected bit of prescience on my part back then - I had become a firm believer in a little motto I'd championed when it came to my record collection:
"You can tape a record, but you can't record (read: REH-kerd) a tape." In other words, rather than buying factory-made Beatles cassette tapes, I'd buy the LPs and play them ONCE, recording them onto blank cassettes for all my future listening. In this way, I'd have both an LP record AND a cassette. Plus, if the cassette ever gave me any trouble, I could go back to my "source" LP and make another one... but that was never necessary.
So, there these gorgeous, new LPs sat in my collection for the last 35 or so years.
Until now.
Over the next few weeks, I'll be unearthing these basically MINT LPs and creating LP rips to share with everyone here on this thread. Even if you already have these US LPs in your collection, I hope you'll enjoy these beautiful 1980s pressings, played for the first time in over three decades!
So, to kick things off, here is my '80s Capitol "Retro Rainbow" pressing of Meet The Beatles! in 16 bit FLAC for your listening pleasure. As before, I have opted to include the actual stylus "drops" and "lifts". Beyond that, I've done nothing to these recordings other than remove major abnormalities by hand and normalize them to -3dB.
hxxps://we.tl/t-oSm0GNZvIH
