Red & Blue Albums

[Lord Reith]

PJ actually goes on record saying that MAL produces no artefacts whatsoever. Going by his demo, I think that is a valid statement. The only artefacty audio he played was the vocal separations and he prefaced that with the caveat that it is still experimental.

I don't hear any artefacts from demixing on R&B. Love Me Do is a real challenge for the technology because it is mono, quite dense and has harmonica and vocals together at the same time. It also has acoustic guitar mixed with drums which can cause problems. But it all sounds very clean to me. I Saw Her Standing There is also quite a challenge and there are no obvious artefacts I can hear. However the snare has been messed with and is too loud and has lost it's "room" ambience (the solo is no more echoey than it was on the original... don't know what people are talking about there).

I Wanna Hold Your hand bugs me because the kick drum is all one volume. The song used to start out with heavy kick drum on the intro, then it backed off, then came back loud during that same bit in the "I can't hide" parts. So now it has lost all its light and shade. Any good musician knows that you hold back the goods for when they are needed most. If you play everything loud, there's nowhere left to go! That song particularly makes use of dynamics to put itself across, and that has all been lost. It's just all one constant volume (loud).

Help seems to have completely lost one of the guitar parts. Once again, this was used to build tension during the "help me if you can" sections.

You Can't Do That is way too boomy. God help anyone listening on a speaker bigger than a matchbox.

Generally though, I am okay with all of it. It doesn't really matter how the stuff is mixed, it's the songs and the singers that people respond to. The Beatles are famous for that, not how they were recorded.

[Refugee]

PJ actually goes on record saying that MAL produces no artefacts whatsoever. Going by his demo, I think that is a valid statement. The only artefacty audio he played was the vocal separations and he prefaced that with the caveat that it is still experimental.

I don't hear any artefacts from demixing on R&B. Love Me Do is a real challenge for the technology because it is mono, quite dense and has harmonica and vocals together at the same time. It also has acoustic guitar mixed with drums which can cause problems. But it all sounds very clean to me. I Saw Her Standing There is also quite a challenge and there are no obvious artefacts I can hear. However the snare has been messed with and is too loud and has lost it's "room" ambience (the solo is no more echoey than it was on the original... don't know what people are talking about there).

I Wanna Hold Your hand bugs me because the kick drum is all one volume. The song used to start out with heavy kick drum on the intro, then it backed off, then came back loud during that same bit in the "I can't hide" parts. So now it has lost all its light and shade. Any good musician knows that you hold back the goods for when they are needed most. If you play everything loud, there's nowhere left to go! That song particularly makes use of dynamics to put itself across, and that has all been lost. It's just all one constant volume (loud).

Help seems to have completely lost one of the guitar parts. Once again, this was used to build tension during the "help me if you can" sections.

You Can't Do That is way too boomy. God help anyone listening on a speaker bigger than a matchbox.

Generally though, I am okay with all of it. It doesn't really matter how the stuff is mixed, it's the songs and the singers that people respond to. The Beatles are famous for that, not how they were recorded.

I agree that what he did with "Love Me Do" is phenomenal, as are most of them. With "Day Tripper" though, there are a couple of things going on that make it sound (to me anyway) a bit "off". One of them is that there's a guitar and bass playing in unison, and they're playing in the same octave as well. When I listen to the intro, it sounds like some of the higher-order harmonics that belong to one or the other wound up being allocated to the wrong track, probably more so when they come closer to being at the exact same pitch with each other than when not. It makes me feel a little bit dizzy when wearing my "cans" than when using speakers, but I can hear it either way. There was also a moment in the podcast where he played a short clip of John's isolated vocal where the last syllable sounded very slightly truncated, which may have just been the reverberation from within the studio being cropped off. Assuming that all of the separations are mixed back together and compared against the source from which they were taken as an aural "checksum" of sorts (that's what I would do anyway), that little bit of sound wound up somewhere that it didn't belong that was probably panned more or less to the other side. "Normal" captured a lot of the room in the vocals on that one, and inter-modulating signals that are coming back and hitting the microphone with a relatively wide variance in time are probably the most difficult thing that MAL has to deal with. I really like most of what he's done, but if he were given a mono mix of something that could be compared against a true multi-track, I don't think there would ever be a 100% perfect match, and there's a line between where it works well enough to sound "right" and when it doesn't. I think that "Day Tripper" is one of those instances where it doesn't, but "Girl" is a good example of where it works beautifully. Again, just my $0.02.

[Lord Reith]

Yes, one has to be very careful when there are two similar sounding instruments in the same register. I had my work cut out with tracks like Not A Second Time, Hold Me Tight, Boys, Drive My Car and others. HMT was a particular headache and I still couldn't quite pull the bass and guitar apart on some parts.

[Fred68]

It's just all one constant volume (loud).

Giles' entire mixing philosophy in a nutshell.

[Beatlesiak]

Wanting to somewhat (on my own behalf), sum up the topic of the "expiring" thread: "R&B 2023 remixed by G.M." to add something from myself - for a long time I have had the impression that for a certain group of The Beatles fans over 50+ (which includes me) the chapter of officially published releases ended with the publication of 2009 "B&W Boxes". Later "inventions" are a hybrid of our Beatles and a product aimed at acquiring a new market, a younger generation of listeners with new technologies, preferences related to the methods of production as well as access and requirements and trends in the specificity of contemporary musical productions. The ubiquitous Loudness War and AI personally does not make me happy, it even terrifies me, because it will be more and more difficult to distinguish/recognize what is coming to us, what is authentic and what has been generated and re-assembled. New listeners will probably not pay so much attention to this, but for us (I think) the most important thing is the most perfect and faithful to the untouched original music from "those" times when Fab4 played for us. What about anniversary inventions? it's worth getting to know, but in this case I limit myself only to CDs, because I don't even have the slightest desire to listen to them on vinyl - why take a step forward and a step or even two back? We have to come to terms with it and accept that this is the way of things and there is nothing we can do about it.

[Lord Reith]

I guess they had to do something to get the Beatles back in the public eye again. They were kind of fading fast into obscurity. The new mixes are okay. They are not the ones I would listen to by default but once I got used to the shock changes I have mellowed to them. The vast part of the population doesn't care about mixes, they just care about songs and these new versions have just given the songs a new lease of life and introduced them to some people who might not have heard them before. And John Lennon's voice sounds the same whether it's coming from left, right, centre, or above your head. So none of that actually matters. People will always warm to their songs and the singers because they were great. The gift wrapping doesn't matter so much.

And like I said once before, it kind of gives new fans something to do. We had all those foreign releases and weird formats to compare in the 70s and 80s. Fans lost all that in 1987. So this brings back some of the "messiness" I would call it, in that it allows fans to do what they love most: sort through piles of different versions and find the ones they like, and argue intensely about it with each other along the way. It's all good. It makes being a fan more fun.

[Mr Muckle]

Yeah, imagine your first exposure to the Beatles comes from these 2023 Red and Blue comps, and you grow to love the band as those of us here do, and then 5 years down the road someone turns you on to the original mono and stereo mixes, that will be the same kind of thrill we've all experienced over decades when hearing other (superior or different) mixes. So that could be a real positive, keep the new fans as engaged looking for alternate mixes and bootleg takes, Beatles living history.

[Lord Reith]

Yeah, imagine your first exposure to the Beatles comes from these 2023 Red and Blue comps, and you grow to love the band as those of us here do, and then 5 years down the road someone turns you on to the original mono and stereo mixes, that will be the same kind of thrill we've all experienced over decades when hearing other (superior or different) mixes. So that could be a real positive, keep the new fans as engaged looking for alternate mixes and bootleg takes, Beatles living history.

Yes, exactly. The sad truth is that 1987 made it fairly boring to be a fan unless you knew about bootlegs. Racks that were once filled to the brim with colourful vinyl imports and compilations were suddenly empty. In their place you had that ugly breadbin or the lackluster 87 cd covers. That actually probably did a lot to make The Beatles less visible. Prior to that you could not avoid the burgeoning Beatles sections.

[Refugee]

Yeah, imagine your first exposure to the Beatles comes from these 2023 Red and Blue comps, and you grow to love the band as those of us here do, and then 5 years down the road someone turns you on to the original mono and stereo mixes, that will be the same kind of thrill we've all experienced over decades when hearing other (superior or different) mixes. So that could be a real positive, keep the new fans as engaged looking for alternate mixes and bootleg takes, Beatles living history.

Yes, exactly. The sad truth is that 1987 made it fairly boring to be a fan unless you knew about bootlegs. Racks that were once filled to the brim with colourful vinyl imports and compilations were suddenly empty. In their place you had that ugly breadbin or the lackluster 87 cd covers. That actually probably did a lot to make The Beatles less visible. Prior to that you could not avoid the burgeoning Beatles sections.

I know that a lot of people prefer mono editions, especially of the early material. However, being in my mid-50s, most of the versions I grew up listening to on vinyl were stereo (real stereo in most cases, but with the extreme panning). Out of the first four that were released in mono in 1987, AHDN seemed to be the worst. I couldn't listen to it at all. I stuck with vinyl on those until I found some nicely mastered CDs taken from good vinyl sources.

[Lord Reith]

I know that a lot of people prefer mono editions, especially of the early material. However, being in my mid-50s, most of the versions I grew up listening to on vinyl were stereo (real stereo in most cases, but with the extreme panning). Out of the first four that were released in mono in 1987, AHDN seemed to be the worst. I couldn't listen to it at all. I stuck with vinyl on those until I found some nicely mastered CDs taken from good vinyl sources.

I started with the stereos in the 70s and liked them because I was learning guitar and they made it easy to hear the separate parts. I first heard the mono mixes on the eps which i used to buy because I had not much money, and generally thought they sounded better but I had also just got a prized Hitachi stereo cassette recorder and so was not going to waste it taping in mono. In fact I became obsessed with finding all the stereo mixes, even going so far as to buy The Beatles Second Album just for Thankyou Girl. I think we were all obsessed withn finding the rare stereo mixes. That was another fun thing that was taken away in 1987. What's the fun or challenge when all the rare tracks are packaged together on two ugly black and white albums?

Later on I started buying more EPs (the mono albums were like hen's teeth) to hear what the AHDN/BFS/HELP stuff sounded like in mono and was very impressed. There was a lot more bass presence and the backing was louder. They certainly had a lot more punch to them, whereas the stereo mixes of BFS and Help were very airy and the vocals tended to float in a disembodied and unsatuisfactory manner above the instruments.

As the years wore on I got the japanese red monos, then the Ebbetss monos then the 2009 mono and stereos but by that point was entirely unsatisfied with all of the mixes. I can remember my embarassment when I went into a fancy high end hifi retailer with my mono Japanese Revolver, and they spent half an hour setting up a Regar planar before putting it on and it sounded like CRAP. No deep bass or shimmer to it, no dynamics to speak of and a rather unimpressive sound overall. They were literally laughing at me and making cracks about the red coloured vinyl and the "cheap Apple microphones". I realised at that point that the mono mixes had been made to sound good on very cheap speakers and didn't translate well to bigger setups. The stereos in contrast had better frequency response and dynamics but didn't have any real body to them.

In the end, many years later I solved the problem by remixing them all myself as I knew that was the only way I was ever going to get the sound I wanted. So it took me four years to get Fabaracadabra right, but at least I have what i want now. As I always say, if you want something done you'd better do it yourself. Otherwise you'll waste your life away waiting.