From the industry organ MIX Magazine, an article about the engineers
and
their approach to the Remaster project:
The Beatles Re-Mastered, 2009
By Rick Clark
A Look at the New Stereo and Mono Box Sets
It's been 22 years since the Beatles catalog was given its big launch
on the
CD format. Since then, many other artist catalogs have regularly been
re-mastered and repackaged. Meanwhile, years passed and fans of The
Beatles
wondered why their catalog wasn't getting the same treatment,
especially
with all the advancements made in the digital technology since the
'80s.
Well, all of that has now been more than amply addressed, as evidenced
with
September's EMI and Apple Corps' release of the entire Beatles
catalog
re-mastered from the original mono and stereo masters and offered in
two
deluxe box sets: The Beatles Stereo Box Set and The Beatles Mono Box
Set.
So, did they substantially improve upon the existing versions?
Absolutely!
Listening to both entire sets is a revelation, which is quite a
statement
considering this is probably the best-known artist catalog in the
history of
recorded music.
The re-mastering effort, which happened over a period of four years,
began
with a crew of engineers at Abbey Road Studios. Mix spoke with
engineer Alan
Rouse, who coordinated the team, and senior engineer Guy Massey,
concerning
this project.
"The whole process was spread over a few people to try and achieve,
what we
hope, at the end of the day, is going to be the best we could get,"
Rouse
says. "No one person was going to take the blame for getting it wrong,
so we
can spread the blame amongst all of us! We keep everything at Abbey
Road, so
it was a very long process-mucking about with machines, A/Ds, test
tapes-trying to determine how we ended up with what we ended up with.
We did
blind tests, as well, after that."
The transfers were done on a 1972 Studer A-80. From there, they went
into a
high-resolution Prism Sound ADA-8XR into Pro Tools at 24 bits/192 kHz.
"When
we put on the masters and compared them with the original CDs, we all
felt,
in general, that what we were hearing on the masters was immediately
more
transparent than the original CDs," states Massey, who worked on the
stereo
re-masters with mastering engineer Steve Rooke and Paul Hicks.
For those concerned the Beatles re-masters would follow the path of
many
other recently re-mastered catalogs, which have changed the dynamics
that
existed on the original albums, the good news is that great pains were
taken
to ensure the integrity of the original recordings.
"We didn't want to obviously have these as loud as a modern rock
record,"
says Massey. "Basically, the stereo re-masters, at the maximum, are
only 4
dBs louder than the original CDs. We used limiting very sparingly,
and
hopefully very transparently. We wanted to retain the dynamics of the
songs
and basically not limit them."
The approach wasn't to make the sound merely more appealing to
"modern"
ears, but rather, to try and approximate what the team felt George
Martin
and the band would have wanted had they not been limited by the vinyl
medium. "We have got some of the [disc] cutting notes from the '60s
that
Harry Moss did and there was very little that he did to them, but the
inevitable things were sometimes reduction of bass, because he
couldn't get
it on-the vinyl couldn't handle the bass back then," says Massey.
"You'll
notice elevated bass and louder drums now. We really tried to push
some of
those elements. We weren't trying to just make a cleaner version of
the
original stereos."
Rouse is quick to point out that all the tapes, which were EMI 811,
were in
excellent condition. "EMI used to be quite a good company for
manufacturing
things, including tape," remarks Rouse. "We've never baked an EMI
tape.
Ever! We checked the heads after each title and a little bit of dust
was
about all we encountered. "
Nevertheless, the old tape leader provided it's own occasional issues:
"We
haven't ever really heard the mono master tapes, apart from the first
four
CDs, which were out in mono. So all of the splicing tape on those old
mono
masters had dried and fallen apart, which was quite irritating,
especially
in rewinding the first time through. You'd rewind. It stops. Join it
up.
Stops."
That said, Rouse states they didn't merely put on an album master reel
and
"record the whole album in one go," adding that everything was
"transferred
one track at a time."
Concerning any cleaning up of extraneous sounds found on the tapes,
Rouse
points out, "If there was anything like clicks, microphone pops,
sibilance,
we chose to deal with them, because they're not really meant to be
part of
the performance. But we did not remove squeaky drum pedals, little
coughs
and squeaky chairs at the end of certain chords, because they are part
of
the performance. Artistically, we haven't touched anything."
Massey states that they used CEDAR to address most of these issues.
"On the
earlier albums there was more sort of vocal 'pop'-type stuff. It was
obviously easier to hear and hone, because we had the band in one side
and
the vocals in the other in the stereos," says Massey. "With the
monos,
because the picture is obviously straight down the middle, it's harder
to
hear some of those idiosyncrasies. We didn't do as much restoration
work,
because we felt it wasn't necessary because we couldn't hear some of
the
things."
"Guy and Paul [Hicks] would go in and do the mastering in Steve's
room,"
says Rouse, "and on the following day they would go into Studio 3,
which is
a room we've used consistently for doing Beatles remixing and listen
there,
because we're familiar with the sound there and it's another
alternative
listening room. If they decided they weren't comfortable with certain
things
that day, they'd make adjustments the following day. Eventually,
myself and
Mike Heatley, who have been involved in the projects for years, would
sit
and listen to what they did in my room, and we would listen to them as
they
stood as albums and, if we felt there was still something we would
like to
hear a little bit more or a little less of, then we'd ask Steve and
Guy."
The speakers used to evaluate the masters ranged from large Quested
and B&W
monitors to listening on iPod.
While most of the public knows the Beatles' catalog through the '80s
CDs,
the role of the mono box was to please those who had the original
mono
albums and wanted to experience re-mastered CD versions that totally
captured the spirit and sonic qualities of those mixes. While the mono
mixes
are regarded as the official mixes for the earlier part of the
catalog, the
new stereo re-masters will replace the existing Beatles CD catalog as
the
official releases.
The Beatles In Mono box also features the original 1965 stereo mixes
of
Help! and Rubber Soul. Those mixes have previously not been available
on CD,
as the original CD versions of those albums were remixes done by
George
Martin in the '80s.
"He was never happy with the balance [of the original stereo vinyl
album
mixes] of Help! and Rubber Soul," Rouse says, "so he remixed those two
and
was going to move on to Revolver and Sgt. Pepper and then realized it
was
going to be too difficult. So that's why those two are the only ones
that
were done. We know that people wanted to hear the original stereos, so
that's
why they were put out along with the monos."
Most people familiar with the stereo CD versions don't realize that it
was
the mono mixes on the original releases that received the most
focused
attention from Martin and the band. Aficionados of the mono mixes
will
quickly tell you they are masterful and probably the best way to
experience
much of their music, but as Rouse (who personally prefers the stereo)
states, "Everybody's entitled to their opinion and I think the monos
have
just as much mileage as the stereos. It's just what you're used to.
"It's the stereo versions that are going to be going forward from
here. The
people that are going to be interested in the mono CDs primarily are
going
to be those who bought mono in the first place and want to get an
alternative to the vinyl that they've got at home. So from that point
of
view, we treated them with a slightly more audiophile version. The
stereos
are slightly more modern. When you look at the ages of people buying
Beatles, they're young, but we still took into account the older
generation
of people who would still want to hear the stereos, as well. It was a
compromise between trying to help them a little bit for the future,
while at
the same time still maintaining the authenticity of the past-whereas
the
monos are just that little bit more authentic, if you like."
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