18 October 2009

I Always Give Them My Money

© Somebody



The Beatles released 13 albums in their lifetime if you include Magical Mystery Tour. Which I do. First I had to buy the LPs then the CDs. That is a lot of money before I had a steady job. Add to that all of the Anthology CDs, Past Masters, Live at the BBC, Let it Be Naked, Love. Fortunately they were all released in the days of CDs so I only had to buy them once. I’m glad I never lived in an age when 8 track tapes and cassettes were all the rage. I never bothered with any of the compilations because there was nothing new there and the American versions do not interest me since I did not grow up with that.

5 comments:

Bill said...

My stereo box came this week and I'm expecting the mono box by the end of the month. But I'm really not that obsessive. The truth is, I've never owned all the Beatles' albums. I have everything after Rubber Soul on vinyl and I would occasionally pick up CDs when they were mid-price, but this was a convenient chance to have everything in one place, and I got a reasonable deal online.
I had heard that the albums would be remixed in 'sensible stereo' as opposed to the weird hard-left and hard-right mixes of the originals but that doesn't seem to the the case.

I've always wanted to hear the mono mixes because those are the ones the Beatles took the most care on. They spent two weeks mixing Sgt Pepper for mono (a long time back then) and two days mixing it for stereo, which clearly shows which format they took more seriously. If I were a tragic completist, I could have got mono versions on the Capitol boxes when they came out. I didn't because I never considered them to be real Beatles albums. But if US fans want to have the albums as they remember them the first time, that's fine by me.

The one thing I definitely won't be buying is that silly bloody Rock Band kit.
I don't play Guitar Hero.
I play guitar.

Anonymous said...

Their 1000% better then the old cds.

Sasha said...

You know how I feel about your beatles, but if you think these things are too costly then there is little hope for mankind.

Mia said...

Bill, I'm shocked, appalled and saddened that you never had all the Beatles albums. You should hand in your membership card immediately. I'd guess you have all the World Party albums. All 4 of them.

MagicAlex said...

It's just the opposite. The older albums are more improved because they were recorded on outdated equipment. You're not gonna see much of a difference on later albums because they used higher track machines.

Mono sounds better than stereo because that's what they did originally. They weren't allowed to remix anything so the new stereo is just the old stereo which isn't really stereo, it's just pan and scan.

The 2009 Abbey Road sounds the same as the 1988 Abbey Road, but the 2009 mono Hard Day's Night is light years ahead of the fake stereo 1988 Hard Day's Night.