In some cases the mono mixes were the ones the Beatles themselves were present for. Some of the stereo mixes were the audio engineers experimenting on their own — this is why Beatles mono mixes are highly sought-after. Can’t recall whether Sgt. Pepper’s was a mono mix originally, but probably an easy search to find out — I’m too lazy to go to my bookshelf and flip through to the Beatles studio notes at the moment…
It was, and there are even some significant differences. On she's leaving home, the mono mix was speed up with the mono version's length coming in at 3:26 and the stereo at 3:35 [0]. I believe (running off of memory here too) that the first album where the stereo mix got some actual attention was the white album.
I've listened to the real thing ie Beetles live and releases on vinyl, tape cassette (of various grades - iron n chromium etc) and CD. I am not a sound engineer nor do I buy cables that cost more than a few quid.
Sgt Peppers sounds right to me because that's how it sounds. A bit self referential but you have to remember that things were a bit different back then. Rather a lot of sound engineering stuff in popular music was being invented at the time.
In my view, the sound that was recorded and post processed at the time and released is the correct one. A well preserved record (vinyl) from the time will have a decent representation on it. I don't think you can go back and retrospectively "improve" it. This proposed change is just a remix and a re-interpretation. It is not canonical.
> the sound that was recorded and post processed at the time and released is the correct one
that's a fun angle - what is the "correct" sound?
a different way to define the "correct" sound could be to claim that experience of listening to the band playing live is the one true correct "sound". In principle you could try to approximately recreate that live sound using a live beatles cover band or some kind of computer simulated beatles [+].
but that perspective of "correct" being a live listening experience ignores the contribution of production to the end product that was shipped & listened to, as you're advocating for.
[+] e.g. try to simulate the sound of all the instruments and the vocals from first principles or something, perhaps fitting them to the actual recordings using some belief about the observation model & error model of how the true sounds would have gotten recorded/distorted/mangled/mixed into the recorded sounds, using the standard equipment and techniques of the day. now we've turned the problem into an arbitrarily hard ill-defined inverse problem, so we can probably make it sound like however we want depending on what assumptions we make, so arguably this is a weird and overly complex way of producing one of many possible remixes or reinterpretations.
"that's a fun angle - what is the "correct" sound?"
I think you are absolutely correct here and I crapped out! - there is no correct.
There is no correct sound but there might be "authentic" sound or perhaps the original sound. The thing is I don't think you can go back on the past when several people who were there are now dead and the rest of them and my tiny recollection are well over 50 odd years old.
Basically, what I'm asking for is: go easy on history.
An album is only mixed for whatever technology is available at the time. The moment you convert an old vinyl record to cassette tape it has already deviated from what was "correct". The same goes for CDs, 5.1, Atmos and whatever else will show up in the future.
In fact if the Sgt Pepper recording that sounds so right to you is in stereo (which has been the default version since 1968), you yourself aren't listening to the original canonical one.
I mean, I did a bunch of remastering back in the day — generally old stuff being re-released on new media. It was always from the finished original mixes (or copies if using the originals was impractical).
There's a vast quantity of stuff out there getting remastered constantly through the ages. For vinyl, for cassette, for CD, for streaming, for whatever. Or multiple times for the same medium, because the old masters wore out, were damaged or lost... And sure, sometimes remastering is done for aesthetic reasons, but it's not common.
I guess if you're going to limit your definition of "remastered" to "the stuff that gets marketed as 'remastered'" then there are going to be more releases in there where remixing was done.
But remixing (unless the goal is DJ-style remixing) is difficult, because reproducing the original mix environment is a huge challenge. In theory it's become more feasible in recent years if the mixing is done totally inside a DAW, but it's still hard to guarantee that the system can be rebooted (so people save "stems"). Long-term archival is a hard problem, even if your goal is just to preserve linear PCM sound files!
It's true about the stereo thing. So many people are used to almost laughable stereo that the Beatles' records were remixed to yet so many (including myself) see these as the canonical versions and were inspired by this lopsided mixing technique, copying it for decades to come (mostly in independent music). But ya, there is something to it... pan the bass and drums hard into one channel and the guitar and a way too loud tambourine in the other! It really does actually sounds great :)
I actually lament the lack of way-too-loud percussion in "music these days". Well, ok, I'm opening myself up for a deluge of "but what about this style of music that makes percussion way too loud!???" Well, ok, I guess I'm just talking about guitar-driven music here. So ya, I guess I'm saying, "Guitar-driven music need louder tambourine... damn these kids today!!!". I'm not saying that but, you know :)
> In fact if the Sgt Pepper recording that sounds so right to you is in stereo (which has been the default version since 1968), you yourself aren't listening to the original canonical one.
Just to add for neophytes-- audio improvements over the past 100 years have no discernible relationship to the pace or quality of video improvements.
I say this because at least in the U.S. it is a highly visual culture. If you look at leaps from black and white to color to digital to hidef to 4k, etc. (and especially increasing framerate), you get a sense of monumental improvements in quality. New shit looks so good that the old shit is ruined now because it looks blurry by comparison and can even be pain-inducing to watch.
So one might think, "Gee, stuff in stereo must be twice as good as old shit in mono!" But even paxys example of Sgt Pepper isn't pedantry. It's not just that mono versions are the canonical ones that the band actually help mix and approve. It's that they sound great. A listener doesn't have to do the aural version of "squinting" to hear what the Beatles were doing in that album.
A bit of a tangent but you can scan virtually any film made between 1915 and 2000 or so and get a pristine, super sharp 4K to 6k copy. That’s because they were shot on 35mm film. 35mm film is estimated to have a “resolution” of around 4K.
Even black and white films, if you see an old nitrate print that’s been well preserved, it will be incredibly sharp. And I’m talking about stuff from the 1920s - 1930s. You might not know about this because the digital/tv versions of these films might be lower quality. But film capture technology has been sharp for 100 years.
The exception to this is ofc stuff that was shot for television on video since its invention. But that would be mostly television shows or live broadcasts.
was Seinfeld shot on video or 35mm film? Interesting to know.
Also Netflix's obsession with 4K is slightly anti-scientific and counterproductive imo. They are really boxing in their content creators at times, plus 4K can't be resolved in a reasonably large television at a moderate distance from a couch anyway. 4K is the dumbest thing. There's one cinematographer who said for viewing even 1080p was pretty good, and hardly distinguishable from 4K - for CINEMA screens. HDR is cool tho.
But Netflix can upcharge for a 4K subscription. ;-)
Seinfeld was shot on 35mm film so bully for them. The HD versions are interesting. You see parts of the set that were meant to be hidden in 4:3. You also see a lot of makeup errors. Once you see where the makeup ends on Elaine's hairline you can't unsee it.
What do you mean the HD version of Seinfeld is 16:9? That is a complete distortion of the intention of EVERYONE involved with making the show.
I hate when they do that. I can’t watch the HBO HD copy of The Wire for the same reason. The whole point of cinema is you choose what the f** is within the frame. That’s literally PART of the art form, and an integral one at that.
> A bit of a tangent but you can scan virtually any film made between 1915 and 2000 or so and get a pristine, super sharp 4K to 6k copy.
Another tangent-- if you watch the original 35mm film on a 35mm projector, you won't get the same "pristine" experience as the 4K or 8K tv which does some uncanny frame-rate upsampling thing which makes the moving images appear as if they're happening in real life.
If you listen to a mono reel-to-reel or record of Helter Skelter on equipment available to the Beatles at the time of the recording, McCartney's voice will sound pretty godammned close to as pristine (if not exactly for most people) as listening to a 24-bit zillion-herz professionally remastered digital recording of the same thing.
We've spend the past fifty years developing so much fidelity in video that we scratch our heads thinking about someone watching Happy Days on an old school tube.
We've spent the past 30+ years trying to convince cranks that CD quality doesn't degrade to triangle waves right below Nyquist. Meanwhile, it seems that vinyl made a comeback and shows no signs of slowing any time soon. Also meanwhile, absolutely nothing has improved audibly in terms of "framerate" because CDs really were able to encode the entire frequency range that is audible to human beings. (Higher sampling rate can be useful for digital filters and other purposes, but that's not what we're discussing here.)
>Just to add for neophytes-- audio improvements over the past 100 years have no discernible relationship to the pace or quality of video improvements.
Not to mention the audio quality has declined in some ways.
Back in the day even casual music fans had hi-fi systems (even if cheap ones).
Today the huge majority, even so called music junkies (unless they're also into hi-fi), will listen through crappy headphones, computer speakers, and so on.
(and/or heavily compressed mp3, streaming, or YouTube music)
Funny story: the first person to perform "Sgt. Pepper" live was Jimi Hendrix. I read an interview with McCartney about this. The Beatles released the album on a Thursday, then had plans to see Hendrix the next Sunday. Hendrix got word they were coming, rehearsed like a madman, and opened his set with it.
The Analogues are a good Beatles tribute band that plays the stuff live and tries to reproduce the sound (original equipment where possible, horn and string backup). There have been other acts that have done well at smaller scale (such as Beatlejuice), but you can see and hear the Analogues on-line quite easily. For me, if Covid had not occurred I would have jumped the puddle to see them.
How do you know how it sounded in the studio, from the high quality masters, on their studio monitors? I think that'd be the true representation, not a vinyl facsimile.
A lot of old music "doesn't sound right", and most of the time it's because we didn't understand stereo imaging in the 60s and just went with "what sounded good".
Turns out, we're willing to make the same mistakes today by remastering this in a format nobody will use instead of standard stereo.
Anyone else find the crescendos on "A Day in the Life" to sound very different on the 2017 remix compared to older mixes? Not just more/better stereo mixing, but it almost sounds like the instruments are playing different notes. I'm not saying I think they actually rerecorded it, but it almost sounds like they did.
Very much so - the sounds aren't new but the mix is. Giles mixed in a lot more of what was present to try and capture the original intention of that section.
> the Atmos mix of Abbey Road, which was produced for its 50th anniversary in 2019 is “a much better-functioning Atmos mix because it’s much closer to the stereo mix, sonically.”
Having listened to the mix after a recommendation on HN I couldn’t disagree more. The atmos mix sounds terrible. I don’t have high expectations for the sgt peppers mix, the mono mix is just a very high bar. I assume any modern mix will sound good for people that otherwise listen to a lot of modern music but terrible to people used to 60s music.
Whether it's Giles Martin (who IS NOT George Martin, and who did not work with the Beatles) or Steven Wilson remixing every great progressive rock record known to man, all of these are the same.
Replace the vibe, atmosphere and space of whatever the original thing was, with a version in which every little detail is a little bit too close and carefully cut out from its background to be presented, pristine, as if it could be listened to isolated from the music it's in.
Generally if you have a sense of the vibe and space of the original work you'll find the remixing appalling, terrible. It's improved if the goal is to pick out all the details as if you were going to fill out a report or perhaps a postmortem.
It's like being mad old Eno records don't have enough 18k content and blaming the original vinyl and fixing it. Sometimes the artists go along with this nonsense and sometimes they just put up with it, or have passed on and can't be consulted about it.
It is only for the glorification of the remixers: Steven Wilson at least does his own music, though I haven't liked it all that much.
> Generally if you have a sense of the vibe and space of the original work you'll find the remixing appalling, terrible.
It's interesting that one can see this in other arts as well. One example from typography is how Trade Gothic, a mutt of a typeface if ever there was one, got "remastered" into Trade Gothic Next by Akira Kobayashi. The original is warm, scatterbrained, charming, completely imperfect, and generally has a soul. The remaster has... nothing. Completely "corporate neutral". The only thing it has going for it is that it fills out the weight and width axes more completely. (Kobayashi's remasters of other Linotype typefaces were similarly deflating, but Trade Gothic had the most soul to lose.)
(Recently mentioned on HN was MD Primer https://mass-driver.com/typefaces/md-primer , which appears to actually back off this trend and go back to things with imperfections, but alas, commercial fonts are a little tough to use in FOSS projects....)
I think one of the main drivers behind these trends is the switch from analog to digital technologies as media for creation. Analog tech tends to be "one-shot": if you didn't capture something you like, do it again until you do. Often some level of editing is possible, depending on the particular medium, but it's usually a pretty blunt, coarse-grained instrument. Digital, on the other hand, allows unlimited tweaking of every last digit and detail until everyone is bored with it and can no longer go on. This power to revise forever is more dangerous than it looks, because now perfection actually appears attainable, peer artists are already chasing it, and so artists feel they have little choice but to do the same. Even if that's not the best thing for their work as a whole. You can see this in action with photography: in the recent photo threads here, or anywhere else for the last decade, how much time is spent whining about sharpness and gear foibles versus the composition of interesting photographs?
Back in the day, what you had was vinyl records pressed off a signal chain that was a pile of old retro ALL TUBE equipment, and you could listen to it over stereo systems (or indeed mono systems) also built off tubes and made so you could turn the record up REALLY LOUD.
They didn't have transistor mixing consoles until Abbey Road. Geoff Emerick, their best engineer, is on record in his autobiography that they lost a lot of energy and power in that transition, and had to work like hell to make the band still sound good when it sounded that much smaller and weaker than it did back in the days of Pepper and Revolver and the White Album.
I have measured these albums off the original vinyl and know the dynamic energy permitted to that format was substantially greater than anything you get in the 'un-muffled' modern day. You had to turn the record up to get the fullest sound as it was not limited and heavily equalized to compensate for idle, inattentive listening. In particular, peak energy could be 18 dB or more, over the loudest RMS output the records could produce.
They also cut a 15k tone on literally this record, Sgt. Pepper's, so dogs could enjoy the music too. And it worked (as did the later quadraphonic records done using carrier tones of 30 to 50k)
I'm gonna suggest the fault is not in the original record…
I think a lot of the muffled aesthetic is a consequence of the decisions made in the recording/mixing process, there's a strong room reverb across the recording particularly noticeable on Ringo's drums which combined with the high-end softening of the Fairchild 660 compressor featured on Beatles records gives it a "rock concert while standing in line for the bathroom" color. I could be mistaken but it sounds like a lot of the instrumental parts were recorded in single takes in the same room compared to say Abbey Road where it sounds like they were tracked independently. A consequence of tracking multiple lines together is there can be cross-instrument fuzzing that results in "muffling", it can be an intentional effect though for a more live sound. Just my 2c
The Beatles personally supervised the mono mixes until their stereo-only release "Abbey Road". During the 1960s, the stereo audio systems weren't as prevalent, so the band delegated stereo mixes to their producer George Martin.
These mixes tend to separate instruments completely on the Left and Right tracks. Perhaps Martin hoped that this would produce an effect of the instruments coming from many places. Personally, I feel this is gimmicky at best, and disintegrated at worst especially when listening on headphones.
In September 9, 2009, EMI released their then-latest remasters of the Beatles studio discography. In fact, they released two versions: stereo and mono. If I recall correctly, the mono box set sold out quickly, and had to be reissued. This suggests that audiophiles perceive providence in the mono releases.
If you want to listen to the Beatles as the band has intended, you should listen to the mono mixes on vinyl.
> Perhaps Martin hoped that this would produce an effect of the instruments coming from many places. Personally, I feel this is gimmicky at best, and disintegrated at worst especially when listening on headphones.
This is not how it happened.
Stereo record players started appearing in the late 1950s and were seen as somewhat a gimmick at first. The equipment for producing stereo records was not like it is today. You might use a four-track tape machine to record the band, and mix it on a console which had a three-way switch for each channel: left, center, and right. Sgt. Pepper came out in 1967 and was produced on such equipment, although the studio was able to synchronize two tape machines together (and they also bounced mixes to tape to build up layers).
They just didn’t have pan pots on their mixing consoles back then.
By the time Abbey Road came out in 1969, the studio had moved to eight-track machines which could more easily be synchronized, you could find a basic “pan” knob on your mixing console, and no mono mix of the record was made.
I understand motivation for remix of "Let it be" - McCartney was very dissatisfied with "wall of sound" by Spector.
And it's already done.
But "Sgt. Pepper" - I think the only motivation is to try squeeze a little bit more money from fans.
My hope is that sometime in future we will get a remix of Metallica "Justice for All" with bass on it.
But Hetfield already stated that they don't plan to do that:
> "And why would you change that? Why would you change history? Why would you all of a sudden put bass on it? There is bass on it, but why would you remix an album? You can remaster it, yes, but why would you remix something and make it different? It'd be like… I don't know. Not that I'm comparing us to the Mona Lisa, but it's, like, 'Uh, can we make her smile a little better?!' You know?! Why?"
56 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] thread[0] Stereo sound and 13th century painting THE BLINDBOY PODCAST 2021 APR 13 ⋅ 1:16:46
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She%27s_Leaving_Home
Sgt Peppers sounds right to me because that's how it sounds. A bit self referential but you have to remember that things were a bit different back then. Rather a lot of sound engineering stuff in popular music was being invented at the time.
In my view, the sound that was recorded and post processed at the time and released is the correct one. A well preserved record (vinyl) from the time will have a decent representation on it. I don't think you can go back and retrospectively "improve" it. This proposed change is just a remix and a re-interpretation. It is not canonical.
that's a fun angle - what is the "correct" sound?
a different way to define the "correct" sound could be to claim that experience of listening to the band playing live is the one true correct "sound". In principle you could try to approximately recreate that live sound using a live beatles cover band or some kind of computer simulated beatles [+].
but that perspective of "correct" being a live listening experience ignores the contribution of production to the end product that was shipped & listened to, as you're advocating for.
[+] e.g. try to simulate the sound of all the instruments and the vocals from first principles or something, perhaps fitting them to the actual recordings using some belief about the observation model & error model of how the true sounds would have gotten recorded/distorted/mangled/mixed into the recorded sounds, using the standard equipment and techniques of the day. now we've turned the problem into an arbitrarily hard ill-defined inverse problem, so we can probably make it sound like however we want depending on what assumptions we make, so arguably this is a weird and overly complex way of producing one of many possible remixes or reinterpretations.
if they never played it live, it makes the idea of regarding the live sound as the "true" sound even more absurd.
These songs were only ever fully performed in the studio.
I think you are absolutely correct here and I crapped out! - there is no correct.
There is no correct sound but there might be "authentic" sound or perhaps the original sound. The thing is I don't think you can go back on the past when several people who were there are now dead and the rest of them and my tiny recollection are well over 50 odd years old.
Basically, what I'm asking for is: go easy on history.
In fact if the Sgt Pepper recording that sounds so right to you is in stereo (which has been the default version since 1968), you yourself aren't listening to the original canonical one.
Audio recordings are mastered for whatever distribution technology is available at the time.
Mixing, as an extension of creative production (Sgt. Peppers is a landmark work for this trend in pop music), is less commonly redone.
There's a vast quantity of stuff out there getting remastered constantly through the ages. For vinyl, for cassette, for CD, for streaming, for whatever. Or multiple times for the same medium, because the old masters wore out, were damaged or lost... And sure, sometimes remastering is done for aesthetic reasons, but it's not common.
I guess if you're going to limit your definition of "remastered" to "the stuff that gets marketed as 'remastered'" then there are going to be more releases in there where remixing was done.
But remixing (unless the goal is DJ-style remixing) is difficult, because reproducing the original mix environment is a huge challenge. In theory it's become more feasible in recent years if the mixing is done totally inside a DAW, but it's still hard to guarantee that the system can be rebooted (so people save "stems"). Long-term archival is a hard problem, even if your goal is just to preserve linear PCM sound files!
I actually lament the lack of way-too-loud percussion in "music these days". Well, ok, I'm opening myself up for a deluge of "but what about this style of music that makes percussion way too loud!???" Well, ok, I guess I'm just talking about guitar-driven music here. So ya, I guess I'm saying, "Guitar-driven music need louder tambourine... damn these kids today!!!". I'm not saying that but, you know :)
[edited for grammar]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXq1rvuN_lI
Just to add for neophytes-- audio improvements over the past 100 years have no discernible relationship to the pace or quality of video improvements.
I say this because at least in the U.S. it is a highly visual culture. If you look at leaps from black and white to color to digital to hidef to 4k, etc. (and especially increasing framerate), you get a sense of monumental improvements in quality. New shit looks so good that the old shit is ruined now because it looks blurry by comparison and can even be pain-inducing to watch.
So one might think, "Gee, stuff in stereo must be twice as good as old shit in mono!" But even paxys example of Sgt Pepper isn't pedantry. It's not just that mono versions are the canonical ones that the band actually help mix and approve. It's that they sound great. A listener doesn't have to do the aural version of "squinting" to hear what the Beatles were doing in that album.
Even black and white films, if you see an old nitrate print that’s been well preserved, it will be incredibly sharp. And I’m talking about stuff from the 1920s - 1930s. You might not know about this because the digital/tv versions of these films might be lower quality. But film capture technology has been sharp for 100 years.
The exception to this is ofc stuff that was shot for television on video since its invention. But that would be mostly television shows or live broadcasts.
Also Netflix's obsession with 4K is slightly anti-scientific and counterproductive imo. They are really boxing in their content creators at times, plus 4K can't be resolved in a reasonably large television at a moderate distance from a couch anyway. 4K is the dumbest thing. There's one cinematographer who said for viewing even 1080p was pretty good, and hardly distinguishable from 4K - for CINEMA screens. HDR is cool tho.
Seinfeld was shot on 35mm film so bully for them. The HD versions are interesting. You see parts of the set that were meant to be hidden in 4:3. You also see a lot of makeup errors. Once you see where the makeup ends on Elaine's hairline you can't unsee it.
I hate when they do that. I can’t watch the HBO HD copy of The Wire for the same reason. The whole point of cinema is you choose what the f** is within the frame. That’s literally PART of the art form, and an integral one at that.
Another tangent-- if you watch the original 35mm film on a 35mm projector, you won't get the same "pristine" experience as the 4K or 8K tv which does some uncanny frame-rate upsampling thing which makes the moving images appear as if they're happening in real life.
If you listen to a mono reel-to-reel or record of Helter Skelter on equipment available to the Beatles at the time of the recording, McCartney's voice will sound pretty godammned close to as pristine (if not exactly for most people) as listening to a 24-bit zillion-herz professionally remastered digital recording of the same thing.
We've spend the past fifty years developing so much fidelity in video that we scratch our heads thinking about someone watching Happy Days on an old school tube.
We've spent the past 30+ years trying to convince cranks that CD quality doesn't degrade to triangle waves right below Nyquist. Meanwhile, it seems that vinyl made a comeback and shows no signs of slowing any time soon. Also meanwhile, absolutely nothing has improved audibly in terms of "framerate" because CDs really were able to encode the entire frequency range that is audible to human beings. (Higher sampling rate can be useful for digital filters and other purposes, but that's not what we're discussing here.)
Not to mention the audio quality has declined in some ways.
Back in the day even casual music fans had hi-fi systems (even if cheap ones).
Today the huge majority, even so called music junkies (unless they're also into hi-fi), will listen through crappy headphones, computer speakers, and so on.
(and/or heavily compressed mp3, streaming, or YouTube music)
Best source I can find: https://www.beatlesstory.com/blog/2017/05/07/jimi-hendrix-th...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZoIxlRC32k
Also it was recreated in the Hendrix movie starring Andre 3000:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMmhHBr7WDA
Turns out, we're willing to make the same mistakes today by remastering this in a format nobody will use instead of standard stereo.
He discusses it in a release interview somewhere.
Having listened to the mix after a recommendation on HN I couldn’t disagree more. The atmos mix sounds terrible. I don’t have high expectations for the sgt peppers mix, the mono mix is just a very high bar. I assume any modern mix will sound good for people that otherwise listen to a lot of modern music but terrible to people used to 60s music.
Whether it's Giles Martin (who IS NOT George Martin, and who did not work with the Beatles) or Steven Wilson remixing every great progressive rock record known to man, all of these are the same.
Replace the vibe, atmosphere and space of whatever the original thing was, with a version in which every little detail is a little bit too close and carefully cut out from its background to be presented, pristine, as if it could be listened to isolated from the music it's in.
Generally if you have a sense of the vibe and space of the original work you'll find the remixing appalling, terrible. It's improved if the goal is to pick out all the details as if you were going to fill out a report or perhaps a postmortem.
It's like being mad old Eno records don't have enough 18k content and blaming the original vinyl and fixing it. Sometimes the artists go along with this nonsense and sometimes they just put up with it, or have passed on and can't be consulted about it.
It is only for the glorification of the remixers: Steven Wilson at least does his own music, though I haven't liked it all that much.
It's interesting that one can see this in other arts as well. One example from typography is how Trade Gothic, a mutt of a typeface if ever there was one, got "remastered" into Trade Gothic Next by Akira Kobayashi. The original is warm, scatterbrained, charming, completely imperfect, and generally has a soul. The remaster has... nothing. Completely "corporate neutral". The only thing it has going for it is that it fills out the weight and width axes more completely. (Kobayashi's remasters of other Linotype typefaces were similarly deflating, but Trade Gothic had the most soul to lose.)
(Recently mentioned on HN was MD Primer https://mass-driver.com/typefaces/md-primer , which appears to actually back off this trend and go back to things with imperfections, but alas, commercial fonts are a little tough to use in FOSS projects....)
I think one of the main drivers behind these trends is the switch from analog to digital technologies as media for creation. Analog tech tends to be "one-shot": if you didn't capture something you like, do it again until you do. Often some level of editing is possible, depending on the particular medium, but it's usually a pretty blunt, coarse-grained instrument. Digital, on the other hand, allows unlimited tweaking of every last digit and detail until everyone is bored with it and can no longer go on. This power to revise forever is more dangerous than it looks, because now perfection actually appears attainable, peer artists are already chasing it, and so artists feel they have little choice but to do the same. Even if that's not the best thing for their work as a whole. You can see this in action with photography: in the recent photo threads here, or anywhere else for the last decade, how much time is spent whining about sharpness and gear foibles versus the composition of interesting photographs?
The latest Giles Martin mix sounds absolutely perfect. It is the pinnacle.
If you haven't listen to the 2017 of Sgt Pepper's, go and do it right now.
That being said, it's so different from the original that it makes me a bit uncomfortable.
They didn't have transistor mixing consoles until Abbey Road. Geoff Emerick, their best engineer, is on record in his autobiography that they lost a lot of energy and power in that transition, and had to work like hell to make the band still sound good when it sounded that much smaller and weaker than it did back in the days of Pepper and Revolver and the White Album.
I have measured these albums off the original vinyl and know the dynamic energy permitted to that format was substantially greater than anything you get in the 'un-muffled' modern day. You had to turn the record up to get the fullest sound as it was not limited and heavily equalized to compensate for idle, inattentive listening. In particular, peak energy could be 18 dB or more, over the loudest RMS output the records could produce.
They also cut a 15k tone on literally this record, Sgt. Pepper's, so dogs could enjoy the music too. And it worked (as did the later quadraphonic records done using carrier tones of 30 to 50k)
I'm gonna suggest the fault is not in the original record…
These mixes tend to separate instruments completely on the Left and Right tracks. Perhaps Martin hoped that this would produce an effect of the instruments coming from many places. Personally, I feel this is gimmicky at best, and disintegrated at worst especially when listening on headphones.
In September 9, 2009, EMI released their then-latest remasters of the Beatles studio discography. In fact, they released two versions: stereo and mono. If I recall correctly, the mono box set sold out quickly, and had to be reissued. This suggests that audiophiles perceive providence in the mono releases.
If you want to listen to the Beatles as the band has intended, you should listen to the mono mixes on vinyl.
This is not how it happened.
Stereo record players started appearing in the late 1950s and were seen as somewhat a gimmick at first. The equipment for producing stereo records was not like it is today. You might use a four-track tape machine to record the band, and mix it on a console which had a three-way switch for each channel: left, center, and right. Sgt. Pepper came out in 1967 and was produced on such equipment, although the studio was able to synchronize two tape machines together (and they also bounced mixes to tape to build up layers).
They just didn’t have pan pots on their mixing consoles back then.
By the time Abbey Road came out in 1969, the studio had moved to eight-track machines which could more easily be synchronized, you could find a basic “pan” knob on your mixing console, and no mono mix of the record was made.
But "Sgt. Pepper" - I think the only motivation is to try squeeze a little bit more money from fans.
My hope is that sometime in future we will get a remix of Metallica "Justice for All" with bass on it.
But Hetfield already stated that they don't plan to do that:
> "And why would you change that? Why would you change history? Why would you all of a sudden put bass on it? There is bass on it, but why would you remix an album? You can remaster it, yes, but why would you remix something and make it different? It'd be like… I don't know. Not that I'm comparing us to the Mona Lisa, but it's, like, 'Uh, can we make her smile a little better?!' You know?! Why?"
That's quite sad but that's creator's decision.