The Beatles In Mono

Product Information

Mono Masters is a compilation album by the Beatles, and is an alternate, all-mono version of the album Past Masters.

These are either "a revelation", "interesting", an "aberration" or "historical revisionism" depending on who you ask. I was amazed at the number of differences I could hear; not just mixing differences, but really big differences, like missing backing vocals on the stereo Fixing A Hole and of course a whole lot of missing special effects from the stereo Lucy.

But, I'm wondering if there's a release that has true mono that never got the fake stereo processing. Though, of course, taste is a matter of subjective preference, so there's no shame in enjoying the stereo mixes of earlier Beatles records.

Here, the added auditory information of stereo actually does make for a richer, more detailed listen. In 2014, five years after the initial CD release, mono editions of each of the albums were released individually in vinyl format, though the mono editions for CD were still available only in the box set.The Yellow Submarine album, included in the set, is the only original UK mono Beatles LP without a dedicated mono mix. The Beatles in Mono was released to reflect the fact that most of the Beatles' catalogue was originally mixed and released in the monophonic format. The boxed set was released on 180-gram heavyweight vinyl on 8 September 2014, with each disc mastered directly from analog tape sources, rather than the digital remasters used for the CD release.

The stereo mixes are quaint, with a lot of hard panning common to stereo mixes of rock music at the time. Also includes: A double-CD collection of all The Beatles non-album and EP tracks digitally remastered in mono including four mixes unique to this package. The folks at the retirement home can spin their single-channel vinyl all they like, but I was onto bigger and better things. All of the USA albums were released individually on CDs containing both the mono and original stereo mixes; this is the only other way to acquire the mono mixes on CD.The same holds true for the songs " The Ballad of John and Yoko", " Old Brown Shoe" and the single mix of " Let It Be", which were also omitted. This one I only had one rather taxing problem with--Help was dish warped (played convex on one side, concave on the other! Therefore, the last few Beatles LPs— Yellow Submarine, Abbey Road and Let It Be—were mixed only in stereo.

As a result, the track listing for Mono Masters differs from Past Masters on the second half of disc two, omitting some later songs that never had a mono mix ("Old Brown Shoe", "The Ballad of John and Yoko" and "Let It Be"), and adding several songs released on stereo-only albums that had unreleased mono mixes. In the last few years, I've been listening to a lot more pre-stereo recordings on LP and on 78 disks. A significant amount of musicality just evaporates instantly when you load up a stereo version of an early Beatles track.IMHO hard panning like that can work okay for jazz (though I don't prefer it, I'll tolerate it) but doesn't work that well for rock music at all. It was still to remain a "limited edition", but since it had already been certified platinum by the RIAA it was not limited to 10,000 copies as originally stated. The Revolver to white album series of records have the "tubey" cool shimmer of the originals which I lack on the 2014 lp's.