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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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 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?"
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.
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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.
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.
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]
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.
Best source I can find: https://www.beatlesstory.com/blog/2017/05/07/jimi-hendrix-th...
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.
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.
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.
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?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/She%27s_Leaving_Home
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.
That being said, it's so different from the original that it makes me a bit uncomfortable.
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.
He discusses it in a release interview somewhere.