Beatles Mono Box - best way to listen?

There is an interesting fact about the mixing for mono releases I read in the book "Recording The Beatles" by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew:
When mixing for mono at Abbey Road only one of the two speakers was used. I beleive it was the right-hand speaker, but I'll have too look that up.

 

Not me, but I did try listening with one ear covered up and I must admit that my preference was to listen with both ears.

 

Haha. In other words, "leave the mono CDs to the professionals, son."

 

Tha's why I ended up buying both the Stereo and the Mono Box sets...expensive, but the best of both worlds.

 

I bought this set when it was first released but haven't listened to it too much because I like records better and own a few of the early UK mono pressings on vinyl. I listened to With the Beatles this morning and was really impressed with the sound. I'm using a tube receiver that I didn't have when I first bought this set so maybe that makes a difference to my ears. Anyway, I'm going to start playing these CDs more often.

 

Just got my mono box the other day. I popped "Please Please Me" into my car CD changer and "I Saw Her Standing There" came on. Now I get it! McCartney's bass was there all along. I'll be damned.

I also spun "Magical Mystery Tour" at home, and was amazed how good it sounded. I'm glad I took the plunge, this is worth $100.

 

Well worth a hundred bucks, that's for sure!

 

I love the mono box so much that I put it in the lock box with my other valuables and papers last night when the tornadoes were around.

 

I held off on buying the mono box back in 2009, waiting for a good deal, & I couldn't resist the current sale price of $99 at Best Buy, so I picked up a copy the other day.

It still amazes me how people are so protective of this set. Personally, I can't stand having to take each disc out of its' plastic protective sleeve each time I want to play one of the discs. At a price of only $8.25 per disc, my mono CD's are staying inside their respective paper sleeves (I can't stand those super thin plastic sleeves that the CD's come packaged in, either) & cardboard jackets, & are going right on my shelf with all of my other CD's for easy access. I have tons of other digipak cased discs that are completely unprotected by anything that I actually paid more for than the mono Beatles discs, individually.

Now maybe if I had paid $250 - $300 for my set I'd keep them inside all of their protective sleeves, but at the price I paid ...... no way.

I will keep everything that came with the set, but all of the plastic sleeves will be going inside the box, which itself will be stored away in a closet. I feel like the only person on this forum who will be handling/storing my Beatles mono discs so shamelessly ........

 

The price of everything, the value of nothing....

 

If I'm understanding you correctly, I don't think you get what I was saying ....... at all.

 

You're right. The packaging is a PITA. I just keep the discs in those cheapy cd sleeves from Sleeve City and leave the packaging alone.

 

Beatles Mono Box - best way to listen?

My answer: tube amp, one paper-cone full range speaker, LOUD!

 

Listen with one hand covering your left ear

 

That's exactly what I love about this set and it makes playing the discs feel all the more special. I enjoy the time and effort it takes to unwrap and take the discs out. It's sort of like dialing the numbers on a vault that holds something precious and valuable behind it's door.

 

When I noticed this thread, I wasn't thinking about a technical answer.

I was thinking about how I took all of the mono albums in the CD box and decomposed them into four song EPs....

Not semi-random four song groupings of my choice. I used discogs.com as a guide and discovered it was possible to emulate EPs that were released in various territories around the globe.


At first I was wondering if there were enough EPs (and/or 45 rpm singles) to scoop up all of the tracks.

If you expand the scope to include places like spain, portugal, france, holland, italy, etc. it turns out it IS possible.


I was able to find a home for every song in the box up until Sgt. Pepper and the White album (no one was releasing EPs by that time - save for the MMT gatefold EP set).


Store them on a music server as lossless files if that's your thing. It's much simpler than swapping cds around quickly. And that way you can leave the album sequence for stereo versions of the songs. I just flat out didn't like having two copies of every album. Breaking the mono box down into EPs solved that problem for me.

For the record, I solved the Sgt. Pepper problem by keeping the album as mono with an 1967 date, and adding a stereo version of the album with a 1978 date (combined with a photo of the picture disc that was timed to steal some thunder from the dumb stigwood produced film).

I solved the White Album problem by combining all of the white album into one long track and making it a "bonus song" for the "Hey Judge" / "Revolution" single... the stereo versions live as separate tracks in my world now. The mono version exists as one long experience


I added the original artwork too - some of it is amazing. Much of it I was unfamiliar with. I even found a photo of the unreleased Apple acetate for the unreleased 1968 Yellow Submarine material.

 

And if you're willing to expand your scope to Mexico, Thailand & South America, you can scoop up a lot more (though not all) of those post-1966 tracks. You could go well into the solo years if you were so inclined...heck, there's a Brazilian 1978 7" 4-song EP from the "George Harrison" album out there!