Beatles Red & Blue Albums Remastered Oct. 19 (Part Two)

I'm not getting these.

Evan

 

I haven't even gotten around to getting all the stereo remasters yet! So this is way down on my list....

 

I'll pick 'em up soon, I think.

Harry

 

I just got them. If they insist on issuing the Beatles in digipacks, WHY can't they house the discs in some sort of protective inner sleeve??

 

Some trivia I found out today. Did you all know that the Red cover & the Please Please Me cover are 2 different pictures? I always thought they were the same....

 

Anything interesting in the new essays in the booklets?

 

FWIW, I also believe that the issue with the intro of "A Hard Day's Night" is the (slightly?) damaged master tape, and what we hear on 2009 remaster / 2010 red album is the best they could do in Cedar "fixing" or "masking" it. Probably the remastering team had decided that most people would not hear it anyway so they voted for using the fixed master rather than a clean safety copy. Who's to know, unless they tell us.

Stan Ricker, who worked with the Beatles master tapes at MFSL, once said in an interview:

...And, of course, the acetate tape was brittle and one time, the tail end of one of the numbers just shattered all over the cutting room floor. Well, I mean that makes it sound really bad, like spilling a bag of potato chips and then walking on them, you know. It wasn't that bad. It was probably a length of tape, maybe six or eight inches long, but it fractured into something like 200 tiny little pieces, so it took the better part of a day to put it all back together.​

I guess something similar must have happened at EMI sometime between 1993 and 2009 with the "A Hard Day's Night" master...

 

I'll probably get the red 62-66.

 

Wow! I can't believe anyone could have just spotted that today! You've cheered me up no end!!

 

I can confirm that "A Day In The Life" has the clean intro.

 

Have a laugh at me too, then. It's not like Paul's wearing a top hat on Please Please Me's cover. You have to look at them together to spot the differences.

 

I didn't notice it either but I guess it makes sense that they would use an alternative photo from the same photo shoot for the Red album.

 

As a photoshopper I always thought they are different - at least because of different picture tone and different framing.

 

I have been listening to The Beatles for nearly as long as our host ... I do believe he stated 46 years in another recent thread ... and I have NEVER known this about the pics ... a great spot!

But you know, I have actually paused a few times when looking at PPM, and thought to myself something seemed strange about the picture ... I didn't grow up with that LP as it was, of course, British ... and did not own it at all until the '87 CD, and was therefore infinitely more familiar with the '73 red comp ..so PPM always looked a little strange, and now I know why - its actually another photo from the shoot ...

Awsome spot !

 

wait! I actually don't see any difference !

just kidding !

 

Wow!

Never noticed that PPM and 62-66 use two different photos...

 

I would imagine it would be more likely that the People who had access to PPM since 1963 would be more likely to notice a difference to those who didn't. Personally I noticed it as soon as I got PPM in 1982, but if I had waited until the CD era, I might not have noticed.

 

So these other stories we've always heard that the Beatles' master tapes have always remained in pristine condition, exactly as they were each time they were sealed in their tins? Was they lying to us?

But what I really don't get it this - once a DIGITAL RECORD has been made of the best playback of the analogue tape possible at a previous time, why not use that digital record of the playback event rather than fix a later, flawed playback event? The whole point of moving towards digital *anything* was the lack of degradation of the information. Frozen in time. Why not just edit the opening chord from another digital source - like the master used for the 1993 CDs?

 

Me too!

 

The "matched" photos on the Red and Blue covers are my favorite things about them. The juxtaposition just sort of sums up the '60s...and in particular the genius of a band that could move from "She Loves You" to "I Am the Walrus" in 4 years.

'Course, the drugs helped too...

 

I'd imagine the digital source from 1993 is 16/44 compared to the recent work being done at 24/192.

 

Tell me you're all kidding!

 

Don't bother with these if you've got the 1993 CD's..these CD's use those masters,Again!-And,aside from better graphics,new Liner Notes and the restoring the "Apple" logo on both the CD's and Back Cover (Which was missing on the original Backs of the Booklets),the sound,mixes and concepts are baasically the same,with louder,Brickwalled (At least,to MY ears!) Sound....