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The Beatles in early '68. Creative highs and personal lows (© Bettman/Corbis)

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Tomorrow is the day (9/9/09) millions of music fans have been waiting 22 years for: The Beatles' studio back catalogue, remastered and available in two lavish CD box sets, The Beatles In Mono and The Beatles Box Set: Remastered In Stereo, goes on sale.

These collections - the mono set is available for a limited time only and the stereo discs can be purchased individually or in the big black box - replace what many consider to be inferior CD transfers that were issued in 1987.

Yesterday, in part one of our review, we put The Beatles' early years - those albums released from 1963-'66 - to the test, rating both stereo and mono versions in exhaustive detail.

In part two, we examine The Beatles' studio years, a period that saw them hit creative highs before their sad, messy end that resulted in yet one final masterpiece.

Do the new CDs deliver The Beatles as you've longed to hear them? Should you part with your hard-earned cash to purchase albums you might already own? And this whole stereo vs. mono thing - is there really a clear-cut difference?

Let's give these babies a spin and find out…

Getting better all the time

"We're fed up with making soft music for soft people," an agitated John Lennon told George Martin late in 1966. "We want to raise the bar a notch."

The Beatle was explaining the band's reasons for getting off the road in order to spend more time in the studio - they were sick of the travel, the hysteria (some of it ugly in the wake of Lennon's 'bigger than Jesus' comment) and the jet engine-loud screams that drowned out whatever they played and however they played it. And in many ways, they were just sick of being The Beatles.

Lennon was making his case for creating a new paradigm for being a band. More importantly, he was arguing for total artistic freedom, which would take shape an album he would later practically disown but one that would, upon its release on 1 June 1967, alter the course of pop music forever.