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REVIEW: The Beatles remastered 1963-66
Should you buy the mono and stereo box sets?
Chris Vinnicombe, Mon 7 Sep 2009, 10:41 am UTC
Switching to the mono disc, what is lost in separation is gained in sheer balls and power, allowing you to hear exactly why Lennon would later refer to Ticket To Ride as "the first heavy metal record."
That said, it seems unlikely that anything other than the new stereo version of Help! will be most listeners' first port of call from now on. It's a truly spectacular record that sounds better than ever here, and the first in a series of stone cold classic albums that sees The Beatles rivalled in the rock canon only by The Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet/Let It Bleed/Sticky Fingers/Exile On Main Street sequence.
New experimentation
Released on 3 December 1965 only four months after Help!, Rubber Soul showcases a funkier Beatles with a much expanded sonic vocabulary. And like Help!, the presence of the '60s stereo versions in the mono box set serves mainly to highlight the superiority of the new stereo masters.
As soon as the vocals enter five seconds into Drive My Car – sympathetically pushed towards the centre from their hard right position in the 1965 stereo image – we're sold. Not all the lead vocals are centred in this way, but in each case the tracks seem to have been given just the right treatments whether you are listening on headphones or on a home hi-fi.
Engineers Guy Massey and Steve Rooke have done a great job with the stereo mixes George Martin created in 1986, and curiously, Rubber Soul in this new incarnation is arguably the most timeless and vital-sounding of all The Beatles' long players.
Whereas the mono Please Please Me is the hard-punching essential purchase and the stereo version a mere curio, Rubber Soul in mono is grainy and swamped. The new stereo disc gives the arrangements the space they need to bloom, exceeding the '60s mono and stereo mixes and the 1987 compact disc.
You say you want a revolution?
On 5 August 1966, The Beatles released Revolver. The eight months since Rubber Soul was the biggest gap between Beatles LPs to date, but in the interim period, the band had crafted a masterpiece.
The variations between the original stereo and mono mixes of what arguably constitutes the finest pop album of all time would take an article longer than this to explore in full. Indeed, this is further complicated by the release of slightly different mixes of several of the Revolver songs on Yesterday… And Today, the 1966 US release with the infamous "butcher" sleeve.
