The engineers who remastered the Beatles catalogue (from left) Guy Massey, Simon Gibson, Sean Magee, Sam Okell, Steve Rooke, Paul Hicks and Allan Rouse.
Do the Beatles remasters capture the authentic Fab Four sound or are they a digital cash-in on the iconic group? Michael Dwyer gets back to mono.
THE world's most famous zebra crossing still leads to the same place. Towering behind the graffiti of a white wall in London, the familiar facade of Abbey Road Studios seems untouched by time.
Inside, though, everything has changed. Studio 2, where the Beatles mostly recorded between 1962 and 1970, is all that remains among the rolling renovations necessary for a world-class recording facility.
But each day, engineer Allan Rouse negotiates a past that clings to the corridors of the building he's known since 1972.
"There's simply nowhere else to put it," he says of the archaic machinery shunted into corners and stairwells. "We are state-of-the-art but we have a history. And we have the equipment to go with it."
This juxtaposition of vintage authenticity and cutting-edge production lies at the heart of Rouse's latest project.
Since 2006, he has co-ordinated six engineers in the epic task of digitally remastering all 13 Beatles albums, plus the Past Masters collection of non-album tracks.
"It's long overdue," he says. "Many bands have been remastered two or three times since the advent of CD and the Beatles never have."
Indeed, audiophiles winced when the Beatles' albums were transferred "flat" to CD in 1987. "Thin and bright, without a hint of the LPs' analog warmth," American fan Steve Guttenberg recently sniffed in his Audiophiliac blog.
But come on. For most of us, surely the songs remain the same, regardless of whatever black art is applied by men in white coats. Isn't the Beatles' remasters launch of 09/09/09 just another way of getting us to buy our old records again in new sleeves?
Rouse bristles. "Any time anything comes out Beatle-wise, people say it's just a matter of getting money out of people," he sighs. "I object to that strongly. I don't think Neil Aspinall has done that at all. In fact, I think he's been very cautious."
Aspinall was the school friend of Paul McCartney and George Harrison who ran the Beatles' record company, Apple Corps, a post he held until just before his death last year.
It's fair to assume he shared the music industry's practical ignorance of the digital process in 1987. Remastering for CD (see below) was an aficionado's concept that had little bearing on the wider market — like the esoteric notion of stereo back when the Beatles made records for a mostly mono world.
Today, ubiquitous digital stereo gives everyone's ears an edge. The Beatles rose to that standard with a lavish range of "new" releases in the past 15 years, beginning with the archival Live at the BBC and Anthology sets.
Rouse oversaw the 5.1 surround mix of the Yellow Submarine Songtrack, then Let It Be . . . Naked, the controversial reshuffle of the Beatles' final album. He admits his purist's streak was tested by the Love album for Cirque du Soleil.
It found original producer George Martin splicing master tapes into an 80-minute symphony that remixed songs, takes and eras to create a 2006 blockbuster. The remasters, Rouse stresses, are the antithesis to all of that. "These are not radical alternative listening experiences," he says. "These are the real thing.
"Love changed the face of the Beatles. But the originals should always be out there.
"What we've done now is to make them available, so the kids of the future can hear them sounding as they should — in fact, in my view, sounding better than they ever did."
Early test audiences have been inclined to agree, although the notion of betterment suggests a fine line between restoration and vandalism.
Has A Day in the Life been improved, for example, by removing the squeak of the piano stool that punctuates the ultimate chord of doom? Heaven forbid, Rouse says.
"We agreed at the onset we would only remove things that were technically related. If it had anything to do with the Beatles' performance — breaths, coughs, squeaky bass drums, squeaky chairs — they stayed."
And still, authenticity remains a relative concept. Apple's insistence on releasing a separate set of the original mono mixes of each album (except Abbey Road and Let It Be, which only ever existed in stereo), opens a Pandora's box.
Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Beatles, popularly known as the White Album, have glaringly different mono mixes. Although the world has come to love them in stereo, Rouse is clear on which versions the Beatles considered more valid at the time.
"The Beatles spent upwards of two or three weeks mixing Sgt Pepper in mono. The stereo was done as an afterthought by George (Martin) and (engineer) Geoff Emerick — regrettably forgetting some of the things they had done on the mono mixes," Rouse says.
Nonetheless, the stereo remasters will doubtless outsell the mono box innumerable times over. And whatever hairs Beatlemaniac audiophiles choose to split, Rouse has a message for them. "The Beatles are not just for you. They are for history."
What is digital remastering?
"MASTERING for vinyl was a process dictated by physical space. Louder signals took up more room on the LP. Softer passages allowed a longer playing time, making dynamics integral to the recording art. Digital has brought a fixed-maximum record level.
Engineers can no longer make peaks louder but they can raise levels between the peaks for greater impact. Oasis' (What's the Story) Morning Glory took this art to the extreme in 1995, setting a new standard in the 'Loudness Wars'. But while a soft CD might have less initial impact, mastering quieter is the only way original dynamics can be preserved.
With such loved material as the Beatles' catalogue, it will be interesting to see how true to the original cuts the engineers have dared to be."
Written By- Joe Leach, Cowshed Studios, London
SOURCE: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au
