Appropriately, there's more to savor from Help! onward, as the Beatles' productions grew ambitious, but Please Please Me, With the Beatles, and A Hard Day's Night all have a strong punch, while Beatles for Sale is warmer than the previous disc.Īs a package, the stereo box is slightly unwieldy - it's a large, vertical set with two stacks of discs in slick cardboard sleeves piled on top of each other. It's not that these are pumped up on digital steroids it's that the veil has been lifted, so everything seems full and fresh. Nevertheless, these remasters surely do surprise with their clarity and depth, with each album feeling bigger and fuller than the previous CD incarnation, but not artificially so. None of the albums have been remixed - although Help! and Rubber Soul retain Martin's 1987 mixes, the original stereo mixes are bonuses on the mono set - so this doesn't shock the way the Yellow Submarine soundtrack did with its reimagined stereo mixes. Crucially, it's also inarguably the best-sounding Beatles music ever released, robust and rich even on the earliest rock & roll. Naturally, it's possible to quibble about some details of the presentation, particularly the decision to split the reissue into two separate box sets, one covering the stereo mixes and one the mono mixes, with only the stereo mixes available as individual discs (it's still possible to complain that the albums do not add era-specific singles or outtakes, but such expansions were never really in the cards), but both boxes still constitute the best Beatles by far.

This reissue campaign corrects almost all the problems of the original 1987 CDs: the sound and artwork are improved, and all the original mono and stereo mixes finally see the light of day. Anniversaries came and went, but no remasters arrived until the release of the video game The Beatles Rockband pushed a long-overdue revamping of the band's entire catalog into the stores on 9-9-09.

Where all their peers from the Byrds to the Who have had their catalogs remastered and reissued in deluxe editions, sometimes several times, the Beatles remained stuck in the early days of digital, their 14 albums plus Past Masters singles collection remaining untouched since 1987. The Beatles always stood apart from their peers, a self-evident statement that sadly extended to the treatment of their catalog in the digital age.

The beatles stereo box set torrent