Abbey Road 50th Anniversary

I listened to the 50th version this weekend at a friends house and I had the same impression about the bass being too overwhelming, though I didn’t think it was the recording because my friend didn’t have a great stereo and his new speakers were sitting on the floor. We were listening to the 5.1 HD version. Then I asked him to switch it to the atmos version and it brought the bass down quite a bit. The balance was much better.

Bass was very good with this version much like the others I have heard over the years.

Well there is no question that since 2009 all the digital versions have had the bass turned up a notch or two compared to the version George Martin himself put out in 1987. 
I would have preferred a far more subtle increase in bass as a result of possibly better transferring technology some 40 years later. In fact I would have preferred all of the post A Hard Days Night releases to have been kept flat as in the 87 versions - just a tad clearer and with a hint more bandwidth.

As things still stand this 50th version will soon become an interesting but soon forgotten curio as the 1987 version remains the standard. The infamous Japanese Black Triangle which was all too hastily withdrawn, but can still be found online, is still the best digital version to date. It just sounds that much slightly closer to the original LP than any of the other digital versions.
So far. 
I’m sure that this is not the last release of the back catalogue that we will ever see. Far from it. One day, but only as the near bottomless money well starts to run dry, they will eventually succumb and let someone have a go at getting as close to the original Harry T Moss vinyl releases as it is humanly possible.

Harry, the mastering engineer at Abbey Road might just be one of the most important unsung heroes in the Beatles story. Here’s a couple of quotes attributed to the great man,

“The Beatles came here in 1962 for an artist test in Studio 3 and that was the first time I met them. Around that era, before anybody was put on to tape to be recorded by a big organisation, they did a test first and I attended hundreds of these tests. I was blasé about it because of every hundred that you had to sit through and suffer; there would only be one that was any good. Frankly I wasn’t impressed by The Beatles at that time.”

“We made records so that they could be played on a Dansette, and we used to argue that instead of making our records inferior to suit an inferior machine, we should tell Dansette to make better players or just go out of business.”

I don't think Abbey Road was made to be played on a Dansette, so some things must have changed along the way. 

Here an interesting review and comparison from Vinyl Rewind:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mhk2XgVPCIM