"New" Beatles Mono Catalog Release on 180gr Vinyl


It looks like the Mono CD Collection from 5 years ago did well enough that the collection is to be re-scrubbed & re-mastered and released on 180-gram vinyl.

Scheduled release date is 09/09/14. Not sure if the September release date has any significance, but apparently the box set is part of Apple Corps 50th Anniversary marketing campaign.

Here's the link to the Rolling Stone Article:

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-beatles-in-mono-to-get-lavish-vinyl-release-this-fall-20140616

For vinyl junkies, this looks like a no-brainer.

Personally, I'm on the fence as to whether to pull the trigger, especially given the $375.00 US Suggested Retail for 14 LPs (roughly $26.75 per album).

I have the Mono CD Box and the Limited Edition USB-Rom 24-Bit FLAC Collection (Shipped in its own aluminum Green Apple). I passed on the US-Release CD Box, and the UK Stereo CD & Vinyl Boxes. Still, it IS The Beatles, and adjusted for inflation the pricing is about the same as when I bought the record albums the first time...
courant
My impression is that there is no digital in the trail from the new discs back to the master tapes. Hi rez digital versions were made for reference purposes in remixing, so that the master tapes did not degrade from having to be played over and over. But its all analog all the way back. The electronics are solid state rather than tubes, and the cutting heads are new and different than the originals, of course.
You might want to check your facts, Wildoats. According to Fremmer and An,luge Planet: "Apple Corps and Universal Music Group today announced the September 8th release date (September 9th in North America) of the long-anticipated Beatles’ mono vinyl reissue series, cut to lacquer using the original analogue master tapes."
So, I don't these are from digital masters. Wrong? I've got mine on pre-order.
it's not possible today to rebuild this mono catalog without digital re-mastering. i wouldn't be surprised if the tapes are already sounding very poor today.
the tapes are darn old and missing half of recorded information if not more.
early re-issues in EX or better condition can be found on internet and that's better and cheaper way to go.
for audiophile folks it's more important to have crispy sound so i assume that this bundle had been electronically re-processed to meet audiophile standards.
Czarivey, If one can believe Abbey Road engineer Paul Hicks, the mono tapes are in good condition. As quoted from Sound on Sound:

Because of their importance, the analogue masters had been scrupulously maintained and archived. “All the Beatles tapes are in fantastic order, the multitracks as well as the quarter-inches,” enthuses Paul. “Guy and I have been doing Beatles stuff for about 15 years, on and off, and we’ve never baked a Beatles tape. The formula on that EMI tape was just fantastic. The only thing we did find, which we had to be incredibly careful with when we were transferring it — and especially with the monos, which hadn’t been played in 40 years — was that a lot of the glue had dried up on the edits. So on the first wind-back you had to be incredibly careful, because a lot of the edits just split apart when winding. We had to get the gloves on!”

“For the transfer and archiving part of the process, we did it song by song,” continues Guy. “So if the tapes had come apart when we were spooling back, we’d replace all those [splices] — same length, we’d measure them all and make sure it was all pukka — and then song by song we’d transfer them. We’d transfer the first one, go back, clean the whole tape path again. Beginning of each week, we’d de-mag the heads. We had a speed reader on the capstan all the time so we knew it was running at the right speed.”

“We’d line up and then we’d always play through, manually checking the azimuth,” says Paul. “It was amazing just by tweaking that, if nothing else, how much more top end you could potentially get. That was a significant part of the transfer process.”