I doubt there’s ever been a piece of music that’s had as much of an effect on my life as Revolver. Never mind that it was recorded half a decade before I was born. In fact, I wouldn’t hear it until the early 1980’s, when the survivors of the “psychedelic culture” supposedly inspired by this record had gone on to become corporate raiders and investment bankers.
According to some sources, the Beatles were somewhat influential on musical trends and cultural movements in the late 1960’s. I wasn’t around for that, and I couldn’t have cared less. What attracted me to them was the sheer talent they had, and the quality of their output, which has never been matched.
Like just about everyone else, I’ve heard their early output all my life. It’s hardwired into our cultural DNA. I wasn’t as familiar with their middle-period input until a friend gave me a copy of Revolver. It was the old Capitol mono mix, and I’d end up literally wearing it out as I pored over every minute detail month after month. To this day, I know every note and nuance of the record.
With this record, the Beatles had gone from catchy pop band to true artists and innovators. We take many of the studio techniques they used for granted today, but on Revolver, they were revolutionary. More to the point, they were judiciously used to complement a suite of nearly perfect songs.
Then 1987 came, and I got to hear the record in stereo when their catalog was issued on Compact Disc. To say the least, I was disappointed. I imagine that the CD masters were what George Martin thought people expected, but I found them to be harsh, brittle and completely sterile.
We’d be stuck with those for another twenty years.
There were alternatives, if you had the time and money to seek them out. In 1994, I was able to track down one of the Mobile Fidelity 180 gram vinyl pressings, which set me back over $100. It was much better than the CD, but it was still shrill on the high frequencies. I did some equalisation on it and burned the results to MiniDisc. For awhile, that was my reference copy.
Others did much the same, often with more professional results. If you knew where to look, there was a series of gray-market “Millenium” masters that were certainly punchier than the standard CD’s, but were a bit overcompressed and clipped. A guy named Doc Ebbetts was able to track down Japanese vinyl and do good remastering jobs, and for some time, his stuff was the best out there.
This situation illustrates an odd irony: the (arguably) greatest rock band in history had their recorded output so poorly presented that private parties saw the need to undertake these kinds of efforts.
There have been a few stabs in the direction of fixing the matter. The mastering on the Anthology series was a bit better, and last year’s spectacular Love was a definite step in the right direction, but we were still stuck with subpar masters of their original catalog.
Until now. Apple/EMI has remastered their entire catalog, and it sounds better than any version I’ve heard. It’s not just an incremental improvement, but a radical one. Allan Rouse had a number of hard decisions to make during the process, but he made the right ones.
This isn’t a remix, but a remaster, so no changes to the source material have been made. What’s been done is a cleanup, and a discreet one at that. A few pops and tape artifacts have been removed, but it doesn’t appear that the noise floor was set high enough to interfere with clarity in the least.
The real improvement is in the overall character of the sound. McCartney’s bass is much more present across the board, and I’m hearing things in his playing I’ve missed before. Same goes for Ringo Starr’s drumming, which we no longer have to strain to hear. Of all things, I found his playing on the verses of “Ticket to Ride” to be nearly overpowering.
A few other folks have pulled waveforms, and these confirm what I’m hearing, or rather not hearing: compression. My biggest worry was that Rouse would feel the need to compete with the kind of volume levels in current music, but that’s not the case. Though the overall sound is certainly meatier, he’s gotten there without compromising dynamic range in the least.
Let this be a lesson to engineers everywhere.
Of course, the sound isn’t perfect. These records were made more than four decades ago, and there are still some defects in the source material that we have to live with. There’s no way this stuff is going to sound like it was recorded last year. This in no way diminishes what the engineers have done here. This is simply a phenomenal job.
Doc Ebbetts seems to agree. In what may be the most eloquent and heartfelt resignation letter I’ve ever read, he states,
The fact of the matter is, the Dr. Ebbetts material does not – and will not – sound better than what is coming commercially in September. People I trust agree with me. The remasters sound remarkably well balanced, with solid, punchy bass, smooth mids and not-to-harsh, yet crisp highs. In comparison, many of the Ebbetts masters fall short – weaker bass, dimished mids, and often too-bright highs.
It’s a given that the remasters will not please everyone, but they will be good enough to make the Ebbetts catalogue solidly inferior.
On that last point, there are detractors, though I don’t know what these people expect. In one case, the complaints came from someone who acknowledged that he was listening to the remasters in mp3 format. I can tell you that, based on my familiarity with multiple versions of these recordings, using ears trained by almost 30 years experience in music, the Beatles have never sounded better.
I was unsure of what to expect. Major corporations have a way of screwing up art and making decisions based on marketing rather than quality. Nowhere is such a philosophy more starkly illustrated than in the music business.
When I put on the headphones and cued up Revolver, I steeled myself for what would likely be a disappointment. That never came. While there are still production choices in the stereo mix of Revolver I don’t like, there’s no denying that the new master is far superior. The horns on “Got to Get You into My Life” are still as brash as ever (Martin stuck microphones directly into the bells), but they don’t suffer the shimmering disortion that made the song virtually unlistenable on the 1987 master.
The strings on “Eleanor Rigby” are less raspy, and when the harmony vocals are pushed forward in the mix on subsequent songs, they no longer sound abrasive and tinny. The vocal parts feel better enmeshed with the backing tracks overall.
My only problem has nothing to do with the remaster; it has to do with the original idea of mixing this record in stereo to begin with.
Abbey Road was the first Beatles record to be released exclusively in stereo. Prior to that, the mix the band finalized and accepted as finished product was in mono. Yes, that includes Sgt. Pepper and the White Album. The stereo mixes were done as supplements for export, and usually without the input of the band.
Revolver is one example of this. Elements recorded in mono were often “converted” to duophonic stereo, and channels were simply panned far to the periphery of the mix. “Eleanor Rigby” is a good case in point: the string section was recorded in mono, and in the stereo mix, it’s still in mono. The vocals are just shifted far right to simulate stereo. The result is oddly disassociative.
Elsewhere, the drums and bass are panned to a separate channel than the vocals and guitars, often creating a problem with mono equipment in which part the arrangement appears to be absent. More to the point, it ends up feeling off-balance.
It’s still my belief that this record was meant to be heard in mono. I’m far from alone on this, and EMI also saw fit to release remastered versions of the original mono mixes. This is where Revolver shines, both as a record and as a remastering job.
The narrowed soundstage generates a feeling of greater intimacy. In several cases, the original mix is superior than that used for the stereo release. There’s a cowbell part on “Taxman” that is virtually inaudible in the stereo master. The harmony vocals on “I’m Only Sleeping” sound much more balanced, and the backmasked guitar parts feel more unified.
On “She Said, She Said,” Ringo’s martial snare drum gains gravity by being centered with the vocals. The older mono masters had a problem with backing tracks dropping out during the complex vocal sections, something that is no longer an issue here.
On “And Your Bird Can Sing,” there’s a greater presence to Lennon’s vocals, and you can actually “hear the room” in his voice. Though loud in the mix, the backing vocals sound less strident than on the stereo version. Like “Good Day Sunshine,” this song was meant to be heard on the radio, and though it may take some acclimation for modern listeners to appreciate something in mono, it simply sounds more natural this way.
When not separated in the mix, the interaction between McCartney’s vocals and Alan Civil’s marvelous French horn work on “For No One” is much more apparent in mono, and “Tomorrow Never Knows” sounds both airier and more down-to-earth. Placing greater emphasis on the rhythm section keeps the chaos of the arrangement grounded, and Lennon’s phase-shifted vocals are more enjoyable when they’re not swaying from speaker to speaker.
Not only is this version far superior in sound quality to the one I grew up with, I find myself hearing things I hadn’t before. “Tomorrow Never Knows” is an absolute orgy of musique concrète, and the new remaster unearths sounds in the mix I’d previously never heard. Turns out the piano surfaces far earlier in the song than I’d thought, and the Bâ™ orchestral chord pulls at the tonic much more effectively than before.
The only problem with the mono remasters lies in getting them. Though the stereo remasters are available as single-disc editions, the mono releases are only available through a limited-edition, sold-out box set, for which prices are now running in excess of $250US. Rumor has it that there will be further pressings, but I do wish that they’d break the set up into individual discs.
After all, this is how the Beatles were meant to be heard.