The Beatles In Mono

Product Information

The box contains a new two-disc compilation album titled Mono Masters, which compiles all the mono mixes of singles, B-sides and EP tracks that did not originally appear on any of the UK albums or Magical Mystery Tour. Your ears are getting more auditory information than you get with mono, but more information does not as a rule make for a better listening experience or even better audio quality. The set debuted at number 40 on Billboard's Top 200 chart and the magazine reported that 12,000 copies were sold in its first week of release. In former times I wrote a detailed review of all the differences I could detect between the mono and stereo 2009 CD versions of Sgt Peppers (I also did Magical Mystery Tour and White Album).

It's the most detailed account of the Beatles' lives up until they were about to release "Please Please Me". Anyway, it's an incredibly well made set - beautiful visually and most importantly, sounds incredible! The folks at the retirement home can spin their single-channel vinyl all they like, but I was onto bigger and better things. Magical Mystery Tour was not included in the set as it was not originally issued as an LP in the UK.

From what I’ve read, they used the original master tapes to make it, so it’s not just a repressing of the old mono releases. In Japan, it debuted at number 10, selling over 20,000 copies in its first week on the Oricon album charts. The stereo mixes are quaint, with a lot of hard panning common to stereo mixes of rock music at the time.

The set was released on compact disc on 9 September 2009, the same day the remastered stereo recordings and companion The Beatles (The Original Studio Recordings) were also released, along with The Beatles: Rock Band video game. When I started my hi-fi journey, I had gone from a mono record changer to a stereo system with two small speakers and was very happy with it. Tracks 9–12 and 15 of disc two were prepared in March 1969 for release as a 7" mono Yellow Submarine EP, two months after the release of the similarly titled soundtrack album, but the project was scrapped, although the EP was mastered. It's also important to note that the stereo versions improved significantly with time, as the studio moved from a 4-track tape machine to 8-track, etc. I was amazed at the number of differences I could hear; not just mixing differences, but really big differences, like missing backing vocals on the stereo Fixing A Hole and of course a whole lot of missing special effects from the stereo Lucy.

The two 1960s mixes are generally very different indeed, and Sgt Peppers may be the most different of the lot because of the dizzying layers of special effects that were presumably very difficult to reproduce in stereo afterwards (the mono version was made first, and regardless of who did the stereo version later, even attempting to reproduce all those effects must have been a bitch). Since 2014, Ruben has written news, reviews, features, guides, and everything in-between at a huge variety of outlets that include Lifewire, PCGamesN, GamesRadar+, TheGamer, Twinfinite, and many more. The Yellow Submarine album, included in the set, is the only original UK mono Beatles LP without a dedicated mono mix.