The Beatles In Mono

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And my favorite experience, overall, is listening to stereo records with a wide and deep stereo presentation. When it comes to the music of the Fab Four, particularly for the group's earlier records, I think the mono mixes sound great while stereo, unfortunately, sounds comparatively disappointing. Have yourself a listen, and once again, the difference will be easy to spot after a few seconds: there's no strange, unnatural division to the music, no unholy separation of the elements. A mono version of the Yellow Submarine album was released in the UK, but it was simply a fold-down (two stereo channels combined into one channel) from the stereo mix, not a unique and separate mono mix.

Unsurprisingly, this is because stereo is a really good audio format, and we know how to engineer in stereo really well by now.

The new digital remastering offers the discs in stereo, but the big news is the box with the discs in mono, that is, the original sound as producer George Martin intended it. The CD set also includes a 44-page booklet with an essay on the important role that the mono mixes played in the Beatles' recording career, notes on every track featured in Mono Masters, and a track-by-track listing of the recordings. For decades, we've all been swimming in the great stereo sea, enjoying almost all of our audio content in stereo.

The folks at the retirement home can spin their single-channel vinyl all they like, but I was onto bigger and better things. Naturally, this kind of added complexity to music wasn't really possible to the same extent with mono, which just has a single channel, so whatever sound you're hearing come out of your left earbud/speaker will be identical to the sound coming out of your right earbud/speaker, meaning you're taking less advantage of humans having two ears. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. It's nice when you play a track, the music envelops you, and you can place the elements of the track on a virtual stage all by ear.I have lately been listening to the audiobook of Mark Lewisohn's wonderful "The Beatles: All These Years – Volume 1 Tune In" (weird title). I love hearing the voices that come from different channels when it is not a single performer - a singer accompanied by an orchestra -, which, obviously, should be heard in the center. In the early albums they had to down mix everything to two tracks, so that the voices could be mixed closer and more clearly in mono.