The Beatles (The White Album) (50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) [3CD]

Another great clean up job by Giles Martin, similar to his work on Sergeant Pepper's, which was amazing, The White Album shines for the first time.Throughout the set, starting with the newly remixed 2 original discs, I'm hearing background sounds that were previously buried. Vocals are more pronounced, more in the center channel. McCartney's bass is deeper with greater punch. Dear Prudence has the opening guitar shimmering. Lennon's vocal in this song has greater presence and is centered in the room. The higher end of Ringo's cymbals and drums are now audible.Lots of haze has been removed from Glass Onion. Ringo has greater punch. Ob La Di features a much sharper piano, with the chorus of the song spread clear across the soundstage. It's a Party Going On !! The chorus of Bungalo Bill, which was a nasty mess before, is vastly cleaner.While My Guitar Gently Weeps--Listen to the crispness of Ringo's hi hat, snare and cymbals. Very smooth recording now. I swear that Clapton's solo at the end of the guitar rose out of the speakers to grab at your heart. All vocals are hanging much tighter in center channel. And I doubt you've ever heard Harrison's moaning at the end of the song like you now hear it on this remixed disc.The entire original 2 discs are so vastly improved sonically. I won't carry you through each song, but it was all very pleasing and VASTLY improved.Esher (disc #3 in this box set)--We'll leave it to the historians to tell you the significance of this disc. Short version: an early bunch of recordings, mostly acoustic, of the Beatles doing significant songs from the White Album before they went deep into the studio to finalize them. I've heard many boots of these recordings over the past few decades, and they totally lacked clarity, muddy, cruddy sounding versions of these. Man, did Giles clean up this. Yes, there's a little hiss, but largely eliminated. It mostly sounds like you're in the studio with the Beatles. On many, they're giddy, having a great old time. While they lack some of the polish of the final published versions, these sound terrific, better than any Esher bootlegs I've ever heard. Very intimate. Beatles unplugged, with some overdubbing. Disc #3, Esher demos, is not one you'll listen to once and forget. You'll want to play it again.The sessions discs (3 of them) have pro's and con's. The Pro's: Giles Martin had access to all the recorded sessions from the White Album tapes--and he's a hell of a curator--and these are the ones he's picked. They're all interesting alternative takes on these famous songs, and a few that didn't quite make it. He has hand selected the best of months of recording sessions. They sound great. The Con's: if you're deep into Beatles bootlegs or the multiple sets of outtakes what have been commercially released, you may not need these.I've found the session discs fascinating and real good sound quality. But if you're not a completist, yes, you could merely buy the 3 disc Beatle set, with the original 2 disc recording, plus the Esher demos. But as people would point out, the nearly 2" thick book that you get in this set, plus 6 amazing discs, makes this the true collector item. I opted for the 6 disc set and I'm extremely pleased. Giles Martin did cut through the clutter of all the bootleg and commercially released session stuff, and I found these three discs easier to listen to than what's been on the market before. Yeah, they sound better than all previous.If you're into sound quality, have good or great gear, value the Beatles recordings and want to hear them without the murky previous sound, are a completist AND will love to see this massive book (that holds the CD's) sitting on your shelf, want disc #7 (which is even higher fidelity recordings). Go for it.Makes a great gift item for people you love.

Surprisingly, the surround mix of the White Album makes considerably more obvious use of the rear channels than the Sgt. Pepper surround mix did. Experience tells me that the dts surround mix would be guaranteed free of added compression (to make the music sound LOUDER), so that’s where I went to first. The surround mix is glorious and my review is based on it.Almost no one focuses on it but, far and away the one most important reason why the new mixes sound so much better is that the sound is culled from the first-generation multitrack tapes and mixed in the digital domain with no analogue tape-to-tape transferring and therefore no generation loss in the mixing process. It’s kinda weird really; but the same state-of-the-art analogue tape recorders that did (and still do) such a breathtaking job of recording sound from a microphone do a really quite poor job of transferring sound from one machine to another. This fact was not lost on George Martin. Reading “All You Need Is Ears” makes plain how greatly aware and concerned he was with this generation loss. Eliminating that generation loss is the key reason why these new remixes can so greatly improve upon the original mixes. When they get round to it, Revolver, with all its tape-to-tape bounce downs, will benefit immensely from such a remix (can't wait!).Many staunchly insist that the original LPs (especially in mono) cannot be improved upon and sound “better” than these remixes. But I think what they mean is that those original mono discs from England sound more authentic because that's how the Beatles intended it and that's what the Beatles were able to achieve in their own time. And so, to some, these digital remixes (especially in surround sound) are like fantasy presentations of Beatle music.I can understand that. But me, I'm coming from the point of view of an audiophile who's been dreaming of this for decades. Here’s what George Martin had to say about it. “When we first got four-track, it was an enormous relief not to have the worries about how many generations of sound quality had been lost which we had suffered in twin-track. But even four tracks are very few. . . . The only way we could get round it was to dub from one four-track to a second four-track – and that, of course, meant losing sound quality.” These dubs are called “bounce downs.” To get the musical complexity they achieved meant filling one four-track tape, mixing that down to mono and dubbing it onto one track of another four-track tape leaving 3 tracks in which to add more sounds. For Sgt. Pepper, “What I did was to dub from one four-track machine on to another, sometimes not once but twice. Harkening back to what I wrote earlier, that would mean, of course, losing up to nine generations of sound quality.” Because they lost even more when mixing the four-track master down to either the two-track stereo master or the mono master. Sir George did not like losing all that sound quality. And so, in another sense, these remixes are more authentic sounding in that they are the sound as George Martin would have wanted it if only it had then been technically achievable and because it’s more like what you would have heard if you’d actually been there in the studio.Like many of us, I've heard all this music countless times. Some never ever want to hear it any other way than the way they’ve always heard it, and that's fine. But me, I'm just absolutely thrilled, fifty years on, to be gifted with hearing this magical music in a NEW, improved and revelatory way. Drawing from the first-generation tapes and remixing from scratch without generation loss and without accumulated tape hiss and without accumulated frequency response distortion (and with modern stereo sensibilities) and uncompressed high-res digital is like hearing this music with a dozen veils lifted off it. It means hearing much deeper into the inner detailing of the mix and hearing things we’ve never heard before. In lifting various analogue-to-analogue mixing distortions Beatle music is presented with a more gorgeous musicality in the sound. It's glorious!In interviews Giles reveals how he agonized over all the myriad aesthetic and technical decisions he had to make. There were countless ways in which, in lesser hands, it could have been screwed up. With help from Sam Okell, I'm very grateful that these remixes are being done by someone who deeply cares, someone as intelligent and tasteful as Giles Martin. The decisions Giles made won’t please everyone; there’s always room to nitpick. But I think these remixes are brilliant—works of art in themselves. I also get considerable gratification knowing how this gorgeous new sound makes Beatle music even more impervious to aging. This wonderful new sound can only render Beatle music even more timeless. I mean, how great is that?!!