The Beatles (The Original Studio Recordings)

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 9th of September 2009, a date chosen partly because of John Lennon's lifelong fascination with the number nine, a box set arrived in record stores that many fans had been waiting decades to hear. The Beatles (The Original Studio Recordings) gathered every album the band ever made, now remastered, into a single sixteen-disc stereo collection. What did it actually take to prepare those recordings? Why do some of the most famous songs appear in mono even on this stereo release? And what happened to the master tapes for tracks recorded in 1962 and 1963?

• 2. The Remastering Project

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  EMI senior studio engineers Allan Rouse and Guy Massey led the remastering project for both the mono and stereo versions of the Beatles catalogue. Their work arrived simultaneously with two companion releases: the mono box set titled The Beatles in Mono, and The Beatles: Rock Band video game. The stereo box set was the second complete collection of original Beatles recordings, following The Beatles Box Set from 1988. Two earlier album collections, The Beatles Collection from 1978 and The Collection from 1982, had not contained every recording the band made. Despite each box set being counted as a single unit in sales tallies, total individual album sales from both mono and stereo formats surpassed thirty million copies. The set received the Grammy Award for Best Historical Album at the 53rd Grammy Awards, a recognition that acknowledged both the depth of the archive and the quality of the restoration work Rouse and Massey carried out.

• 3. What the Discs Contain

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  Please Please Me, With the Beatles, A Hard Day's Night, and Beatles for Sale each made their CD debut in proper stereo through this set, though many individual songs from those albums had previously appeared in stereo on various compilations. Help! and Rubber Soul use remixes that George Martin prepared for the original 1987 CD releases, not the original 1965 stereo mixes, which were reserved for The Beatles in Mono. Magical Mystery Tour is presented in the sequence and artwork of its original North American Capitol Records release rather than the shorter UK six-song EP format. Every disc replicates the original album label as it first appeared, from various Parlophone Records designs through the Capitol Records label for Magical Mystery Tour and the Apple Records labels used from Yellow Submarine onward. The Beatles and Past Masters are each two-disc sets. For Past Masters, the first disc uses a mid-1960s Parlophone label design, while the second uses the Apple label design.

• 4. Lost and Missing Tapes

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  Before early 1963, it was standard practice at Abbey Road Studios to wipe and reuse master tapes once a recording had been mixed down to mono for single release. That practice explains why no true stereo mixes exist for the 1962 single "Love Me Do" and its flipside "P.S. I Love You". For the 1963 single "She Loves You" and its flipside "I'll Get You", the situation is different. The tape-wiping practice had stopped by the time "She Loves You" was released, and the master tapes may have still been at EMI as late as January 1964, when a German-language version of the song was recorded. Those tapes are nonetheless commonly believed to have been either stolen or destroyed at some point afterward. Unofficial stereo versions of "She Loves You" have been assembled using the backing track from its German counterpart "Sie Liebt Dich", but Rouse and Massey elected not to use that approach for the box set. The single version of "Love Me Do" featuring Ringo Starr on drums carries an additional complication: even the mixed-down mono tape of that recording has been lost. Some researchers have suggested the original version was intentionally destroyed to remove confusion between it and the more widely circulated version of the song. Since 1980, clean 45 rpm mono singles sourced from private collectors have served as the master for this version.

• 5. Songs That Stayed in Mono

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  Two further tracks appear in mono on the stereo discs: "Only a Northern Song" and "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)". Neither received a stereo mix during the Beatles' recording lifetime. Other songs in a similar situation were handled differently. Stereo mixes of "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Penny Lane", and "Baby, You're a Rich Man" were all created in 1971 and included without issue. A stereo mix of "Yes It Is" had received a very limited UK release in 1986 on a mail-order cassette promotion that Apple and the Beatles had not authorised, before appearing commercially on Past Masters in 1988. "Only a Northern Song" was first given a stereo mix for the Yellow Submarine Songtrack album in 1999. A differently edited stereo mix of "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)" appeared on Anthology 2 in 1996, but the original edit of that track has never received a stereo mix despite multi-track recordings being available, making it the sole remaining track in the catalogue in that situation.

• 6. The Documentary DVD

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  Exclusive to the stereo set and absent from the mono version, the included DVD titled The Mini Documentaries compiles all the short films attached to each individual album disc. Narration comes from all four Beatles as well as George Martin, who opens each individual album documentary. The films draw on rare footage, previously unheard dialogue, sound excerpts, still photographs, television appearance clips, footage from inside recording sessions, and material from the final photo session the band conducted together. Five Beatles films are represented: A Hard Day's Night, Help!, Magical Mystery Tour, Yellow Submarine, and Let It Be. The DVD carries a red Apple label modelled on the original US Let It Be LP. The Stereo Box also includes a QuickTime-format version of the same films on the CDs themselves.

• 7. The USB Release and Vinyl Edition

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  On the 7th of December 2009, a limited edition of thirty thousand apple-shaped USB flash drives appeared, each containing the full catalogue encoded in 44.1 kHz/24-bit FLAC format. That resolution is higher than CD standard, which runs at 44.1 kHz/16-bit, marking the first time the Beatles catalogue had been made available in a high-resolution digital format. The 16 GB drives also included 320 kbps MP3 copies of the albums, a specially designed Flash interface, original UK album art, rare photographs, and expanded liner notes. On the 12th of November 2012, a vinyl edition arrived pressed on 180-gram records and accompanied by a 252-page book. Physical inserts from the original LP releases were reproduced, including the cardboard cutout sheet from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the photos and poster originally included with The Beatles. That same remastering team later extended their work to John Lennon's studio albums and Paul McCartney's solo albums reissued by Hear Music.