The Capitol Albums, Volume 2

• 1. Introduction

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  The Capitol Albums, Volume 2 hides a small surprise inside one of its songs. The stereo mix of "I'm Looking Through You" opens with a false start never heard on any earlier release. This box set gathers the Beatles' 1965 American releases for Capitol Records, giving each track both a stereo mix and a mono mix. Some early copies of the set, though, left the factory with the wrong mono recordings entirely. Nobody caught the mistake until finished copies had already reached stores. What happened inside Capitol's mastering process to cause an error like that? And why do the same 1965 recordings still sound different depending on which mix reaches your ears?

• 2. The Dexter Mix

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  Capitol A&R executive Dave Dexter Jr. built these mixes, not the versions producer George Martin had assembled for British release in the 1960s. As with The Capitol Albums, Volume 1, these discs skip Martin's original mixes entirely. Dexter pulled sub-master tapes from Capitol's own vaults back in 1965. He added reverb to several tracks, giving them a fuller sound than the original British mixes. For songs that existed only in mono, Dexter engineered a simulated stereo effect instead. Those tapes eventually became the four albums collected across this set's discs.

• 3. Two Versions of Everything

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  All 92 tracks on this box set appear twice, once in stereo and once in mono. Every song from The Early Beatles reached compact disc in stereo for the first time here, along with many of the tracks from Beatles VI. For collectors, the differences between a stereo mix and its mono counterpart are one of the biggest draws of the whole set. Each of the four discs pairs one album with both of its mixes. The lineup runs The Early Beatles, Beatles VI, the American version of Help!, and the American version of Rubber Soul. Each disc carries its own Capitol catalogue number, printed alongside the album title. In the weeks before the official release, Capitol circulated a promotional disc, just as it had for Volume 1. That promo featured both mixes of eight songs from the set. That packaging decision came together in the months before Capitol ever announced the set to the public.

• 4. A Chart Anniversary

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  Capitol announced The Capitol Albums, Volume 2 on the 22nd of March 2006. The official release date, the 11th of April 2006, wasn't chosen at random. It marked the 42nd anniversary of a Billboard Hot 100 record: the Beatles once held 14 positions on that chart simultaneously. That same date fell exactly one week after the Beatles had monopolized the top five positions on the same chart. In Britain, the set reached shops slightly before that official date, and some advance copies and pre-ordered sets shipped even earlier. The box set debuted on the Billboard 200 album chart on the 29th of April 2006, entering at number 46. It sold approximately 27,000 copies in that first week. On the 19th of May 2006, the RIAA certified it gold. Not every one of those early copies, though, turned out to be exactly right.

• 5. The Wrong Mix

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  Beatles VI and Rubber Soul lost their real mono mixes on early copies of this set. What buyers got instead was a fold-down mix: the stereo recording collapsed into a single signal and fed to both speakers. Technically that counted as mono, since left and right channels carried identical sound. But it wasn't the mono mix Capitol had actually released back in 1965. The original US vinyl pressings of The Early Beatles and Help! had already used fold-down mixes for their mono editions. But the vinyl versions of Beatles VI and Rubber Soul had contained genuinely distinct mono mixes, recordings unique from their stereo counterparts. Losing those genuine mixes on this box set was new, since only this particular release ever carried the incorrect versions. Beatles author Bruce Spizer, who wrote the set's liner notes, explained the error to the fan website What Goes On. Spizer said a "third party mastering facility incorrectly sent stereo-to-mono mixdowns" to be pressed, instead of the vintage mono mixes. At first, it was unclear whether the mistake hit a single pressing plant or every copy made. It now appears to have affected every set pressed before the corrected version went out. At the time, Capitol explained that it wanted to test how the stereo mixes of Beatles VI and Rubber Soul would sound played in mono. That wasn't a concern for the other two albums, since their vinyl mono mixes were already fold-downs of the stereo versions. Someone made fold-down test copies to check the sound, and by mistake, those test copies were the ones pressed and shipped. There was one way to tell the two versions apart without hearing them: their running time.

• 6. Telltale Timings

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  Disc one, The Early Beatles, runs 52 minutes and 25 seconds, unaffected by any mastering error. The other three discs reveal the mono mixup in their own running times: a correct mono mix always plays slightly longer than the mispressed version. Disc two, Beatles VI, runs 56 minutes 16 seconds with the correct mix, but only 56 minutes 1 second on the mispressed disc. Disc three, the American version of Help!, runs 59 minutes and 7 seconds, also unaffected. Disc four, Rubber Soul, runs 59 minutes 8 seconds correctly, or 59 minutes 1 second on the flawed pressing. For anyone holding this set, the running time on disc two or four still tells the story. It's the quickest way to know whether a stereo-to-mono mixdown got pressed by mistake.