On 09/09/09 (probably in the spirit of John Lennon’s “Revolution 9”), a new remastering of the entire Beatles catalog (on both stereo and mono versions!) will be released (along with an excellent multi-platform Beatles Rock Band game). Whoa!

Some intricate mastering details have been posted here by the Abbey Road engineers themselves. It’s very interesting to note how they approached this project, starting from the analog reels some of which are more than 40 years old, and how the latest digital technology was used during the process. It reportedly took four years to complete this undertaking!

I personally own original vinyl pressings of *all* the stereo albums (this was from the 1980’s and I was still in high school back then!), and this I consider some of my most prized possessions. The sound of these albums simply cannot be matched in my opinion. I have the original CD releases as well, but they just sound trebly thin and lifeless by comparison. Later on, I got hold of some remasters (some Japanese premaster of Abbey Road, and all the Dr. Ebbetts remasters on FLAC), but as far as my ears can remember, the vinyl still blows them away. Nope, I don’t want to join in that CD vs. vinyl debate anymore!

Let’s just hope these new versions will turn out to be the best listening experiences we can ever have of these works of art, in any format for that matter. I really share the sentiment of Mr. Guttenberg as he expressed in his CNET blog.

I have high hopes though, primarily since I think only recently has the converter technology began to mature enough such that analog to digital conversion is now as transparent as can be, compared to even a decade ago or less. (Mastering engineer Bob Ludwig used to complain about this so much in the past!) But the $8,000 Prism box Abbey Road allegedly used is the current flagship of the company, and while I have never heard any Prism ADC’s yet (I used to use Lavry’s in the U.S.), it still is way up there, at the very high-end of things. Combine this with an excellent analog front-end, and some intelligent use of digital processing (especially noise reduction and final limiting), and the infinite knowledge and wisdom of the Abbey road engineers and hopefully we have a winner. Can’t wait to hear them!

© 2009, Aji Coronel. Nyquist Recording Studio. All rights reserved. If you need to copy content, please provide the link to this original post.

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