I have no idea why anyone ever thought burying the drums in one ear and the guitars in another was a good idea. Or even if you’re listening in a room, why in the hell you’d want to make it seem like all of the drumming equipment is like twenty feet to the right of you, and the guitars 20 feet to the left. I mean, I get it in the sense of it being new tech and playing with it, but god damn it sounds awful especially on headphones or in a car.
Yeah, what is wrong with cover? It’s really cool and distinctive and modern, fitting the music. I love it, too. Don’t like the Nyro one particularly. Kinda boring.
One must note that every Beatles album up to and including the White Album was recorded and mixed in mono. The original stereo mixes were just an afterthought. When their whole catalog got rereleased in 2009, both mono and stereo mixes of all these albums were renewed, but I went with the mono box because I wanted to hear the music as close as it was first intended to be. The time around 1966 was the beginning of stereo, and you hear a lot of those ping-pong mixes on albums from that time. The concept hadn’t quite matured yet and producers/engineers tended to gimmicky effects.
Slight different-band hijack: Bob Pridden’s surround mix for the deluxe Tommy box set sounds really odd to my ears, with Moonie’s drums almost exclusively relegated to the rear left channel. I get the concept of the mix putting the listener “on stage” with the band, but I’d much rather hear the drums spread out to fill the whole room.
I presume it’s because if you were listening to live, unfiltered music, the guitarist would be standing in one place, and the drummer would be in a different place, and so the sounds they make would be coming from different places. Probably not 40 feet apart from each other, but then, why’d you choose to place your speakers 40 feet apart?
I understand stereo separation and creating space with it. But why would you put something like drums ALL in one channel (or almost all.) it’s the extreme separation of some of those early stereo records that is annoying as hell. I can get putting most of one guitar in one ear and most of the other in another ear, but then the other instruments need to be split among the two channels for balance and cohesion.
When you talk about putting sounds in ears, are you assuming the listener is wearing headphones?
In the sixties, were more listeners using headphones or speakers? And which kind of listener did the record producers etc. have in mind when they were creating their stereo mixes?
Even on good hifi (is that still a word?) stereo speakers, the channel separation on mid- to end-sixties recordings is sometimes very grating. Doesn’t need earphones to detect it.
Whoops. My other post mentioned non headphone listening:
Like another example, and I don’t know if this is the Beatles, but other 60s artists around this time, is when you have a busted speaker and only get one channel, and that channel does not contain the vocals, or only has some faint vocal bleed on it. Like, why the hell would you pan your lead vocal 100% to one side? Even on a normally working system, that just sounds weird to me.
About 50 years ago I had a KLH receiver with a ‘mono’ button that would address such situations. Of course, such a wonderful feature has been ‘obsolete’ for a long, long time.
Look at the color saturation on a 1966 TV show. Artists received new toys they wanted to experiment with. Of course they went too far. I’m not sure if EMI was in the phonograph business but companies like RCA certainly were, and they wanted to give record buyers a reason to buy new stereo systems the same was they wanted TV viewers to buy new color TVs,
Yes, like 5.
The official announcement:
The new mix of “Taxman” sounds really good. Nothing weird or fancy, just nicely well balanced. Basically sounds like it always should’ve sounded.
Comparing it back-to-back with the 2009 remastered version and the new definitely sounds more balanced and better.
No, the only actual real-world releases were the movie soundtrack (which had an all-black cover to emulate Smell The Glove), 1992’s Break Like The Wind, and 2009’s Back From The Dead. Interestingly, the band’s wiki page has a section for the fictional discography, down to the singles.