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March 27

looking for a good Beatles greatest hits compilation on CD in stereo for about US$15, any suggestions?

looking for a good Beatles (the band) greatest hits compilation on CD in stereo (not mono) for about US$15, any suggestions? Therapyisgood (talk) 02:05, 27 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It might depend on which of their many hits you consider "greatest". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:42, 27 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The best single-disc Fabs compilation is this one, I'm sure you can get it for $15 on discogs. Your stipulation that the songs should be in stereo rather than mono is weird, though. All but the first three tracks are in stereo, if you can live with that. --Viennese Waltz 07:50, 27 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wasn't a lot of the early Beatles stuff in mono? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:09, 27 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, and the real problem is that the mono mix is all that remains. While they can remaster songs by removing static and buzz, the original independent tracks are not available to truly remix. So, when Peter Jackson's group developed AI to recreate new tracks from the mono mix to separate John Lennon's voice from his personal recordings, it allowed them to split the mono mixes back into tracks and then remix. But, it is not really the original track. It is an AI recreation of what likely was used to make the mono mix. I have very mixed feelings about it. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 23:36, 28 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

1 is simply a greatest hits compilation of all their #1 songs. Also, all mono songs were remixed in stereo. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 00:51, 28 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Where does it say that? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:50, 28 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For instance here, in the Notes section taken from the booklet of the release. The stereo mixes of the early Beatles records were heavily panned (voices in one channel, instruments in the other) and are by now quite unpleasant to listen to. My records, bought in the 80s, are like that. I'd much rather have the mono mixes but those are not that easy to find because for some reason people seem to think that stereo is better. --Wrongfilter (talk) 03:15, 28 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The article about the 1 album here says the first three tracks are in mono, and the link you posted doesn't contradict that. I concur that phony stereo doesn't sound very good. It's as if the singers were in one isolation booth and the guitars were being played in another isolation booth. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:41, 28 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It looks like the album keeps getting rereleased. In 2023, "Love Me Do" was remixed in stero. Digging into it, they only had the original mono mix to work with. They used Peter Jackson's AI stuff to split the mono mix into separate parts so they could remix it in stereo. That is hopefully better than other attempts such as shoving the voice to one side or, what I consider worse, putting the left and right out of phase to make it "immersive." It just sounds broken to me, not immersive. My personal opinion is that the early songs were recorded and mixed in mono. It isn't like the later ones that were recorded and mixed in stereo and then mixed down to mono for radio play. So, if you get a stereo version of the early songs, it isn't really stereo. It is some technical trick to make it sound a bit like stereo. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 14:56, 28 March 2025 (UTC)[reply]