5 ms·

I've listened to the real thing ie Beetles live and releases on vinyl, tape cassette (of various grades - iron n chromium etc) and CD. I am not a sound enginee

I've listened to the real thing ie Beetles live and releases on vinyl, tape cassette (of various grades - iron n chromium etc) and CD. I am not a sound engineer nor do I buy cables that cost more than a few quid. Sgt Peppers sounds right to me because that's how it sounds. A bit self referential but you have to remember that things were a bit different back then. Rather a lot of sound engineering stuff in popular music was being invented at the time. In my view, the sound that was recorded and post processed at the time and released is the correct one. A well preserved record (vinyl) from the time will have a decent representation on it. I don't think you can go back and retrospectively "improve" it. This proposed change is just a remix and a re-interpretation. It is not canonical.

shoo 5y ago
> the sound that was recorded and post processed at the time and released is the correct one that's a fun angle - what is the "correct" sound? a different way to define the "correct" sound could be to claim that experience of listening to the band playing live is the one true correct "sound". In principle you could try to approximately recreate that live sound using a live beatles cover band or some kind of computer simulated beatles [+]. but that perspective of "correct" being a live listening experience ignores the contribution of production to the end product that was shipped & listened to, as you're advocating for. [+] e.g. try to simulate the sound of all the instruments and the vocals from first principles or something, perhaps fitting them to the actual recordings using some belief about the observation model & error model of how the true sounds would have gotten recorded/distorted/mangled/mixed into the recorded sounds, using the standard equipment and techniques of the day. now we've turned the problem into an arbitrarily hard ill-defined inverse problem, so we can probably make it sound like however we want depending on what assumptions we make, so arguably this is a weird and overly complex way of producing one of many possible remixes or reinterpretations.
- onionisafruit 5y ago
  Did The Beatles ever play Sgt Pepper's live? I'm too young to remember, but I think that was from after they stopped playing live.
  - shoo 5y ago
    i am not a beatles fan, i have no idea. presumably they played it live (or the component parts of it) during recording. if they never played it live, it makes the idea of regarding the live sound as the "true" sound even more absurd.
    - onionisafruit 5y ago
      That's what I was getting at. There's no live baseline to compare it to in this case.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    Yes, they stopped touring the year before. These songs were only ever fully performed in the studio.
- gerdesj 5y ago
  "that's a fun angle - what is the "correct" sound?" I think you are absolutely correct here and I crapped out! - there is no correct. There is no correct sound but there might be "authentic" sound or perhaps the original sound. The thing is I don't think you can go back on the past when several people who were there are now dead and the rest of them and my tiny recollection are well over 50 odd years old. Basically, what I'm asking for is: go easy on history.
paxys 5y ago
An album is only mixed for whatever technology is available at the time. The moment you convert an old vinyl record to cassette tape it has already deviated from what was "correct". The same goes for CDs, 5.1, Atmos and whatever else will show up in the future. In fact if the Sgt Pepper recording that sounds so right to you is in stereo (which has been the default version since 1968), you yourself aren't listening to the original canonical one.
- rectang 5y ago
  > An album is only mixed for whatever technology is available at the time. Audio recordings are mastered for whatever distribution technology is available at the time. Mixing, as an extension of creative production (Sgt. Peppers is a landmark work for this trend in pop music), is less commonly redone.
  - TylerE 5y ago
    Remasters almost always invoke a remix, wether they advertise it or not.
    - rectang 5y ago
      That's just not accurate. Most mastering starts from finished mixes, not multitrack masters. (Source: I'm a former mastering engineer.)
      - coldtea 5y ago
        Most mastering yes. Remastering less so.
        rectang 5y ago
        I mean, I did a bunch of remastering back in the day — generally old stuff being re-released on new media. It was always from the finished original mixes (or copies if using the originals was impractical). There's a vast quantity of stuff out there getting remastered constantly through the ages. For vinyl, for cassette, for CD, for streaming, for whatever. Or multiple times for the same medium, because the old masters wore out, were damaged or lost... And sure, sometimes remastering is done for aesthetic reasons, but it's not common. I guess if you're going to limit your definition of "remastered" to "the stuff that gets marketed as 'remastered'" then there are going to be more releases in there where remixing was done. But remixing (unless the goal is DJ-style remixing) is difficult, because reproducing the original mix environment is a huge challenge. In theory it's become more feasible in recent years if the mixing is done totally inside a DAW, but it's still hard to guarantee that the system can be rebooted (so people save "stems"). Long-term archival is a hard problem, even if your goal is just to preserve linear PCM sound files!
tomcam 5y ago
The Beatles never performed any songs from Sgt. Pepper live in any form. Paul and Ringo did so separately in later decades.
- sonofhans 5y ago
  Funny story: the first person to perform "Sgt. Pepper" live was Jimi Hendrix. I read an interview with McCartney about this. The Beatles released the album on a Thursday, then had plans to see Hendrix the next Sunday. Hendrix got word they were coming, rehearsed like a madman, and opened his set with it. Best source I can find: https://www.beatlesstory.com/blog/2017/05/07/jimi-hendrix-the-sgt-pepper-experience/ https://www.beatlesstory.com/blog/2017/05/07/jimi-hendrix-th...
  - nineteen999 5y ago
    There's footage of it on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZoIxlRC32k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZoIxlRC32k Also it was recreated in the Hendrix movie starring Andre 3000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMmhHBr7WDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMmhHBr7WDA
  - ingas 5y ago
    Yeah. And I don't know whether Jeff Beck was the first who played "A Day in the Life" but he did that magnificiently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHHY3eRUMsM&ab_channel=feedbackbro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHHY3eRUMsM&ab_channel=feedb...
- jleyank 5y ago
  The Analogues are a good Beatles tribute band that plays the stuff live and tries to reproduce the sound (original equipment where possible, horn and string backup). There have been other acts that have done well at smaller scale (such as Beatlejuice), but you can see and hear the Analogues on-line quite easily. For me, if Covid had not occurred I would have jumped the puddle to see them.
adrianmonk 5y ago
I'm not sure whether an Atmos version will add much either, but the title means that current Atmos version (from 2017) doesn't sound quite right.
itomato 5y ago
We won’t have “correct” until we have multi-track masters behind a mixing deck.
op00to 5y ago
How do you know how it sounded in the studio, from the high quality masters, on their studio monitors? I think that'd be the true representation, not a vinyl facsimile.

shoo 5y ago

> the sound that was recorded and post processed at the time and released is the correct one that's a fun angle - what is the "correct" sound? a different way to define the "correct" sound could be to claim that experience of listening to the band playing live is the one true correct "sound". In principle you could try to approximately recreate that live sound using a live beatles cover band or some kind of computer simulated beatles [+]. but that perspective of "correct" being a live listening experience ignores the contribution of production to the end product that was shipped & listened to, as you're advocating for. [+] e.g. try to simulate the sound of all the instruments and the vocals from first principles or something, perhaps fitting them to the actual recordings using some belief about the observation model & error model of how the true sounds would have gotten recorded/distorted/mangled/mixed into the recorded sounds, using the standard equipment and techniques of the day. now we've turned the problem into an arbitrarily hard ill-defined inverse problem, so we can probably make it sound like however we want depending on what assumptions we make, so arguably this is a weird and overly complex way of producing one of many possible remixes or reinterpretations.

onionisafruit 5y ago
Did The Beatles ever play Sgt Pepper's live? I'm too young to remember, but I think that was from after they stopped playing live.
- shoo 5y ago
  i am not a beatles fan, i have no idea. presumably they played it live (or the component parts of it) during recording. if they never played it live, it makes the idea of regarding the live sound as the "true" sound even more absurd.
  - onionisafruit 5y ago
    That's what I was getting at. There's no live baseline to compare it to in this case.
- BurningFrog 5y ago
  Yes, they stopped touring the year before. These songs were only ever fully performed in the studio.
gerdesj 5y ago
"that's a fun angle - what is the "correct" sound?" I think you are absolutely correct here and I crapped out! - there is no correct. There is no correct sound but there might be "authentic" sound or perhaps the original sound. The thing is I don't think you can go back on the past when several people who were there are now dead and the rest of them and my tiny recollection are well over 50 odd years old. Basically, what I'm asking for is: go easy on history.

paxys 5y ago

An album is only mixed for whatever technology is available at the time. The moment you convert an old vinyl record to cassette tape it has already deviated from what was "correct". The same goes for CDs, 5.1, Atmos and whatever else will show up in the future. In fact if the Sgt Pepper recording that sounds so right to you is in stereo (which has been the default version since 1968), you yourself aren't listening to the original canonical one.

rectang 5y ago
> An album is only mixed for whatever technology is available at the time. Audio recordings are mastered for whatever distribution technology is available at the time. Mixing, as an extension of creative production (Sgt. Peppers is a landmark work for this trend in pop music), is less commonly redone.
- TylerE 5y ago
  Remasters almost always invoke a remix, wether they advertise it or not.
  - rectang 5y ago
    That's just not accurate. Most mastering starts from finished mixes, not multitrack masters. (Source: I'm a former mastering engineer.)
    - coldtea 5y ago
      Most mastering yes. Remastering less so.
      - rectang 5y ago
        I mean, I did a bunch of remastering back in the day — generally old stuff being re-released on new media. It was always from the finished original mixes (or copies if using the originals was impractical). There's a vast quantity of stuff out there getting remastered constantly through the ages. For vinyl, for cassette, for CD, for streaming, for whatever. Or multiple times for the same medium, because the old masters wore out, were damaged or lost... And sure, sometimes remastering is done for aesthetic reasons, but it's not common. I guess if you're going to limit your definition of "remastered" to "the stuff that gets marketed as 'remastered'" then there are going to be more releases in there where remixing was done. But remixing (unless the goal is DJ-style remixing) is difficult, because reproducing the original mix environment is a huge challenge. In theory it's become more feasible in recent years if the mixing is done totally inside a DAW, but it's still hard to guarantee that the system can be rebooted (so people save "stems"). Long-term archival is a hard problem, even if your goal is just to preserve linear PCM sound files!

tomcam 5y ago

The Beatles never performed any songs from Sgt. Pepper live in any form. Paul and Ringo did so separately in later decades.

sonofhans 5y ago
Funny story: the first person to perform "Sgt. Pepper" live was Jimi Hendrix. I read an interview with McCartney about this. The Beatles released the album on a Thursday, then had plans to see Hendrix the next Sunday. Hendrix got word they were coming, rehearsed like a madman, and opened his set with it. Best source I can find: https://www.beatlesstory.com/blog/2017/05/07/jimi-hendrix-the-sgt-pepper-experience/ https://www.beatlesstory.com/blog/2017/05/07/jimi-hendrix-th...
- nineteen999 5y ago
  There's footage of it on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZoIxlRC32k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZoIxlRC32k Also it was recreated in the Hendrix movie starring Andre 3000: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMmhHBr7WDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMmhHBr7WDA
- ingas 5y ago
  Yeah. And I don't know whether Jeff Beck was the first who played "A Day in the Life" but he did that magnificiently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHHY3eRUMsM&ab_channel=feedbackbro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHHY3eRUMsM&ab_channel=feedb...
jleyank 5y ago
The Analogues are a good Beatles tribute band that plays the stuff live and tries to reproduce the sound (original equipment where possible, horn and string backup). There have been other acts that have done well at smaller scale (such as Beatlejuice), but you can see and hear the Analogues on-line quite easily. For me, if Covid had not occurred I would have jumped the puddle to see them.

adrianmonk 5y ago

I'm not sure whether an Atmos version will add much either, but the title means that current Atmos version (from 2017) doesn't sound quite right.

itomato 5y ago

We won’t have “correct” until we have multi-track masters behind a mixing deck.

op00to 5y ago

How do you know how it sounded in the studio, from the high quality masters, on their studio monitors? I think that'd be the true representation, not a vinyl facsimile.