John Lennon, good music, poor fidelity


I just picked up a CD title "Lennon Legend, The Very Best of John Lennon" put out by Polyphone in 1997.

The fidelity is mediocre to poor. I've also found this to be the case with every Beatles title I have including the MoFi LP box set. Did the guys that mastered these have tin ears or is the source material subpar?

Are there any Lennon compilations with audiophile fidelity? If not, are any of the individual releases good fidelity, CD or LP.
herman
Herman,

The recent MoFi editions of his (Lennon) solo CDs are excellent.They are also available on LP. Definately worth a try. I was skeptical, because they were remastered by Capitol not that long ago, and sounded fine. The MoFi releases are extremely impressive from the sound quality aspect.
As for the Beatles, it gets dicey on CD. The "Anthology" series are decent. I enjoy "Let It Be Naked" for the sound quality, but some people do not. "Yellow Submarine" got a remastering job in 1999 that surpasses the original.
The Beatles catalog is in dire need of the 24-bit makeover.
This has been an issue that resurfaces frequently, and may not be rectified until we get another format that survives.

Cbucki
Herman-to start off with The Beatles,the newest remastering and disc with the best sound quality is the One compilation.This really does sound good but obviously the production is of it's time especially the earlier stuff.
The tracks though do sound quite a bit better than their previous CD incarnations.

Lennon's solo albums were all remastered around 2000,I haven't checked these out but would imagine (you may call me a dreamer)that these will sound better than the previous versions and individual tracks will sound better than Legend.

There's a newer Lennon compilation called The Lennon Collection but it has fewer tracks than Legend and I'm not at all sure when it was mastered.
Regardless of mastering quality, everyone should own either Legend or Collection (or Shaved Fish) in order to have "Cold Turkey" in your collection. Lennon's finest solo track IMHO.