The Beatles Revolver

@bdp24 - 🤣🤣🤣  I think we are in the small minority of Beatles fans who kinda wish they'd never even recorded that!

And you are right - I remember that period very well, and those records you mentioned are indeed classics.... 

The Beatles started using a new SS mixing console from the Abbey Road. Here is about in from the book of Geoff Emerick "Here, There and Everywhere":

"As it happened, the first week of the Abbey Road sessions were quite peaceful without John and Yoko’s presence, though a bit tentative because of equipment problems. The new mixing console had a lot more bells and whistles on it than the old one, and it gave me the opportunity to put into practice many of the ideas I’d had in mind for years, but it just didn’t sound the same, mainly because it utilized transistor circuitry instead of tubes. George Harrison had a lot of trouble coming to terms with the fact that there was less body in the guitar sound, and Ringo was rightfully concerned about the drum sound-he was playing as hard as ever, but you didn’t hear the same impact. He and I actually had a long conversation about that, which was quite unusual, but after a good deal of experimentation I came to the conclusion that we simply couldn’t match the old Beatles sound we had become used to; we simply had to accept that this was the best we could achieve with the new equipment. Personally, I preferred the punchier sound we had gotten out of the old tube console and four-track recorder; every- thing was sounding mellower now. It seemed like a steр backward, but there was nothing we could do-there was an album to record and we simply had to get on with it."

@vair68robert  +1

Back in the day all the tens, hundreds (?) of snippets of taped musical components of a Beatles' song were individually mixed on 4 track and then "bounced down",  enabling more musical elements to be added, which inevitably degraded the overall SQ.

Giles Martin has been able to sync the original, first generation tapes directly to 100+ channel mixing boards and the results, to my ears, is superb. 

Sgt. Pepper on BluRay is the pinnacle of audio quality as played through my system.....and if you've never heard Ringo's uncompressed drums I encourage you to seek it out.

If the re-jiggered sound is offensively different than what you remember when the music was originally released, then most certainly ignore it.....just don't restrict my choice to enjoy it. 

(apologies if I've wrongly described the recording process)

@richardmathes The values of Beatles as artists in the ‘60s and the values of corporations in the 2020s are two different things.

To say one is besmirching the Beatles as mere capitalists when one criticizes the motives of corporations in the 2020s is a conflation.

The issue at hand when someone says, “it’s all about the money” is the relentless exploitation of the Beatles’ music by questionable means by corporations, not the Beatles’ personal values themselves.

The values of corporations in the 60’s were little different than those of today. You only have to look at the greed of Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex during Vietnam. Nothing’s new.

Sorry, Mr. Musturd, but I don’t see "endless exploitation" of The Beatles for money, nor do believe that the surviving Beatles have or would permit it. They seem to still have a hand in how their legacy is handled, and if cutting-edge can continue to add something to their music, I believe they are all in. After all, the fulfillment of their music’s potential happened in the studio.

Scratch that. Never mind the sorry part.

Would you argue that Free As a Bird was motivated by exploitation?

God knows greed is abundant. That doesn’t mean that it’s universal. Life isn’t the black and white of Revolver, it’s the color of Sgt. Pepper’s.