Sgt. Pepper’s to get new Atmos mix: current version ‘doesn’t sound quite right’

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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

> Perhaps Martin hoped that this would produce an effect of the instruments coming from many places. Personally, I feel this is gimmicky at best, and disintegrated at worst especially when listening on headphones.

This is not how it happened.

Stereo record players started appearing in the late 1950s and were seen as somewhat a gimmick at first. The equipment for producing stereo records was not like it is today. You might use a four-track tape machine to record the band, and mix it on a console which had a three-way switch for each channel: left, center, and right. Sgt. Pepper came out in 1967 and was produced on such equipment, although the studio was able to synchronize two tape machines together (and they also bounced mixes to tape to build up layers).

They just didn’t have pan pots on their mixing consoles back then.

By the time Abbey Road came out in 1969, the studio had moved to eight-track machines which could more easily be synchronized, you could find a basic “pan” knob on your mixing console, and no mono mix of the record was made.

Exactly this.

Whether it's Giles Martin (who IS NOT George Martin, and who did not work with the Beatles) or Steven Wilson remixing every great progressive rock record known to man, all of these are the same.

Replace the vibe, atmosphere and space of whatever the original thing was, with a version in which every little detail is a little bit too close and carefully cut out from its background to be presented, pristine, as if it could be listened to isolated from the music it's in.

Generally if you have a sense of the vibe and space of the original work you'll find the remixing appalling, terrible. It's improved if the goal is to pick out all the details as if you were going to fill out a report or perhaps a postmortem.

It's like being mad old Eno records don't have enough 18k content and blaming the original vinyl and fixing it. Sometimes the artists go along with this nonsense and sometimes they just put up with it, or have passed on and can't be consulted about it.

It is only for the glorification of the remixers: Steven Wilson at least does his own music, though I haven't liked it all that much.

If you're listening late at night, you may think the band are not quite right.

In some cases the mono mixes were the ones the Beatles themselves were present for. Some of the stereo mixes were the audio engineers experimenting on their own — this is why Beatles mono mixes are highly sought-after. Can’t recall whether Sgt. Pepper’s was a mono mix originally, but probably an easy search to find out — I’m too lazy to go to my bookshelf and flip through to the Beatles studio notes at the moment…

Very much so - the sounds aren't new but the mix is. Giles mixed in a lot more of what was present to try and capture the original intention of that section.

He discusses it in a release interview somewhere.

Back in the day, what you had was vinyl records pressed off a signal chain that was a pile of old retro ALL TUBE equipment, and you could listen to it over stereo systems (or indeed mono systems) also built off tubes and made so you could turn the record up REALLY LOUD.

They didn't have transistor mixing consoles until Abbey Road. Geoff Emerick, their best engineer, is on record in his autobiography that they lost a lot of energy and power in that transition, and had to work like hell to make the band still sound good when it sounded that much smaller and weaker than it did back in the days of Pepper and Revolver and the White Album.

I have measured these albums off the original vinyl and know the dynamic energy permitted to that format was substantially greater than anything you get in the 'un-muffled' modern day. You had to turn the record up to get the fullest sound as it was not limited and heavily equalized to compensate for idle, inattentive listening. In particular, peak energy could be 18 dB or more, over the loudest RMS output the records could produce.

They also cut a 15k tone on literally this record, Sgt. Pepper's, so dogs could enjoy the music too. And it worked (as did the later quadraphonic records done using carrier tones of 30 to 50k)

I'm gonna suggest the fault is not in the original record…

I think a lot of the muffled aesthetic is a consequence of the decisions made in the recording/mixing process, there's a strong room reverb across the recording particularly noticeable on Ringo's drums which combined with the high-end softening of the Fairchild 660 compressor featured on Beatles records gives it a "rock concert while standing in line for the bathroom" color. I could be mistaken but it sounds like a lot of the instrumental parts were recorded in single takes in the same room compared to say Abbey Road where it sounds like they were tracked independently. A consequence of tracking multiple lines together is there can be cross-instrument fuzzing that results in "muffling", it can be an intentional effect though for a more live sound. Just my 2c

They released a standard stereo mix at the same time. This is a cork-sniffing extra.