Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now
We got a copy of the Abbey Road remix in, cleaned it and played it. Now we can officially report the results of our investigation into this modern marvel. Imagine, The Beatles with a new mix! Just what it needed, right?
So what did we hear?
The Half-Speed mastered remixed Abbey Road has to be one of the worst sounding Beatles records we have ever had the misfortune to play.
Hard to imagine you could make Abbey Road sound any worse. It’s absolutely disgraceful.
Is it the worst version of the album ever made? Hard to imagine it would have much competition.
I will be writing more about its specific shortcomings down the road, but for now let this serve as a warning that you are throwing your money away if you buy this newly remixed LP.
UPDATE 2022
As you may have guessed by now, I have completely lost interest in detailing the abundant shortcomings of this awful record. Do yourself a favor and don’t buy one.
If you did buy one, do yourself a different favor: order any UK pressing from 1970-1986 off the web and play that one head to head with it so you can hear how badly they screwed with and screwed up the new mix.
When the remastering is this incompetent, you do not need a Hot Stamper pressing to beat it. Almost any record will do.
Remastering a well-known title and creating a new sound for it is a huge bête noire for us here at Better Records.
Half-Speed mastered disasters that sound as bad as this record does go directly into our audiophile record hall of shame.
If this isn’t the perfect example of a pass/not-yet record, I don’t know what would be.
Some records are so wrong, or are so lacking in qualities that are critically important to their sound — qualities typically found in abundance on the right vintage pressings — that the defenders of these records are fundamentally failing to judge them properly. We call these records Pass/Not-Yet, implying that the supporters of these kinds of records are not where they need to be in audio yet, but that there is still hope. If they target their resources (time and money) well, there is no reason they can’t get to where they need to be, the same way we did. Our audio advice section may be of help in that regard.