More than a decade after The Beatles in Mono box set got a limited-edition release on vinyl, the collection is back in print. The Beatles website has listed the 14-LP anthology, to be re-released July 18 (the CD version is still in stock here).
The box set contains the group’s first nine LPs as they came out in the U.K. — from Please Please Me to the White Album — as well as the U.S. compilation, Magical Mystery Tour, and non-album singles collected on Mono Masters. The albums, pressed on heavyweight, 180-gram vinyl, are just as they were when they came out originally, and the mono mixes still sound superior to the stereo versions of the time. (The box set notably doesn’t feature Fab Four’s three albums to be mixed primarily in stereo — Abbey Road, Yellow Submarine, and Let It Be.)
Engineer Sean Magee and mastering supervisor Steve Berkowitz, who have each won Grammys, oversaw the releases, working with quarter-inch master tapes without any digital interference, at Abbey Road Studios in 2014. The collection includes a hardbound book.
“In the main, we thought in mono,” McCartney told Rolling Stone in 2009. “The stereo mix wasn’t really important to us – we figured, well, you just spread the mono.”
They sound different, too; Lennon’s voice gets a different vocal effect on “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” than the stereo cut. A Rolling Stone review from 2014 of the mono edition of the White Album picked apart the differences in the mix from the stereo edition. “McCartney’s ‘Helter Skelter’ was a tighter ruckus, a minute shorter than in stereo and minus Starr’s shout about his ‘blisters,’” it said. “Starr’s country pie ‘Don’t Pass Me By’ ran faster in mono, and Eric Clapton’s guitar soloing was up front longer in Harrison’s grand sigh ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps.’”
The reissue — which follows last year’s 1964 U.S. Albums in Mono box set, which featured the records with the track lists as they came out in the States — will likely slow down the glut of Beatles in Mono box sets being listed on eBay for $1,000 or more as they are now.