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Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

I've listened to the real thing ie Beetles live and releases on vinyl, tape cassette (of various grades - iron n chromium etc) and CD. I am not a sound engineer nor do I buy cables that cost more than a few quid.

Sgt Peppers sounds right to me because that's how it sounds. A bit self referential but you have to remember that things were a bit different back then. Rather a lot of sound engineering stuff in popular music was being invented at the time.

In my view, the sound that was recorded and post processed at the time and released is the correct one. A well preserved record (vinyl) from the time will have a decent representation on it. I don't think you can go back and retrospectively "improve" it. This proposed change is just a remix and a re-interpretation. It is not canonical.

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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.

> An album is only mixed for whatever technology is available at the time.

Audio recordings are mastered for whatever distribution technology is available at the time.

Mixing, as an extension of creative production (Sgt. Peppers is a landmark work for this trend in pop music), is less commonly redone.

Remasters almost always invoke a remix, wether they advertise it or not.

That's just not accurate. Most mastering starts from finished mixes, not multitrack masters. (Source: I'm a former mastering engineer.)

Most mastering yes. Remastering less so.

I mean, I did a bunch of remastering back in the day — generally old stuff being re-released on new media. It was always from the finished original mixes (or copies if using the originals was impractical).

There's a vast quantity of stuff out there getting remastered constantly through the ages. For vinyl, for cassette, for CD, for streaming, for whatever. Or multiple times for the same medium, because the old masters wore out, were damaged or lost... And sure, sometimes remastering is done for aesthetic reasons, but it's not common.

I guess if you're going to limit your definition of "remastered" to "the stuff that gets marketed as 'remastered'" then there are going to be more releases in there where remixing was done.

But remixing (unless the goal is DJ-style remixing) is difficult, because reproducing the original mix environment is a huge challenge. In theory it's become more feasible in recent years if the mixing is done totally inside a DAW, but it's still hard to guarantee that the system can be rebooted (so people save "stems"). Long-term archival is a hard problem, even if your goal is just to preserve linear PCM sound files!

It's true about the stereo thing. So many people are used to almost laughable stereo that the Beatles' records were remixed to yet so many (including myself) see these as the canonical versions and were inspired by this lopsided mixing technique, copying it for decades to come (mostly in independent music). But ya, there is something to it... pan the bass and drums hard into one channel and the guitar and a way too loud tambourine in the other! It really does actually sounds great :)

I actually lament the lack of way-too-loud percussion in "music these days". Well, ok, I'm opening myself up for a deluge of "but what about this style of music that makes percussion way too loud!???" Well, ok, I guess I'm just talking about guitar-driven music here. So ya, I guess I'm saying, "Guitar-driven music need louder tambourine... damn these kids today!!!". I'm not saying that but, you know :)

[edited for grammar]

How about guitar-driven percussion[1]?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXq1rvuN_lI

> 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.

Just to add for neophytes-- audio improvements over the past 100 years have no discernible relationship to the pace or quality of video improvements.

I say this because at least in the U.S. it is a highly visual culture. If you look at leaps from black and white to color to digital to hidef to 4k, etc. (and especially increasing framerate), you get a sense of monumental improvements in quality. New shit looks so good that the old shit is ruined now because it looks blurry by comparison and can even be pain-inducing to watch.

So one might think, "Gee, stuff in stereo must be twice as good as old shit in mono!" But even paxys example of Sgt Pepper isn't pedantry. It's not just that mono versions are the canonical ones that the band actually help mix and approve. It's that they sound great. A listener doesn't have to do the aural version of "squinting" to hear what the Beatles were doing in that album.

A bit of a tangent but you can scan virtually any film made between 1915 and 2000 or so and get a pristine, super sharp 4K to 6k copy. That’s because they were shot on 35mm film. 35mm film is estimated to have a “resolution” of around 4K.

Even black and white films, if you see an old nitrate print that’s been well preserved, it will be incredibly sharp. And I’m talking about stuff from the 1920s - 1930s. You might not know about this because the digital/tv versions of these films might be lower quality. But film capture technology has been sharp for 100 years.

The exception to this is ofc stuff that was shot for television on video since its invention. But that would be mostly television shows or live broadcasts.

Seinfeld went through one round of reprocessing for 1080 HDTV and the word is that Netflix is doing it again in 4K before they begin streaming it.

was Seinfeld shot on video or 35mm film? Interesting to know.

Also Netflix's obsession with 4K is slightly anti-scientific and counterproductive imo. They are really boxing in their content creators at times, plus 4K can't be resolved in a reasonably large television at a moderate distance from a couch anyway. 4K is the dumbest thing. There's one cinematographer who said for viewing even 1080p was pretty good, and hardly distinguishable from 4K - for CINEMA screens. HDR is cool tho.

But Netflix can upcharge for a 4K subscription. ;-)

Seinfeld was shot on 35mm film so bully for them. The HD versions are interesting. You see parts of the set that were meant to be hidden in 4:3. You also see a lot of makeup errors. Once you see where the makeup ends on Elaine's hairline you can't unsee it.

What do you mean the HD version of Seinfeld is 16:9? That is a complete distortion of the intention of EVERYONE involved with making the show.

I hate when they do that. I can’t watch the HBO HD copy of The Wire for the same reason. The whole point of cinema is you choose what the f** is within the frame. That’s literally PART of the art form, and an integral one at that.

> A bit of a tangent but you can scan virtually any film made between 1915 and 2000 or so and get a pristine, super sharp 4K to 6k copy.

Another tangent-- if you watch the original 35mm film on a 35mm projector, you won't get the same "pristine" experience as the 4K or 8K tv which does some uncanny frame-rate upsampling thing which makes the moving images appear as if they're happening in real life.

If you listen to a mono reel-to-reel or record of Helter Skelter on equipment available to the Beatles at the time of the recording, McCartney's voice will sound pretty godammned close to as pristine (if not exactly for most people) as listening to a 24-bit zillion-herz professionally remastered digital recording of the same thing.

We've spend the past fifty years developing so much fidelity in video that we scratch our heads thinking about someone watching Happy Days on an old school tube.

We've spent the past 30+ years trying to convince cranks that CD quality doesn't degrade to triangle waves right below Nyquist. Meanwhile, it seems that vinyl made a comeback and shows no signs of slowing any time soon. Also meanwhile, absolutely nothing has improved audibly in terms of "framerate" because CDs really were able to encode the entire frequency range that is audible to human beings. (Higher sampling rate can be useful for digital filters and other purposes, but that's not what we're discussing here.)

>Just to add for neophytes-- audio improvements over the past 100 years have no discernible relationship to the pace or quality of video improvements.

Not to mention the audio quality has declined in some ways.

Back in the day even casual music fans had hi-fi systems (even if cheap ones).

Today the huge majority, even so called music junkies (unless they're also into hi-fi), will listen through crappy headphones, computer speakers, and so on.

(and/or heavily compressed mp3, streaming, or YouTube music)

That's why it's a shame that there is no proper mono mix of this classic album on the major streaming services, unlike the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds.

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

Funny story: the first person to perform "Sgt. Pepper" live was Jimi Hendrix. I read an interview with McCartney about this. The Beatles released the album on a Thursday, then had plans to see Hendrix the next Sunday. Hendrix got word they were coming, rehearsed like a madman, and opened his set with it.

Best source I can find: https://www.beatlesstory.com/blog/2017/05/07/jimi-hendrix-th...

There's footage of it on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZoIxlRC32k

Also it was recreated in the Hendrix movie starring Andre 3000:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMmhHBr7WDA

Yeah. And I don't know whether Jeff Beck was the first who played "A Day in the Life" but he did that magnificiently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHHY3eRUMsM&ab_channel=feedb...

The Analogues are a good Beatles tribute band that plays the stuff live and tries to reproduce the sound (original equipment where possible, horn and string backup). There have been other acts that have done well at smaller scale (such as Beatlejuice), but you can see and hear the Analogues on-line quite easily. For me, if Covid had not occurred I would have jumped the puddle to see them.

> 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.

Did The Beatles ever play Sgt Pepper's live? I'm too young to remember, but I think that was from after they stopped playing live.

i am not a beatles fan, i have no idea. presumably they played it live (or the component parts of it) during recording.

if they never played it live, it makes the idea of regarding the live sound as the "true" sound even more absurd.

That's what I was getting at. There's no live baseline to compare it to in this case.

Yes, they stopped touring the year before.

These songs were only ever fully performed in the studio.

"that's a fun angle - what is the "correct" sound?"

I think you are absolutely correct here and I crapped out! - there is no correct.

There is no correct sound but there might be "authentic" sound or perhaps the original sound. The thing is I don't think you can go back on the past when several people who were there are now dead and the rest of them and my tiny recollection are well over 50 odd years old.

Basically, what I'm asking for is: go easy on history.

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.

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