Well said.

100% agree.

I heard that the team cleared the mix with McCartney & Starr and with the Harrison & Lennon estates before releasing the project. Pretty cool.

At the very least, it's superior to that weird stereo remix we got a few years ago.

On a totally unrelated note, decided to listen to the Ringo Starr live album. Profoundly weird. Like listening to an 80s cover band featuring guys who were actually in those bands. Performances are entertaining though.

Made me google the beginning, and this is a brief wiki-copy of the highlights from their first two singles to Beatlemania broke out in the US as well.

«After the moderate success of "Love Me Do", the single "Please Please Me" was released in January 1963, two months ahead of the album. It reached number one on every UK chart except Record Retailer, where it peaked at number two.

Released in March 1963, Please Please Me was the first of eleven consecutive Beatles albums released in the United Kingdom to reach number one. The band's third single, "From Me to You", came out in April and began an almost unbroken string of seventeen British number-one singles, including all but one of the eighteen they released over the next six years. Issued in August, their fourth single, "She Loves You", achieved the fastest sales of any record in the UK up to that time, selling three-quarters of a million copies in under four weeks. It became their first single to sell a million copies, and remained the biggest-selling record in the UK until 1978.

On 13 October, the Beatles starred on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, the UK's top variety show. Their performance was televised live and watched by 15 million viewers. One national paper's headlines in the following days coined the term "Beatlemania" to describe the riotous enthusiasm by screaming fans who greeted the band – and it stuck.

On 7 February 1964, the Beatles departed from Heathrow with an estimated 4,000 fans waving and screaming as the aircraft took off. Upon landing at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, an uproarious crowd estimated at 3,000 greeted them. They gave their first live US television performance two days later on The Ed Sullivan Show, watched by approximately 73 million viewers in over 23 million households, or 34 per cent of the American population.»

Rewatching The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years. It’s pretty good.

It’s fun and well-made but also absurdly whitewashed

My hot take is that it's complete nonsense designed to sell as many units as possible.

The AI technology used on "Revolver" is being marketed as unique and ground-breaking but there are better programs that have been used with a lot more skill by other studios/engineers. Nobody is smart enough to figure out that the source for this info is the same company selling you a box set that costs 3X more than other box sets with more content, and that they have ties to the "inventor" of said technology. And the person doing the remixes is the son of the Beatles original producer but has little experience doing work that is worthy of such hype. He has made bad mistakes in the mixes and replicated mistakes in the old mixes that should have been fixed. When brought to task for it, he pleads ignorance to the Beatles music and insults critics. Defenders say that it's a good thing because he approaches the music with "fresh ears". There is much laughing and eye-rolling going on behind the scenes between industry professionals. But it sells units and impresses the general public. Dumb comments about how "Peter Jackson and Abbey Road should work on such and such" are commonplace now, as if they are the end-all.

The "Revolver" remixes themselves are terrible. You can hear anomalies that are the result of primitive extraction work, mixed improperly as to make them more obvious. The guitar solo in "Taxman" (which has been extracted with the tambourine) sounds like a chewed-up cassette tape. And there was also nothing wrong with the original multi-tracks that would have prevented them from being remixed tastefully and effectively without the extraction crap. Compare any of the remixes that have been coming out to the ones on the old "Yellow Submarine Songtrack" release, which was done correctly.

And the mastering has been bassy and trebly and loud. Their response to complaints has been that they are designed for a younger generation who listens with iPods. Woah, hold me back. Sounds like a sonic thrill.

I also thought that most of the outtakes were boring.

When it comes to the Beatles, deceptive hype always works, and Apple knows this well. So they take full advantage despite their lack of skill in the audio and compiling department.

Well you know more about all this than I do. So...

Nah, there's some interesting material in there.

A few interesting things. And a lot of "listen to once" things. Probably the least interesting box set yet in regards to the extra material.

You were 100% correct when you said that critics and fans are raving about it.

But it's a lot of baloney (IMO).

The technology is always going to provide space and depth, but that doesn't mean it was done well.

They could do a lot better and without all the bells and whistles too.

I expect that they are constrained by the material available to them though. Maybe the sessions just weren't that interesting overall? You'd have to think that the vaults are just about empty now.

Right, yes. But also keep in mind that they spread it across two half-full discs to inflate the price. Two discs worth of material total spread across five discs. They did the same thing with the Let It Be box. But people love it anyway.

Better that the remaining members and their families make money out of it now before some music publishing company run by a sentient AI in 2040 releases what fell through the sluice in 66.

Sure! Another million to add to the 500 billion they already have. I'm not gonna pay for it.

I guess my point is that the total audio content could have been a 2-disc jewel case with a thick booklet for $24.99.

But they spread it across 5 discs with a huge book bound with sheep scrotums and charged $150.

When I worked in music retail in the 90's, Beatles CD's were deliberately overpriced compared to everything else ($19.99 for a single disc) and it was a "rule" that they were not to be sale priced without Apple's authorization (which I only remember happening when the red and blue albums finally came out - and the red album was 60 minutes of music total spread across two CD's for $29.99).

And they are still doing it. And nobody seems to care, even though they have more money in the bank than everybody on this forum combined X1000.

They can suck my dick.

I absolutely appreciate what you're saying.

I also have no doubt that they workshop their release strategies pretty hard, and they know what their target market wants.

Absolutely, but based on fruitless discussions I have had on other forums, the answer to that question seems to be "anything".

And that is technically what we are getting, plus tacky remixes to sell even more copies to general consumers and also the added bonus of stretching the content as far as possible so we pay more money for it.

And I haven't even mentioned the hilarious quality control errors (glitches in the mono White Album blu-ray, bad mastering mistakes in the Let It Be box, fake version of the unreleased Get Back album that never existed, various things sourced from inferior bootlegs for no apparent reason) which went un-fixed because nobody cares.

Sounds like Giles Martin could use your help.