| Beatle Mania |
| Megan Marshall |
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The Beatles are timeless. Their music has been popular
for over twenty years,
and their albums are still selling like hot cakes. Recently,
all of the Beatles' albums were re-released and re-issued
and remastered.
Also released were box sets of mono recordings and stereo
recordings.
The trouble lies in that many do not know the difference between
mono
and stereo recordings.
Mono is the short form for monaural or monophonic sound,
and is a single-channel recording often with only one microphone
or speaker
fed into one channel. However there were two types of mono
recordings.
The first being one track recorded as one channel. The other
being two tracks
(ie vocals and instruments) being streamed and recorded together
as a singular channel. This recording method was popular and
used in the early
1900s for means of AM radios and vinyl pressings. It was a
simple, inexpensive
method to record, however it created a more dense, concentrated
sound.
The Beatles' first album, Please Please Me, was one of the
first compact
discs to be released in mono. The first 10 albums released
by the Beatles were
recorded in mono, only to be later re-issued and remastered
in stereo formatting.
Yellow Submarine was the last album to be released in mono
in 1969.
The demise of mono came in the early 1950s when stereophonic
technology
took over and became more common.
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Stereophonic (or stereo)
recording is the reproduction of sound using
two or more independent sound tracks (ie vocals, harmony vocals,
instruments)
to recreate a sound similar to hearing something in person -
the sound seemingly
coming from all directions, not just in one direct stream. By
all means, stereo
recording is much more diverse, intricate and complex than merely
one-track
recording. The Beatles' first stereo album was Abbey Road in
1969, and
subsequently the remainder of their albums were recorded as
such.
In determining the differences between mono and stereo recordings,
it appears evident that stereo would be the better purchase,
right? Maybe.
To this day, and in lieu of the new formatted Beatles releases,
there remains
strong opposition over which is the 'better' sound and ultimately,
the 'better' buy.
Many defend mono by stating that these ten albums were originally
recorded
in mono, therefore this is the way they should be heard.
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