A Splendid Time Is Guaranteed for All

So I went ahead and did it -- I purchased Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band for the third and (I'm assuming final) time. OK, the first time was a birthday present in 1980 and the second time was a used copy of the CD in the late '90s, so this marks the first time that the Beatles actually received any Pepper money directly from me, but you get the idea.

I had mixed feelings, mostly due to my general lack of audiophilia. Years of exposure to amplifiers, crash cymbals and earbuds have left me with a constant ringing and a sense of hearing that's about as sophisticated as my sense of taste (mmm... PBR...). I couldn't imagine that these songs, which are practically part of my genetic makeup, could ever sound fresh to me again. But after all the raves across the board, I had to give it a go.

Having a Saturday afternoon to myself, I set about the task. I poured a cup of coffee, cued up the CD, and just sat there, listening. For the first time in decades, since the days when I'd sit in my room with my headphones on, I just sat and listened to this record. I didn't even read the little booklet that came with it. And what I heard was pretty darn impressive.

There's a clarity of sound that I had never heard before. Each note of McCartney's bass was right there, every drum fill that had previously rumbled under the surface was now discernible (and surprising in their complexity). I swear I could pick apart each voice in the harmonies, each instrument in the orchestral swells in "A Day in the Life." It was like I was hearing it in 3-D, almost able to walk around in the sounds.

Or was it? I played it for it for Mrs. Q ("You don't think I'm going to sit here and listen to the entire Sgt. Pepper record, do you?" But she did.), and we went back and forth about the sound. She agreed it was "crisper", but she wasn't quite convinced that it was the great leap forward that I had experienced. So yesterday we got out the trusty old vinyl pressing and did a little A/B listening. It was an interesting experience -- had our vinyl copy not had a bit of surface noise (understandable for a 30-year-old pressing), we realized that they would have been very comparable indeed. Essentially the new CD restores the clarity of the original sound, which had been tragically lost on the 1987 CD pressing. 

The Beatles remasterings are long overdue. Future Beatles fans will have an artifact more befitting the group's legacy (and its heartening to remember that there will be future Beatles fans). And for those of us who believed that we had internalized every note of the Beatles' music, these discs perform a valuable service -- they make us listen leaning forward.

1. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.mp3