Let me say up front, I'm not intending to **** on anyone's idea of a good time. I should also state that I've no interest in vinyl and was happy to no longer hear scratches on discs I played to death when I moved over to CDs (and now streaming).
But I'm gobsmacked someone would pay ~$40 per mono vinyl album and think it was a good deal. Clearly scarcity isn't an issue as they can drop another batch later (notwithstanding any degradation in the tape; it's mono, who's gonna know?). So what is it?
BTW, does the Michael Jackson estate still own the Beatles catalog? Or was it sold on to someone else and I missed that.
You ask fair questions; I don’t think you’re a bad trip. Forty bucks is
very expensive (edited with a strikethrough) but is almost standard these days for all-analog reissues from master recordings (they are indeed using the original masters).
The box and book look beautiful, so it seems to be packaged wonderfully. YMMV on the value of that.
Mono recordings of rock n' roll and other popular music from 1966 or earlier (and sometimes up until '68 or '69 depending) that were produced and recorded in the mono format are sought after these days because people want to hear records that reflect how the recordings were originally intended to be heard. I think the resurgence of the format came from industry response to a recognition that started in the mid-1990s among increasing numbers of consumers (like me) that true mono reproductions of music recorded and produced in mono was not only a possibility but also the buying public's preference, and these requests, aggregated en masse, showed the music industry that there was a newly powerful consumer demand bloc. These consumers, whose numbers had grown, began to buy records from companies that had undertaken new efforts to reproduce mono recordings. So there were new revenue streams and profits once the new mono records that the public had clamored for became available for purchase.
With this in mind, note that The Beatles have been in unwaveringly high demand since about 1963 among rock n' roll record buyers, and they were a prime example of a band that had specifically recorded in mono and had spent much of their available energy and monetary budget for recording and production within the mono format. So the mono part of the box set is a big deal.
The prices of many older records still extant also tell you where the public and audio guys are at, and The Beatles record prices were especially illuminating of this trend. There is a significant price disparity between mono and stereo Beatles records. You can get a high-quality Parlophone Beatles record in stereo for . . . crap. I don’t even know. Wanna know why? Nobody wants stereo! The Beatles catalogue in the new box set just released didn’t even bother with a stereo version this time around because you can get reasonable facsimiles of those stereo reproductions from Amazon for around $25. I’m not joking. I’ll look up the Parlophone stereo prices and come back. eta* Yeah, really good audio resale companies sell great Beatles stereo reissues for about $30. These are 180 gram, all-analog records that are remastered by good engineers. Nothing to sneeze at; but The Beatles' Parlophone mono records were fetching $200 for each title on average until a few days ago.
I do see a validity to the skepticism regarding the quality and necessity of mono reissues, and I get that it’s also ripe for cash grabs; I surely dig that there is a healthy dollop of greed and there are suckers that are involved in the machinery of the industry. There are consumers who buy industry cash grabs and line the pockets of the unscrupulous.
My take is that I personally prefer mono to stereo in any decade because I have always thought (for thirty years of so) that stereo recording and reproduction is artificial. It’s fake. You don’t hear music in stereo when you hear it live. So once I heard records how they were meant to be heard I've been a proponent of mono.
Now there are exceptions. The Beach Boys are different and sound great in stereo because they put endless hours and beaucoup bucks into it.
Sony owns The Beatles publishing catalogue. They purchased half of it from Michael Jackson in ‘1995, and the other half from his estate after his death. The Beatles own the synchronization publishing rights, which aren't insubstantial.
Here's George Harrison about The Beatles and their attitude about mono vs. stereo. From Reddit:
"At that time [...] the console was about this big with four faders on it. And there was one speaker right in the middle [...] and that was it. When they invented stereo, I remember thinking 'Why? What do you want two speakers for?', because it ruined the sound from our point of view. You know, we had everything coming out of one speaker; now it had to come out of two speakers. It sounded like ... very ... naked."
It’s a consistent theme with them.
eta* This post has been edited numerous times in many ways to strengthen its main assertions with more thoughtful, thorough explanations and for clarity
