The Beatles Remastered Stereo Box Set
The Beatles aren’t a “best of” kind of group. You can’t order just the “best of” album and be done with the lads from Liverpool. In fact, I think many of their best songs were not their number one hits but actually were their more adventurous recordings such as “Strawberry Fields Forever.”
If you really want to understand The Beatles amazing music you must hear their CDs as a whole rather than just listening to a song here and a song there. I think that they recorded quite a few of the greatest albums of all time and even their not so fantastic albums (such as With The Beatles) have a few really good songs.
That’s why I believe it is such a fantastic idea to Buy The Beatles Remastered Stereo Box Set. The stereo box set includes every single album (and every non-album song with the inclusion of the Past Masters CDs) that they recorded and released during the 1960s.
In other words it contains pretty much everything except for The Anthologies and the Live at the BBC set. I think this makes sense because those 90s releases aren’t a part of “the official catalog” of The Beatles. They are kind of like the “special features” on a DVD while the original releases are the main film.
Actually, there are a few more of their CDs that aren’t included in the box set, for example there’s 1999 release of a CD titled Yellow Submarine Songtrack that is completely different from the 1969 Yellow Submarine LP. It’s actually much better and worth checking out because of it’s alternate mixes (it’s actually remixed, not just remastered.) Let It Be… Naked and Love are not included either.
Along with The Beatles In Stereo Box, I also recommend that you Buy The Beatles Mono Remastered Box Set which features the original mono mixes for all of The Beatles songs up through Yellow Submarine. It may be difficult to understand in the context of today, but when John, Paul, George, & Ringo were mixing their albums they considered the mono mixes to be of much more importance when compared to the stereo mixes up until their last couple of albums which were mixed only in stereo.
