Beatles Mono

The STEREO BOX SET be the official canon, but what Beatlemaniacs have really craved is the MONO BOX SET. This limited-edition box is laden with new-to-CD mixes, including the genuine rarities of the previously unreleased mono mixes of the four new songs from Yellow Submarine, and its packaging is gorgeous, filled with mini-LP replicas with stiff cardboard sleeves of every album from Please Please Me to The Beatles, complete with replicated gatefolds and packaging inserts, all protected in resealable plastic sleeves…

It's often unfair to compare the Rolling Stones to the Beatles but in the case of the group's mono mixes, it's instructive. Until the 2009 release of the box set The Beatles in Mono, all of the Fab Four's mono mixes were out of print. That's not the case with the Rolling Stones. Most of their '60s albums – released on Decca in the U.K., London in the U.S. – found mono mixes sneaking onto either the finished sequencing or various singles compilations, so the 2016 box The Rolling Stones in Mono only contains 56 heretofore unavailable mono mixes among its 186 tracks…