Seems every Christmas there’s a new stack of Elvis packages and box sets. This year the Beatles are back aboard the boomer money train with a reissue set priced by the pound.
“The Beatles Stereo Vinyl Box Set,” out today, is a massive carton containing each of the band’s original studio LPs — on freshly pressed 180-gram, audiophile vinyl — plus the “Past Masters” singles-and-extras albums and a 252-page book about the making of each album. It weighs in over 20 pounds and will set back obsessives $319. (The individual albums also will be sold separately, at $24 each.)
It’s as if you traveled back in time to purchase them when they were brand new. Actually, given the audio quality of the new vinyl, it’s much, much better.
The albums in the set:
“Please Please Me” (1963)
“With the Beatles” (1963)
“A Hard Day’s Night” (1964)
“Beatles for Sale” (1964)
“Help!” (1965)
“Rubber Soul” (1965)
“Revolver” (1966)
“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (1967)
“Magical Mystery Tour” (1967)
“The Beatles (The White Album)” (1968)
“Yellow Submarine” (1969)
“Let It Be” (1969)
“Abbey Road” (1970)
“Past Masters” (vols. 1 & 2, 1988)
The vinyl reissues follow the CD reissues from 2009, the result of years of painstaking studio re-engineering.
But it’s not over yet: Next year, the whole catalog comes out again — on vinyl, and in mono.
As another highly influential British quartet once sang, derisively, “Reissue, repackage, repackage, re-evaluate the songs …”
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