| From: Bengt Wärmlind, SWEDEN To: February 14th, 2001 Dear people at Apple, First of all I will congratulate you all at Apple, EMI and Abbey Road Studios to the tremendous success with the ‘1’ CD by THE BEATLES. Very well-deserved! You have treated The Beatles very well! The 24 bits remastering is very skilfully and musically made. The Beatles has never sounded better! Thank you very much! Here are some of my favourites: ‘Love Me Do’ sounds as it was recorded yesterday. What a beat! ‘Ticket To Ride’. What punch in the instruments! And John’s voice - pure magic! ‘Yesterday’. Nice dry sound in the violins. And Paul’s guitar so beautiful! ‘Day Tripper’. One of my favourites in the 60’s. Great, that you have repaired the dropout. ‘Eleonor Rigby’. Wonderful dry and clear sound in the violins. ‘Hello Goodbye’. The bass and orchestra have never sounded better! ‘Get Back’. Great big bass sound! All instruments sound fabulous - like on ‘Ticket To Ride’. ‘The Long And Winding Road’. Now even Phil Spector’s hated violins sound fabulous! After a year’s distance to the acclaimed remastering and remix on the ‘Yellow Submarine Songtrack’ CD in 1998, I think what you have done now on the ‘1’ CD is the right way to present The Beatles on forthcoming releases. That is 24 bits remastering of the original mixes from the 60’s is preferable. History is against you remix them now. The reason: The people who were involved in the 60’s, like Sir GEORGE MARTIN, NORMAN SMITH, GEOFF EMERICK(?) and others, are no longer available for such a big task. And no others in the whole world can make a remix correctly. No one has told me anything, but it’s not a too qualified guess, that the whole Beatles album catalogue very soon will be re-released 24 bits remastered. Hopefully we will then - at last - get the first four albums, ‘Please Please Me’, ‘With The Beatles’, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ and ‘Beatles For Sale’ on STEREO CD’s also! I think you remember all my efforts in 1995-98 to persuade you at Apple, EMI and Abbey Road Studios to re-release these albums on STEREO CD’s. The background was that I had purchased a rare, high-quality 2 CD bootleg called ‘Original Master Recordings’ (BEAT CD 013-2) in the summer 1995, which contained these albums in glorious stereo sound. Every person I played the CD for just loved it! At once I thought: "The world must be able to hear this treasure!" So I started to write about this issue to several Beatles magazines. 11 articles were published all around the world, three of them in The Beatles Monthly Book in the U.K. But that wasn’t enough! I got the idea, "think if I could send the CD’s to them who decide, like Sir GEORGE MARTIN and the people at APPLE, EMI and Abbey Road Studios". The bootleg was no longer available, and even if it was, I couldn’t afford to send all these people the CD’s, off course. I decided to make CD-R’s. But at that time, in 1996, CD-R’s had to made in my local CD store and were very expensive, £25 each! After intensive search for sponsors I managed to send 6 double CD-R sets in December 1996 and April 1997 to NEIL ASPINALL at Apple, Sir GEORGE MARTIN, engineer GEOFF EMERICK, MIKE HEATLEY at EMI International and ALLAN ROUSE at Abbey Road Studios, among others. I think the CD-R’s were well received. Because Sir George Martin popped up talking about them spontaneously. And on 11th July 1997, XX (from Abbey Road) and YY (from EMI) carefully listened to the CD-R's at Abbey Road Studios and compared them with EMI's original master tapes. The result was sensational! "Your CD-R's are identical to the master tapes! IT SOUNDS GOOD!" I was told. So when the day comes when you will re-release the Beatles original albums 24 bits remastered, I hope that not only the original mono versions are included now, but also the STEREO versions of the first four albums. Why not make twofers with both the mono and stereo versions as you have done already with many of your other artists from the early and mid 60’s? As I wrote earlier, remastering is enough, don’t remix them! With one exception: ‘With The Beatles’. There I think a remix is preferable. But that demands that the component vocal and instrumental tracks are still available, so that you can remix the vocals and instruments separately like you did on the ‘Yellow Submarine Songtrack’ CD 1998. But I don’t know if that’s technically possible. Finally, the booklets just have to be remade. (They look almost embarrassing now.) Please let MARK LEWISOHN write extensive liner notes and include some glorious unpublished photos! And if there are still some beautiful unreleased outtakes in the vaults, please include them as well! Kind regards, Bengt Wärmlind Simular letters have also been sent to: MIKE HEATLEY at EMI International in London, Back to First Four In Stereo!
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