“This device isn’t a spaceship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards.... It takes us to a place where we ache to go again.”
Mad Men advertising guru Don Draper’s pitch to the Kodak executives about their photo Carousel was slick but effective; Draper knows how fragile memory is, how quickly and completely a cherished moment can slip away into the void. By contrast, we’re surrounded by mementos of The Beatles, but only the very young can actually hear their music. It’s inescapable; part of the sonic wallpaper; as reliable as death, taxes and minority governments.
So EMI’s massive four-year remastering job isn’t really about sound quality at all. There aren’t that many audiophiles left out there, and aside from the occasional nagging complaint about how you can only ever hear John or Paul’s voice in one earphone when listening to the old 1987 CD mixes, it’s not like there was a Greek chorus bemoaning the quality of the discs already on the market, and you’ll forget your mother’s maiden name long before you stumble over the first verse of “Yesterday.” How, then, does
a troubled multinational company struggling through the worst market in the history of the business get people to buy CDs of the best-known (or the least-forgotten) music in the world?