www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-34766693

It's easy to be suspicious with a lot of Beatles re-releases these days, thinking they are just mere cash ins on music that will inevitably sell by the bucketloads. The 2009 remasters I thought were solely good for the release of the albums in Mono. However, the stereo releases were disappointing in today's surround sound age, in which I thought they merely tidied up the messy stereo mixes that were, after all, only ever an afterthought in the 1960s. However, I picked up the re-release of The Beatles '1' yesterday, enthused by the idea that the master tapes had been remixed into surround sound by George Martin's son Giles. I thought his mixing efforts on Love were very impressive so I had high hopes for this.

And wow, did he deliver with this! The Beatles have never sounded greater than this, and I very much doubt they will ever improve on this - this is by far the most impressive re-release I have ever heard from any band. Martin's initial idea was to have the impression that the band were playing right in front of your very eyes. Gone is the compression and now you can hear each and every instrument in full clarity - for instance, there are tiny little acoustic riffs I missed on previous versions and the bass is clearer and less muddy. Yet for all the clarity of the instruments, the vocals and harmonies are crystal clear and dominate the mixes as opposed to merely mingling in with the music - for example, I recognised harmony vocals in Yellow Submarine I never even knew existed. If you really want to hear the full impact, listening via headphones is where the differences become most apparent.

I have no idea why they didn't bother remixing the old stereo records in much the same way. And I think the 2009 stereo remasters really screwed up big time as they should have realised they were just polishing turds in all honesty. For example, Paperback Writer still sounds pathetic on the stereo remasters where the energy is sapped from the recording by channelling the great heavy guitar riff down the left side - earphone users will know what I'm talking about. It's the case with many stereo tracks where the vocals lie on the right hand side while the instruments lie on the left and it sounds horribly unbalanced. These surround sound mixes on 1 eradicate that and retain - and actually heighten - the energy of the original mono recordings. I highly recommend it - even a casual fan would be silly to miss buying this record in my opinion.

The fact that The Beatles aren't available in this format for their other albums is a worry though - iTunes users (the demographic of which are particularly young) will read up on the hype and buy and then wonder why such bad recordings are praised (no chance of buying the superior mono versions digitally). In this day and age where a majority of music listeners listen via headphones, these problems are only exacerbated when listening in such a way. It isn't good enough that the greatest musical act of all time has yet to see ideal versions of their music in such glorious modern surround sound. I disagree that it is rewriting history as I said previously that the stereo versions were never any good and it only makes sense to update the sound for the modern age. With the only widely available versions being the poor stereo masters, it risks The Beatles being lost to the next generation of music listeners. Thinking about this, I can't believe the scant disregard for modern ways of listening that the engineers who worked on the remasters were guilty of. Almost criminal neglect I feel!