Allan Rouse and Guy Massey smiled confidently at Capitol Records' Studio C in Hollywood, where the senior studio engineers for Capitol's United Kingdom parent company, EMI Records, supervised a preview of the top-secret project they have been working on for four years.
Massey punched "play" on a CD containing portions of 14 Beatles songs as they sounded on the 1987 CDs that brought the Fab Four's catalogue into the digital age, then played spruced-up CD remasters the world will hear when they are released on September 9.
Across town in Santa Monica a few weeks later, three representatives were testing MTV Networks' The Beatles: Rock Band video game.
Two reps strapped on replicas of Paul McCartney's Hofner bass and John Lennon's Rickenbacker guitar, while the third sat behind an electronic drum kit emulating Ringo Starr's Ludwig set and delved into the new video game, which, not coincidentally, hits the market the same day as the new CDs.
Even though nearly 40 years have elapsed since the Beatles' acrimonious breakup, the harmony they created on record, in concert and on film maintains a remarkable hold on pop-music lovers worldwide.
The two projects promise to ramp up Beatlemania again for yet another generation.
The Beatles' recorded past is being faithfully refurbished in CDs, while the video game springboards the British group into the world of interactive game play and the entertainment future.
Retailers have been taking advance orders for individual CDs, box sets the and Rock Band game for months, and it's a good bet the Beatles will appear near the top of the sales charts one more time.
EMI is shipping some 4 million CDs worldwide, about half to the US, according to a recent Billboard report, with first-week sales in the US expected to total about 500,000 copies.
The Beatles have never fully slipped from the public consciousness, helped along by carefully considered new projects.
The group's albums have sold nearly 58 million copies in the years since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking retail sales in 1991.
The remastered CDs and the Rock Band game, along with a Beatles edition of Trivial Pursuit and several other related products, are a co-ordinated effort to reinvigorate the franchise.
Adding to the momentum is the recent news that director Robert Zemeckis is negotiating to make a new version of the Beatles' 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine.
The Beatles: Rock Band video game introduces the world's best-selling pop group to the world of interactive gaming.
That world has been dominated by young male enthusiasts, but it is now drawing in their parents and grandparents.
Classic rock, pop and country material has been included in Rock Band, which was developed by MTV game producer Harmonix.
What the remastered Beatles CDs offer, beyond the opportunity for EMI and Capitol to pump up profits - they are being issued as individual CDs and in two box sets: one with all the mono mixes ($US500, or $NZ732) the other with the stereo versions ($430, or $NZ630) - is a fresh take on music that has been omnipresent for nearly half a century.
The box of mono releases is considered the definitive record of their music because the group and their producer, George Martin, created everything up to and including The Beatles, aka the White Album in 1968, to be heard in mono.
Stereo mixes of those recordings were typically created as an afterthought, and the Beatles often were not present when those versions were done.
The Fab Four's recorded output spanned just seven years and 13 studio albums.
Those albums document the Beatles' transformation from a group of lads bashing out their versions of American R&B and rock tunes into pop's most successful and influential songwriting team, as well as one of its most accomplished teams of recording-studio innovators.
ROUSE, who has overseen remastering the monaural mixes the group preferred, and Massey, who is in charge of remastering the stereo versions, have been working on Beatles projects for a dozen years or more.
They have earned the support of surviving Beatles members Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, as well as Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison, the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison who took over their husbands' interests in Apple Corp, the company the Beatles launched in 1967 to control their business affairs.
Apple still approves all Beatles projects, and the four principals are referred to as "the shareholders" by those working on projects.
"They trust this team," said Apple chief Jeff Jones during the remaster preview in June.
"They've been doing this for a long time."
Rouse displayed an engineer's pride when describing the pristine state of the original Beatles tapes, some of them nearly 50 years old.
"These tapes hadn't been played in 20 years," he said.
"We would never consider using anything other than first-generation masters. ... These were done one track at a time, not album by album."
The results?In general, everything is cleaner and fuller, and the dynamic range - the difference between the loudest and softest sounds - has been expanded.
Vocals sound more immediate.
The old Twist and Shout is almost tinny next to the remastered version.
McCartney's fingers plucking the strings of his acoustic guitar as he sings Yesterday become more tangibly percussive, his voice and the guitar more open.
Harrison's Taxman benefits from the visceral punch of Starr's drums.
It's less dramatic than improvements in the Love soundtrack, for which Beatles producer Martin and his son, Giles Martin, remixed the original tapes for the Cirque du Soleil show in Las Vegas that George Harrison dreamed up with Cirque creator Guy Laliberte as a creative collaboration among the surviving Beatles and their families.
Giles Martin also produced the remixed tracks used in The Beatles: Rock Band, and Harrison's singer-guitarist son, Dhani, lent a hand to formulating the game.
"Mastering is very limited; you can only do so much," Rouse acknowledged.
"It's a much more subtle approach, as opposed to remixing."
It is also being presented at less than its full sonic potential because of the inherent limitations of the compact disc.
Neil Young, by comparison, just issued Archives, Vol. 1, a 10-disc retrospective set, on Blu-ray disc, in addition to CD and DVD versions.
CDs can hold only 15% to 20% of the digital information in masters that use the current state-of-the-art 192kHz, 24-bit sampling rate, the same used for the Beatles' new masters, according to Rouse.
A Blu-ray disc offers 100% of that sampling rate for playback.
"You can change it into a video game and make it cute and everything," Young said about the Beatles remasters.
He's concerned that the music itself will be slighted unless Rouse and his team "go back to the original masters and remaster them the right way and give all the information about them. ...
That's what people want."
An EMI UK marketing executive said there were no plans to issue the Beatles' remasters on Blu-ray, adding "it's just a matter of when, not if" they'll be released in audiophile vinyl pressings.
And Apple still hasn't reached a deal to make the quartet's catalogue available for legal downloading.
McCartney, Starr and Martin have said in recent years that, outside of a unique project like Love, they aren't interested in completely rethinking what they created in a bygone place and time.
A DIFFERENT aesthetic is at work in The Beatles: Rock Band, which takes history as a launching point.
"The biggest priority for all of us was to ensure we were creating a product that accurately captured the essence of the Beatles," said Harmonix chief executive Alex Rigopulos.
"The shareholders were all generous enough with their time to provide this guidance in abundance," he said.
"This included everything from helping to select the track list to helping shape the visual design and representation of the band, to helping craft the historical narrative.
The game came out far better as a result than it possibly could have if they hadn't been involved."
The game uses 45 songs, from among some 200 in the official Beatles oeuvre, to create play through distinctly different eras.
For Giles Martin, one hurdle was to fabricate the equivalent of multi-track recordings required for Rock Band to work.
He needed to isolate individual instruments and voices from two-track tapes of the Beatles' earliest works on which all instruments were combined on one channel, all voices on the second.
"We worked out a way for filtering the different parts - the bass and drum tracks, leaving out the guitar," Martin said.
"I was completely surprised about what we managed to achieve.
When my dad came to see me and check out our work, he said, `What you've done is alchemy.' It's like you handing me a cake, and me handing you back the ingredients.
"The whole idea," he said, "was to have a game that is collaborative, something generations can play together.... Therefore, we wanted to choose songs that could be multiplayer. That knocked out something like Yesterday... We didn't want to veer into one-player songs."
Songs are set amid several "environments," starting with the band's scruffy days as leather-jacketed rockers playing the Cavern Club in their home town of Liverpool through to the swan-song 1969 concert atop Apple Corp headquarters in London.
Avatars of each band member change through the years, from the collarless suits of The Ed Sullivan Show appearances through to the psychedelic military uniforms of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The Beatles' decision to stop touring after 1966 to focus on the recording studio presented a limitation the game's developers at Harmonix solved by inventing "dreamscapes" for later songs.
These are colourful backdrops, such as a verdant field for Harrison's Here Comes the Sun or a gazebo that turns into a hot-air balloon in the title track from Sgt. Pepper.
Giles Martin also incorporated previously unreleased studio chatter among the Beatles in many of the songs.
Rock Band creators did not consider it sacrilege to tinker with history.
The visuals for Birthday, for instance, show all four Beatles at their usual instruments, even though Starr had left the band briefly when that song was recorded and McCartney played drums.
"We took some liberties," said Sean Baptiste, manager of community development for Harmonix.
"It is a game, after all."
At one point, Harmonix project leader Josh Randall said, it hit him that, "these guys don't feel like the Beatles to me.
Something was missing.
I went back and scrutinised all the footage we'd been looking at for the previous year.
That's when I started to realise that when these guys play, there's so much joy that just pours out of them.
How do we do that?"The answer: the creation of new game coding allowing animators more freedom with facial expressions.
"We pushed as hard as we could to try to capture a little bit of that spark."
- Los Angeles Times-Washington Post
