DB - I found EMI really pleasant – more musical, less technical. When you’re working in a factory, as I was before, there are production commitments, they needed 8 sides cut a day. I’d get in trouble as I didn’t produce any sides, but I was spending time working directly with clients. But EMI was a recoding studio, and it was all about the music. You could spend a day with a client and it was looked on as a very positive thing. They accepted the fact that clients would sit in while the album was cut. It was part of the deal, but in the other factory situations it was considered a pain. And so, it also began for Don Bartley. One of the top sound engineers in Australia, Don first heard Sgt. Pepper’s…. upon its release in 1967, and decided then and there to enter the music business. As a result,, he eventually came to master what many consider the “holy grail” of audiophile Beatles records: the “Audio-5 Sgt. Pepper’s”. My father was an American advertising executive assigned to Japan Air Lines, and had been transferred to Yokohama. And my mother was a bit of a bohemian - born in Paris during the 1920’s, her parents were members of the Lost Generation. She was happy to be in Japan, but realized we still needed a connection to home. So one hot summer day, we rode a crowded train to a Tokyo theater specializing in American movies. DB - I really enjoyed working with clients, because I learned a lot from them - just listening to them talk about how they went about making the record, and what they wanted to hear as the end result. Some clients were very technical and specific and others were musicians, and spoke more on a musical, emotional level. I just learned so much from all of them. I never took a course. Apart from Richard Harvey at CBS, who taught me the ground rules - and did a good job of it - I never actually had a formal education in mastering, as there were no courses in those days. I’m not self-taught, but learned from a lot of people around me, and the ones who came before me.

Apple Corps and Universal Music will next month reissue The Beatles‘ 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as a six-disc super deluxe edition box set, 50 years after the original album was first released.In 1987, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was released on CD for the first time. It was, by some considerable distance, the most ballyhooed reissue in the history of pop. A two-hour documentary about the album and its place in history was shown at prime time on ITV, even then a very peculiar place to find Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman discussing LSD and the Exorcism of the Pentagon protest.

I also take issue with some of Martin’s stereophonic choices. Why, for example, should the first three notes of the harpsichord theme that introduces “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” be placed in the left channel, while the fourth (and others) find themselves in the right? The effect not only comes across as arbitrary, it distracts from the musical line. I basically said “Wow!” and chatted with Richard for a few hours, and he eventually said, “I think we can do something.” So I put my name and number on a piece of paper, and didn’t think anything else of it. He called a week later and said: “When can you start?” My family was cautious about it at the time – “when you get a job with the government, it doesn’t get any better.” But that’s how I started at the Australian Record Company. The standard line about the album is that, at its centre, it’s a work of tremendous warmth and inclusion, that attempts, as Ed Vulliamy writes in the accompanying book, to “embrace everybody – ‘the man from the motor trade’, ‘the girl with kaleidoscope eyes’”. There are moments where it sounds like a high-water mark of hippy-era optimism before disillusion set in. Their fans are lovely and the band want to take them home, life is getting better and a splendid time is guaranteed for all – including traffic wardens, worried parents of errant teens and cosy sexagenarian couples.

Apple, the Beatles’ label, has attempted to set things right a couple of times, first in 1982 with a remastered Beatles in Mono CD box set; and later, in 2014, with a 180-gram mono vinyl box set taken from the original analog tapes. Still, although these releases did allow us to hear the album as the Beatles had intended, they were still in mono and thus missing the spatial benefits of stereo. And when I worked at EMI in Australia, there was an engineer there who had worked at Abbey Road at that time, named Richard Lush – I think he was the original assistant engineer on Sgt. Pepper’s…. He said everything for the original was done in mono, and fully designed around a mono release. They had spent two to three weeks mixing it for mono, and just as they were sending it off, someone came running down from the office and said ‘by the way, we need a stereo mix.’ DB – After a couple of years on the job at EMI, management called me into a meeting. They presented me with these tapes. They said they were special tapes from Abbey Road, and they wanted to produce an audiophile version of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album. I was amazed, and said to myself, “This is me? I’m going to work on this album?” It was like a dream coming true. One rare version has been out of reach: the Nimbus Supercut pressing, said to be one of the best. But in the course my research, I came across a lesser-known Australian audiophile release from 1983, the EMI Audio-5. I have come to realize that, from a sound quality perspective, this may be the most valuable and best sounding of them all. DB - My first job was a Van Morrison best of compilation, and we had to put the master together as well as cut the master lacquers. I had already been editing tape at home, so I gave it a go. Richard said, “no, it’s not good enough” and told me to do it again. He pointed out the level issues and other aspects to me, and then how to do it right. It was a great learning process. The album was released and was quite popular. The facility was then bought by Columbia and became CBS records. Not much difference, but there was a bit more diverse product coming through.

So eventually I got a job at the Australian Record Company. I told my parents about my new position, and they said “Oh no! A government job is very secure!” As well, my school careers adviser had suggested being a train driver, or bus driver instead (laughs). The Beatles "Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band" RARE UNIQUE PLATINUM Vinyl Cd Record And Autographed Cover- Platinum Frame - Unique Gift The vinyl records at the time were high quality – if you had a good pressing and a good system, it was an amazing representation of what was going on in the performance, and what was meant to be released. Vinyl in those days was capable of very high quality reproduction. Which it still is today. DB – It’s more artistically correct, and quite a nice atmospheric effect. Whereas with the early Rubber Soul it’s an extreme technical pan, and it just sits in place.Thus, a lifelong appreciation of the Beatles started for me. Yellow Submarine is one of their more underappreciated albums, but it is still my favorite to this day. I listen to it every few months without fail. Fewer than 500 copies of the Audio-5 album were made. This is fewer than the Nimbus Supercut production run, making it one of the rarest Sgt. Pepper’s… factory pressings in existence. It was never available at retail outlets and was sold only for “cash in hand” at the hi-fi show. And its audiophile provenance makes it all the more desirable.