If The Beatles were reissued on SACD...

[Jens]

Triggered by the ongoing discussion about the never-to-be-released Beatles catalogue on SACD, it got me thinking what should be on them, in terms of audio channels.

You can't have mono, stereo and multichannel DSD all on the same disc (except sequentially if the content lasts very short) so what would be best is to have a stereo/multichannel version and - again - a mono edition, I reckon.

I don't have the mono CD remasters but I suppose they're 2-channel mono, for lack of a better term. I mean the same mono signal is contained in the left and the right channel. I guess that's the only sensible thing to do both on the CD layer and in the high-resolution stereo area. In the multichannel area however, you can do a dead-center 1.0 mono playback.

So if I were to have a say in it, I would issue each album in two editions:

1. Mono SACD

• CD layer: 2.0 mono
  
• DSD stereo area: 2.0 mono
  
• DSD multichannel area: 1.0 mono -- on the center channel, so you get true mono. If you have a 5.1 set-up, you can still choose between two and one-channel mono.

2. Stereo/Multichannel SACD

• CD layer: stereo
  
• DSD stereo area: stereo
  
• DSD multichannel area: 5.1 mix

Anyway, if we're ever going to see multichannel mixes of The Beatles catalogue (beyond Love) it's surely going to be on another medium that has different constraints and can contain all of the mixes (1.0, 2.0 and 5.1) side by side, like Blu-ray Disc.