Love by Beatles (The) (CD, Nov-2006, Capitol/EMI Records)

If you care about the Beatles at all, you must go and buy the LOVE CD. Don't download it (you can't legally, anyway) because you need the full fidelity of the recording. Don't rip it to your iPod, either. Listen to it with the best headphones you can find and prepare to hear the songs you thought you knew for the first time. Every track is a revelation: from guitar licks on I Wanna Hold Your Hand that previously drowned in AM-radio-friendly compression, to a neat little whacka-chicka whacka-chicka (think the theme from Shaft by Isaac Hayes) guitar riff I couldn't detect before on Get Back, to the faint but distinct sound of the creaking springs of an office chair over the most famously long piano chord in history at the end of A Day in the Life.

There are also the mash-ups Beatles producer George Martin and his son did as they put this album together to provide the soundtrack to Cirque du Soleil's LOVE show in Vegas. They're nice, inspired at times, but that's not what stays with you (OK, the sharp transition from Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite to She's So Heavy really grabs you by the throat). What resonates is the recordings themselves, how clean they sound, so clean that you are sure that they've been redone by new musicians, but they're the original recordings by J, P, G, and R.

Which leads me to just want more. Much more. I want to see the whole catalogue redone, and I know I'm not the first to say so about the generally weak Parlophone CDs. But now we have the proof that we won't really know the full genius of the Beatles until we can finally hear what they heard in the studio.