My first encounter with The Beatles

Being 22 years old, I have never had much experience of Beatles. Of course I have heard a song or two, but never had I actually LISTEN to them. So when all this debacle about 9/9/09 stated I thought I perhaps should look (or listen) to what it was all about. What follows is my first days impressions:

First 2 minutes:

Why are these guys famous? I mean, this does not sound so special.

First 15 minutes:

Ok, switched to my in-ear headphones, and it made a lot of difference! The sounds are rich in a way modern music never does. It makes me smile!

First 3 hours:

Two things are worth mentioning. First, this makes me spontaneously dance around the house, which I almost never do. This is some good music! And there are a lot of songs which I recognize but never reflected they were Beatles songs.

However, there are something very wrong with the way they mixed this to stereo. What was wrong took me some time to pinpoint. The stereo separation was VERY wide and when I removed one earpiece the lyrics just vanished! Now, I am no sound-technician so I will not use any (correct) musical terms here. But what I think is wrong is that there are no bleed over between the channels. This does not matter when you listen on your hi-fi gear in your living room, but listening on headphones this sounds very unnatural to the brain. In some songs this makes me feel nauseated.

To be continued:

As my iTunes playlist says, I have 10 hours and 18 minutes of music to listen through before I can say anything final. Right now, I am positively surprised about the music, but disappointed about the bad and gimmicky stereo mixing.