‘Sgt. Pepper’ to get deluxe 50th-anniversary edition

Purists still love to debate whether “Rubber Soul,” “Revolver” or “Abbey Road” are more consistently creative works than “Sgt. Pepper,” and McCartney has often said there are days he leans toward any of those four as his favorite of the band’s studio works during its relatively short but astonishingly fertile seven-year career as a recording unit.

But dozens of musicians, producers, record executives, music writers and others polled by Rolling Stone magazine in 2012 place “Sgt. Pepper” at the pinnacle of the publication’s list of the “500 Greatest Albums of All Time,” lauding it as “simply the best of everything the Beatles ever did as musicians, pioneers and pop stars, all in one place.”

Giles Martin, the son of the Beatles’ original producer, George Martin, has collaborated again with veteran Abbey Road studios engineer Sam Okell on the new stereo and 5.1 multi-channel mixes of the album.

Perhaps the most tantalizing element for Beatles aficionados is the word that Giles Martin and Okell created the new stereo mix with direct transfers from the original four-track tapes, rather than the two-track master that has been the basis of all previous stereo versions of “Sgt. Pepper” for the last 50 years.

Why so much attention to a new stereo version of an album that has been available in stereo for five decades?

In 1967, George Martin and the Beatles spent the vast majority of their time focused on the monaural mix, which was still the dominant playback format in England at that time.

Hence the new anniversary edition is an attempt to create a mix closer to what the world might have heard if the Beatles and George Martin had cared about stereo at that point.

The “Anniversary Editions” of “Sgt. Pepper” will include a single CD version with the new stereo mix (priced at $18.98 on Amazon) and a deluxe two-CD and digital version ($24.98) containing 13 alternate takes of all the “Sgt. Pepper” songs in the original sequence plus five additional takes.

Those five takes are two previously unreleased versions of “Penny Lane” and three of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” songs recorded at the beginning of the “Sgt. Pepper” sessions but issued as a double-sided single four months before the album came out to help satiate fans’ demands for new Beatles music.

The two-LP vinyl deluxe version ($38.98) will have everything on the double CD and digital versions except the “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” mixes.

There also will be a six-disc “super deluxe” edition ($149.98), housed in a 12-by-12-inch box with lenticular artwork of pop artist Peter Blake’s iconic cover image of the Beatles surrounded by more than 60 figures from then-contemporary pop culture to ancient history.

That set includes the new stereo mix on one CD and two CDs with 33 more recordings from the “Sgt. Pepper” sessions, most previously unreleased. A fourth CD contains direct transfers of the original mono mix of the full album and the extra “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane” tracks, a U.S. promotional mono mix of “Penny Lane” and early mono mixes of “She’s Leaving Home,” “A Day in the Life” and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.”

The latter had been thought lost but was discovered during the research process for the anniversary edition.

The set’s fifth and sixth discs are a Blu-ray and DVD with the new high-resolution surround-sound mixes of the album, high-res audio versions of the new stereo mix and “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” and various video features including a newly restored 25th anniversary documentary about the making of the album that aired in 1992 but was never released on home video.