APART from being the 40th anniversary of the First Quarter Storm, 2010 also marks 40 years since the Beatles broke up.

Actually, John Lennon announced that he was leaving the group in late 1969; Paul McCartney followed suit in early 1970, but it wasn?t until the last day of that year that the breakup was made official in an acrimonious lawsuit.

Both the student demonstrations that marked the First Quarter Storm of 1970, and the final dissolution of the Beatles, marked historic turning points for the generation that came of age at the cusp of the new decade. Dark days lay ahead: the prospect of martial law and a world without new Beatles songs loomed on the horizon. The euphoria of the Sixties was finally over.

In any case, now is as good a time as any to weigh in on the remastered Beatles catalog, which was released September last year to general acclaim and much media hype.

It took a while, but I finally managed to procure copies of most of the remastered discs. (It would have been much sooner, but I was loathe to part with the P13,000 which is the retail price of the boxed set. I mean, Beatles 4ever, but P13,000 is a hefty chunk of change, especially for a format which some consider well on its way to obsolescence.)

From first listen, the remastered set was revelatory: guitars, bass and drums were thrown into sharp relief. The vocal harmonies stood out clearly. You could hear what each member of the group brought to the party. The highs were high without sounding harsh or tinny ? a frequent complaint with some of the early CD versions. The bass was deep and full. This band wasn?t bad at all.

The remastered versions ticked all the audiophile boxes. I thought to myself, this is like listening to the Beatles for the first time.

Of course, I soon realized that that wasn?t too far off the mark.

You see, I grew up with the Beatles. My first clear pop memory is of hearing ?I Should Have Known Better? from a jukebox in a student canteen near where I lived: John?s thrilling harmonica intro was like nothing I had heard before, certainly nothing like the Mantovani records my father played. That would have made me eight or nine at the time.

It was the height of Beatlemania. In fact, my baptismal godfather was the host of a television program called ?Beatlemaniacs,? and I clearly remember him occasionally sporting a Beatle wig. I dreamed of owning my own pair of Beatle boots: some of my classmates were already wearing them ? with short pants!

I didn?t really get into the Beatles, however, until I got my own radio, a wooden Radiowealth transistor radio which took four ?C? batteries. There used to be a radio program called the ?Beatle Beat Show? which played all Beatles all the time. I listened to it every night.

The first album I ever bought with my own money was ?Sgt. Pepper,? this when LPs cost P7. I worked my way backward and forward from there until I had acquired the entire catalog. I wore those records out, listening incessantly to George?s raga rock opus ?Within You Without You? and the entire ?white album,? on my father?s record player ? trippy stuff for 1968.

Years later, when the local record company reissued all the LPs in a boxed set, I bought them all over again. But something was missing. The pressings were clearly inferior to my earlier copies. The sound was thin, and the cheap recycled vinyl prone to ticks and pops. More than likely, the record company had simply made a tape from library copies of LP, cut a new master from that, and pressed the records.

Perhaps I had over-listened to the Beatles, but by the time the band broke up I had already moved on. Jimi Hendrix ? freshly dead (another 40th anniversary this coming September) ? was my new thing, and there was no looking back from there. I still listened sporadically to the old Beatles albums, but nostalgia was no substitute for the excitement of listening to them when they were current.

Nothing like a 30+-year hiatus to freshen the ears.

Now the Beatles sound vital again. Thankfully, although I was an early adopter of the CD format, I had never gotten any of the first-generation Beatles CDs, so I was spared what some audiophiles consider subpar audio quality and the inevitable guilt-ridden feeling that accompanies buying an album all over again.

The remastered CDs are undeniably the best-sounding Beatles ever, but in the end, rediscovering the Fab Four isn?t really about an audiophile experience. It?s about realizing how much the music of these four men have shaped your musical tastes, your preferences, your attitudes ? even your outlook on life.

Young people who will be listening to the Beatles for the first time on these CDs are in for a treat. Too bad they won?t get the back story that older listeners ? those who grew up with the music ? carry with them. ?