"Normal" Smith

Why, oh why, has Apple Records not remastered The Beatles? The band's records were some of the first to be put on Compact Disk, but they've never reissued them with more advanced reproduction now available.

And the men who could direct the remastering to achieve the sound they always wanted -- the band members and the guys behind the controls -- are dying.

Under the producer George Martin, it was Mr. Smith’s role to choose the equipment and techniques used to capture individual sounds in the studio and then to weave them into a finished recording. In the Beatles’ case, he favored sounds that were more stark than those typically heard in the ornamented and reverberation-drenched songs on popular radio.

“Norman thought the actual Beatles’ sound, playing together in the room, was great, and he wanted to preserve that,” Mr. Kehew said. “And that was really different from other records at the time.”

His approach made its mark on a remarkable stretch of hit songs from 1962 until early 1966. They included “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Help!” “Day Tripper” and “We Can Work It Out” — all crisp and ringingly energetic recordings that were increasingly experimental.

In the last full album he worked on with the Beatles, “Rubber Soul,” in 1965, Mr. Smith helped the band members lay the groundwork for the increasingly radical studio performances they would feature on later LPs like “Revolver” (1966) and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (1967). One “Rubber Soul” breakthrough was the use of a sitar on the song “Norwegian Wood.”

After Mr. Martin left EMI in 1966, Mr. Smith succeeded him as a senior producer. He scouted and immediately signed the experimental group Pink Floyd to a contract and produced its first two albums, “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” and “Saucerful of Secrets,” both recognized as definitive works of psychedelic rock...

Genius.