A friend of mine was just telling me about a remix (or maybe remastered?) version of Abbey Road he heard on the in-flight entertainment system yesterday on a transatlantic flight. He was very excited about it, raving about how great the drums sounded. But I can't find anything on a new remix/remaster on Amazon or the wikipedia entry. 
 
I know about the remastered version that came out 5 years ago, which I haven't heard because everything that's been remastered from the 60's tends to suck. I never forgave them for what they did to All Things Must Pass. Could this 2009 remaster be what he heard, or do you know of anything more recent?

Here you go. Basically they used the Phil Spector removal tool:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_It_Be..._Naked

My guess would be he heard Love, which has a lot of Abbey Road stuff on it.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_(Beatles_album)

Just realised I linked to Let It Be Naked which is a blast but not what op is asking.

I know everything was recently released in mono on 180g vinyl, remastered from the original analog tapes, but that re-release excluded Abbey Road and Let It Be because they weren't originally mixed in mono. 
 
http://www.npr.org/blogs/...atles-are-back-in-mono
http://www.cnet.com/news/...ound-like-this-before/

I asked him if it was the Love show mix, but he was quick to say no, that wasn't it. Maybe he's mistaken, but he's seen the Love show. Perhaps it was the 2009 remaster. Thanks, all.
 
 

My wife bought me the Beatles Remasterd box set..... man was I disappointed to find out it was hard panned..... vox on one side and instruments on the other..... what a pain it is to try to listen on some headphones..... It sounds pretty good on a small system where the speakers are close together....... but talk about disappointing.
 
I mean seriously.... who thought that panning like that was a good idea?

Maybe the noise in the plane bled into the head-buds and canceled out enough of sumthin' to make it sound like a complete remix. Happens to me too.

I mean seriously.... who thought that panning like that was a good idea?

 
I believe the issue on the earlier matieral was having to record on 4 track machines and limited available tracks.  I remember reading that they often had to bounce tracks together to create room for other tracks and then would save a clean unused track(s) for vocals.
 
One song in particular, I think it was Eleanor Rigby, if I remember correctly, has the lead vocal panned to one side.
 
I actually find it amazing how much they could actually pack into those recordings from just 4 tracks and bouncing.

Many of the early Beatles stereo mixes have what we would now deem "strange" panning.  But you have to look at it in terms of the '60s
 
Stereo was new and a novelty. It was a special effect.  Most people still had mono equipment any way.  It was seen more in terms of "Hey, we can get the sound to come out of two separate speakers.." rather than thinking of them as a stereo image pair.
 
So if you imagine a typical '60s home with a new stereo system, the speakers placed randomly in the room because that's the only place they will go...   Drums and guitars coming from one corner by the door while Paul sings on his own over in the other corner by the window...
It must have been magical.
 
Quadraphonic was a logical step from stereo. Spread the speakers around the room and you can have a different instrument in each speaker,  just like having the band in your own front room.
They were thinking in terms of the number of channels they could separate the sound into rather than how many speakers it would take to create a particular sound field, which is what we do today with surround.