Would that Giles Martin, the 49-year-old son of the late Beatles producer Sir George Martin, could oversee the re-production from the ground up of every iconic rock ’n’ roll album.

His painstaking restoration of the Beatles’ Hollywood Bowl recordings and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band rendered all previous incarnations obsolete. And now he and his team of engineers have worked similar wonders with The Beatles, the Fab Four’s 30-song double album commonly referred to as The White Album.

A Vaughan Williams Christmas

Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital Chelsea

She Remembers Everything (Deluxe Edition)

Rosanne Cash

One sign that gift-giving season has arrived is the release of critically acclaimed rock ’n’ roll albums in boxed, freshly remastered, multidisc editions tantalizingly marketed as the best-ever way to experience the music contained therein. It’s an impression cemented by the enthusiastic reviews that inevitably flood the relevant publications and that get collated into verbal highlight reels for the packages’ Wikipedia entries.

Love and Wealth: The Lost Recordings

The Louvin Brothers

If there’s such a thing as the perfect pop song, Ervin Drake’s “It Was a Very Good Year” is it. The evocatively elliptical lyrics are so exactingly tailored that they’d hold up as poetry if it were possible to read them without simultaneously hearing their accompanying melody—which is also evocatively elliptical and exactingly tailored.

Kaleidoscope

Cyrus Chestnut