So I am not going to bed tonight having had a religious experience, but I can firmly say that my life has been enhanced by 09.09.09 – or, as I like to think of it, B-Day.

First things first: the new remasters can't polish a turd.  Ringo singing still sounds like Ringo singing.  Run For Your Life is still a nastily misogynistic lyric that the others should have vetoed.  The second disc of The White Album still largely sounds like the self-indulgent mess it always has.  And Revolution 9 remains utterly, wholly, inexcusably, pointlessly intolerable.

If you are comparing like with like – and there are problems in doing so, as I shall explain – the remasters simply sound better.  The music is still the music and you still tap your foot and nod your head and sing along.

If you compare the 1987 and 2009 versions of Abbey Road (the only Beatles album devised as a stereo recording from the off), then 2009 wins hands down.  Everything was still there in the 1987 CD master, but in 2009 it sounds more alive.  The percussion is a little crisper, the guitars a little fresher, and the vocals just sound more like live voices.

But that's the point – it's not a massive difference.  If you listen to the new remasters in MP3 format via bog-standard iPod headphones, you probably will not notice much new.

But, listening to uncompressed audio files with a pair of noise-cancelling Shure earbuds that were so expensive I still keep them in their case, I genuinely could hear the difference.  And it was a lovely experience and a splendid way to spend my afternoon off work, even if I couldn't listen as loudly or for as long as I would have liked because of The Ten-Month Long Headache.

The mid-period albums, though, are more difficult.  Every other Beatles album up to and including The White Album was conceived as a mono work that was then later – and sometimes very haphazardly – converted to stereo after the event.  Stereo was only even given proper thought on Revolver, Sgt. Pepper and The White Album.

(Indeed, the original stereo mixes of Help! and Rubber Soul were so poor that George Martin reworked them for the 1987 CD releases.  Confusingly, the 2009 mono versions of those albums include not only the mono mixes but also the 'original' stereo mixes.  And yes, Sir George was right: they are rough in the extreme.)

The stereo mixes have been the only ones (legally) available for well over 30 years.  This afternoon has been the first time I've ever heard the mono versions of any Beatles work, save for a hooky mono copy of Sgt. Pepper I downloaded four or five years ago.

I never used to understand why an audiophile family friend maintained that The Beatles sounded "louder" on his original vinyl albums, but after today I do.  The mono mixes, generally speaking, do indeed seem louder than their stereo brothers.  I think the reason for this is that the mono mixes are a little heavier on bass and a little lighter on treble and, because the instruments are not "spread out" across the spectrum, sound a little more crowded – more Cavern Club than Candlestick Park, if you like.

Eleanor Rigby is a prime example.  The 1966 stereo conversion was so awful that McCartney's vocal bounced around according to the engineer's whim for a particular verse or chorus.  In mono, you just get to listen to the song without those distractions.

We Can Work It Out is one of my absolute favourites.  (Not originally included on an album, it features here on the Past Masters stereo CD and the Mono Masters CD in the mono boxset.)  The new stereo version sounds great, but the new mono remaster really makes it sound beefier overall and even almost rock-y in certain passages.

Similarly, on Sgt. Pepper, I used to get annoyed by the instruments popping up at the farthest ends of the stereo spectrum, rather than in the more nuanced manner used in stereo recordings today.  I don't want only vocals in my right ear and only instruments in my left ear; I want to listen to it as a whole.  With these mono mixes, I can.

The White Album's stereo incarnation clearly benefits from the advances in stereo technology and mixing techniques that the extra couple extra years' experience had brought.  Worked up originally as a mono album, The White Album uniquely sounds better to me in stereo.

Meanwhile, Tomorrow Never Knows – like Eleanor Rigby also on Revolver – sounds better in stereo.  Clearly that song was properly thought out from the stereo angle: John's double-tracked vocals are separated by left and right channel but are central in the mix.

I think my general rule of thumb now is going to be to listen to the mono versions up to and including Magical Mystery Tour and the stereo versions thereafter, beginning with The White Album… while allowing for the odd Tomorrow Never Knows aberration where required.

So, so far, the remasters are great.  I don't feel I've been ripped off – for £170 I've got 240-odd pieces of music I love and that I will listen to again and again, eventually working out at about ha'penny a song.  And I've still got a lot of "new" listening to do that holds a lot of potential: I've always tended to be a 'singles only' person where the first few albums were concerned because I always felt that some of the rock'n'roll filler on those albums sounded a little wimpish at times.  I am hoping that the more muscular sounding mono remasters will yield up a few unexpected treasures.

And yes, I fully appreciate that this is objectively pathetic behaviour for a supposedly intelligent 38 year old man but I was recently reminded why I continue to behave like this thanks to some discarded lyrics by Prefab Sprout's Paddy McAloon: