Jon Astley - The Master Of Remastering

http://www.sospubs.co.uk/sos/jan02/articles/jonastley.asp

 

"In 1996, The Who asked me to oversee their reissue/remastering program..."

Oh well. Why did they do that? They must have been dazed and confused.

 

"The CEDAR processors really came to the forefront on this one. They worked brilliantly on the bass and bass drum: the only thing you could hear them working on was the guitar, where they just took the plectrum off the front. I had to treat that slightly differently. I use the De-hiss, De-click and De-thump plug-ins within SADiE"


Oh, my God!

 

Definitely not the purist approach.

 

Aw man! He has some nerve to talk about preserving dynamics when he NR's everything to death!

The following caught my eye:

Well, at least he's on the right track as far as not fooling with dynamics is concerned. But, i'll bet that if I load up some of his recent work in an editor it will be maximized.

I made a BIG mistake when I got rid of my ABBA "Gold" CDs for the new one. I didn't discover his name on it until I after the old ones were long gone. Why does he have to play god with stuff? So there's a little dropout. I never noticed it before. Big deal!

Well, the British philosophy of mastering is to "improve" sound and "fix" errors.

Thanks for that link, Luke!

 

Well, I think Luke would have been happy to have Astley fix the little dropout in Steve's mastering of "Listen To The Music" by the Doobies! Little "nits" like that do drive some people crazy I guess.

 

Jon Astley´s mastering tips: (Hear, hear!)

"• Don't put too much top end on everything — I was probably guilty of that for about the first two or three years I was doing this. "

 

He is known for adding top end.

 

If Jon Astley remastered the Rascals' catalog...

"Wow, there's a really HUGE dropout after the bridge on 'Good Lovin'! I'll have to fix that!"

 

When will Mr. Astley be Remastering the Beatles catalog?

 

Actually, that's not a dropout, that's constant tape damage that causes the high frequencies to drift in and out in one channel. A sound not unlike playing a mono tape back in stereo and then combining the channels.

Have you actually heard that CD, Angel?

 

A bit disturbing that he speaks of his Who remixes as if they were revelations. Jon Astley took license to alter historical documents to HIS liking, and I find that quite arrogant.

 

Hey, hasn´t anybody got anything good to say about this guy

My initial question was not a rhetorical one, by the way:

Why did The Who choose him for their reissues?

 

He's Pete's brother in law.

 

...Just to add, I realize even subtle remastering involves at least some altering by definition...but I think most will agree his remixes aren't exactly "faithful" to the original mixes. That's not even taking into account the excessive EQ and compression used...which he claims to oppose.

 

Is that true?

 

Yes.

 

Luke, if you haven't heard it, the german CD (target label) Best Of The Doobies uses a tape that lacks this damage & sounds quite good (probably an early dub for the comp, or from a 2nd gen safety). But I still listen to the DCC more, and it really doesn't bother me (I'm not listening through phones though).

 

Ok, this one's a classic:

""On the original vinyl of Live At Leeds they put a little note on the label saying 'The crackles are intentional'. So when I remixed it in '96 and used the CEDAR De-crackler to clean it up, I wrote on it 'The crackles are gone!' It's a nice record now. But some of the Who fans still come up to me at gigs and say 'You completely ruined that track because you took the hiss away.' I say, 'What are you comparing it to?' They say 'The one I've got,' so I just say, 'Well, play that then!'"

Is this guy for real??

 

Not anymore, right?? Pete came out as gay, or am I imagining things?

 

So Pete's his sister in law now.

 

Ok, I'll have to give that one some thought

Oh, by the way, thanks for taking that picture of your sister off your avatar (just kidding! what the hell was that anyway?).

 

You're imagining things. Pete has never proclaimed to be gay.

For the record, Pete isn't with his wife Karen anymore (Jon's sister). I'm not sure if they are still married or not, but I know not long ago Pete had a girlfriend.

Not that any of this really matters, but...

 

Not to give him too much of a break, but keep in mind that Jon didn't do any of the remixing - Andy Macpherson did. To the best of my knowledge, Jon wasn't even in the same room (or building) when the mixes were done.

 

Pete did say he was bisexual many years ago, though, correct?