What year kills remastering?

I have heard a lot of remastered stuff. The stuff from the 70's is great. The stuff from the 60's sounds very good to good. The stuff from the 50's is not that good (but it sounds a better than it did).

I'll bet there's some people here that might know this, Steve would know. I don't know. For some strange reason I want to know.
Please fill in the blank for me.

As a rule of thumb, music on any type of media that was recorded before the year ________ can never be brought back to a good quality sound.

 

Hogwash.

Stuff from the 50's, 60's and 70's... All were recorded with the most amazing equipment (usually) under different conditions, and the way it's been mastered to CD/LP has a varying effect. Either through engineering insight or the label's control.

Or am I not understanding this well....?

Sheesh. Ever heard some well mastered Sun Records stuff?? It'll knock your blue swede shoes right off....!

 

I don't know if you can break it down by decade. I have heard some stuff from the 50's that sounds just dowright amazing (think DCC Nat Cole, Bear Family Dean Martin etc.) It is all in how it was originally recorded and other factors such as if the 1st Gen masters were used or even how the tapes were stored. There is plenty of good sounding 50's and 60's recordings out there.

 

Steve's Buddy Holly stuff sounds better than most of the Beatles pre Rubber Soul stuff on cd.

Some Jazz stuff from the friggin 40's sounds better than anything Rush has put out in the last 10 years!

 

I have heard remastered albums of The Sons of the Pioneers. They sound terible.
There has to be a general cut-off time when the best recording equipment using the best tapes and storing them in the best conditions until 2003, cannot not be help by technology. It will only be a bad recording sounding like a better bad recording.

 

There are too many factors to put your finger on a certain date.
Just listening to my Howling Wolf Chess disc, some songs are horrible, some are incredibly clear with lots of presence.....it comes down to recording equipment, studio, engineering, mastering.....lots of factors.

 

There has to be a rule of thumb or general time, some incident of technology that brought it to the level of good quality to begin with. Is it as simple as the invention of recording tape? It can't be.

 

daved64 said:

And how! Steve's Buddy Holly From The Original Master Tapes, especially the Japanese pressing, is unreal. When I first played this disc, I was stunned by the clarity.

 

It might be a roundabout way of answering the question, but perhaps forum members could list the oldest audiophile favorite they own; that is, music they listen to with no allowances for when it was recorded, that puts them in the room with the musicians. After a while, maybe, we'd see no one listed anything before a certain date.

 

What you might be referring to is something like the year 1925. That was the year nearly every recording company switched over from acoustical recording (which usually doesn't sound all that good) to "electrical" recording (which can be remastered to sound pretty decent). The technology to play the new disks also changed somewhat.

I have some incredible sounding stuff from the 1930s, and horrible sounding stuff from last year. So basically after 1925, it's a crapshoot.

 

Echoing the words of others here, some of the best recordings I have ever heard were made in the 50s! As the 60s progressed, one could hear a gradual sound degredation going on. IMO, some of the worst recordings were made in the 80s!

You could hear the sound gradually suffer when the eight and 16-tracks became commonly used in the late 60s.

 

I'm gonna venture to guess as to what Sput is after - though he seems to want to quantify it more than anyone can or should. While it's true that there are a lot of factors involved, I think we can generalize and say that - on the whole - the recorded sound improved with the use of tape over acetate in the late 1940s. It may not have sounded better originally, but now, 60 years later, I think most tapes have held up better than the discs. At the same time, I agree that a lot of music from the 50s (lets stick to tape for this argument) sounds better than later-recorded stuff just because of the minimal miking and mixing that was done to it. Some of the best sounding stuff that I have are jazz recordings from the mid-50s.

 

I agree with most of the other posts. Some of the older recordings from the 50s sound terrific (IMHO better than modern recordings). An example of this is Steve's Bill Haley and the Comets disc. It is stunning.

 

Yup. Small jazz combo recorded live in the studio with no overdubs, in mono. The purest tone you'll hear in hi-fi. See the DCCs of Miles Davis's COOKIN, WORKIN, RELAXIN, and STEAMIN.

 

I too agree that some '50s recordings are excellent. Look at the Elvis 24 KARAT HITS! gold CD done by none other than Mr. Hoffman. Stunning sound. Also listen to disc one of the Elvis Close Up box set. Amazing.

Then there are recent releases that sound like total garbage. To wit, Rush Vapor Trails.

 

Heh heh. How about just about anything recorded AFTER the year 1998 (or so) can never be brought back to a good quality sound?

Not that I've checked that many, but I get the impression that the vast majority of newer pop recordings have been processed well past the "breaking point".

Of course, pop songs have undergone massive processing all through the years, but that was analog processing, which posesses a certain charm. It wasn't until digital manipulation tools were "perfected" that processing achieved new heights (or lows, depending on your POV).

But who knows...maybe 30 years from now, this digital processing will be looked at with nostalgia...stranger things have happened.

 

Amen

 

Thank you.

 

I have a 1905 Caruso that on the right machine pre-1925 acoustic phonograph sounds wonderful, so I really don't think there can be any hard and fast rules about this. Jeff

 

Just curious, Sput--

Which Sons Of The Pioneers discs are you listening to? Most of their cd's seem to be old radio shows, rather than studio recordings.

Why RCA has not done better by them is a mystery, but I think they made very good sounding records in the time frame you are talking about.

 

I agree with Dave64. It depends on the master tapes. Some vintage stuff sounds fantastic remastered. Some "newer" stuff sounds completely off!

Dave

 

I bought some for a friend. I gave them a quick listen. I remember one was remastered. I think you explained what I heard when you said "radio shows"
It probably was. It sounded terrible.