Re-mastering...Is it really as bad as we think?

Hundreds of threads have been written deriding and critiquing almost every CD that has been re-mastered in the last year or two. Can it truly be that CD's mastered in the mid-80's actually sound "better" than contemporary releases? How can Moody Blues CD's from '85 sound better than the several band approved re-masters of recent vintage? Why do we all clamour for (and are willing to spend big $$ on) an Abbey Road CD that was released, without approval by Apple, in 1983???? Shouldn't the official CD sound better? It seems with every supposed advance in sound reproduction, the ensuing releases are worse, not all mind you, but enough that everyday we get threads on the relatively poor sound of new re-masters. Who's to blame? The mastering engineers? The original session producer? The tape used during the session? The actual method of converting analogue signals to digital?

We all want to see the Beatles catalogue re-done, but will the ensuing product be worse than what we already have? I'm not talking about 5.1 surround remixes and the like...just a complete re-master, from the original master tapes. Can we be assured that the new Cd's will indeed be an improvement? As much as I admire Mr. Hoffman's impressive resume, is he, and a handful of other engineers, the only one's to be trusted with such an important job?

I can't imagine Peter Mew...or Jon Astley to name two, are incompetant sound people. So why does the Beatles catalogue sound so bad? Why is it that Who Deluxe Editions sound worse than the previous incarnations? I can't imagine any label, or artist would say "yea, it sounds like crap, but what the hell, no one cares". But that seems to be what is happening. Is the age of Ipod and mp3's where sound quality is compromised, the real devil here?

I've been involved in the CD industry since before they were commercially released...even then, most of the insiders realized that the medium was not the "perfect sound, forever" mantra mentioned in all the print ads. Without going into all the technical reasons, and allowing that the same master tapes are used, how and why can a track or an entire CD mastered in 1983 sound superior to one's subsequently remastered in 1987....or 1992....or 2005? Or are we all jaded into believing that re-masters, in general, are inferior? In ending, how is it possible that Aqualung sounds worse with every re-master?????? Cheers, Ron

 

To some degree it's subjective - how you like things to sound is different than Joe, Tom, or Mary. That factors in.

But like anything else, everything that is new is not necessarily good. Just like everything old isn't automatically crap. It goes both ways.

A lot of people now have more what I'd like to call "knobitis" - there are a lot of tools available even to Joe Consumer. Hell, I even had one sound engineer at a concert we played at rave about Garage Band like he was a sound expert (and by the quality of his work, clearly he wasn't). Technology has gotten to the point where it's commodity. You can futz for the sake of futzing.

There also has been the trend over time to get louder - the MP3 generation so-to-speak. You're not even necessarily mastering for CD or vinyl or tape; I mean, people know their stuff is going to end up as some lossy file at some point. But at some point loud for the sake of being loud, no matter how defined the instruments are, makes something hard to listen to for long periods of time. It's very ... crunchy (for lack of a better word).

Plus, many engineers just do what the label or artist says. Is it Mew's fault people hate some of his stuff? Maybe, maybe not. We will all never know who is 100% pushing the buttons. I mean, I may be the best mastering engineer in the world, but if Star With Lots Of Clout is paying me a lot of money do to his or her bidding, I doubt I'll get much say in.

Just my $.02.

 

Because the band didn't realize what they were signing off on, I guess...and it wouldn't surprise me that most acts don't spend time listening to their back catalogs the way we do..., and therefore they don't compare different masterings as we do. Like many, some probably assume 'remastered' means 'better' until they find out otherwise.

It should...it doesn't. All comes down to the mastering, and why one sounds better than another has several factors involved.

Many are to blame, but start with the absurd mindset that 'NR is better' or makes something sound 'cleaner,' whatever that means.

With EMI invovled and the way they generally(not always)do things, who knows? Not optimistic

Of course not! Nothing in life is assured except death, taxes, and Ed Feinblatt occasionally sending us another dud...

Of course not..but as I said, more goes into the final product than the mastering engineer.

The Beatles catalog, overall, doesn't sound 'bad,' just some of it, while others you know could stand improving upon, just by referencing original vinyl. As for Mew and Astley, you'd have to ask them why some of their stuff sounds awful(Mew, it should be noted, has done a few things worthwhile in recent years, but the stuff that sux is what we pick up on and run with the most).

Not sure, but a lot of aging rockers can't be trusted to know what sounds *good* after all those years of deafening concert performances.

When you've got many fingers poking in the pie, from engineers and producers to label execs and artists, I imagine it doesn't take much to muck things up.

 

Without daring to provide a technical answer (I would not consider myself qualified to hazard one of those), might part of the answer lie with the suit-wearing executives who are in some way attempting to make the music loud and crunchy knowing that many people now, and even more in the future, will not be buying this stuff on a CD but will be downloading it to hear in an ipod or in their car? I can tell you that I prefer the crunchy, compressed stuff in my car, but not on my home system. What I'm saying is that most people won't care about the loud compression on a CD they buy at Walmart and it will carry over to mp3, wma, atrac3, etc. with a great degree of punchiness. Therefore, the industry has covered their bases for both formats.

Am I possibly on the right track here? Sounds like crap but it's loud enough to download w/out losing too much, therefore it can be sold on iTunes and at Target with the same [crappy] mastering work. More money to be made, right?

 

With newer releases or reissues, I think the majority of people don't find them offensive sounding. Even a few years ago, I was suckered into thinking "it's louder, there's more bass and treble--must be an improvement". However, for people that listen for, or detect certain audio deficiencies, it's a sad time indeed.

I think some of the great 80s-mastered CDs were created (in part) by laziness. Companies putting out albums on the strange new medium didn't take the time to over-compress, over-eq, and generally mess up the sound.

 

If I'm not mistaken, from what I've read here over the years, it seems that the loud maximized remasterings are done that way to sound "best" on Joe Six Pack's boombox, Walkman-type portable and car stereo, where the remasterings most preferred here sound best on more high end systems.

 

Not necessarily true ... I mean, a good MoFi or DCC sounds good everywhere. Sure, you need to play to Joe Consumer when you're trying to sell a million copies, but at what point is it bad to completely pander to the masses? Audiophiles will never be mainstream but there is a happy medium.

 

"Back In Black", "Crime Of The Century" and "Imagine" are 3 that have been vastly improved with remastering.

Most of the late 80's fastmaster CD's I own I would gladly replace by respending $$$ (are you reading this RIAA?) if a better issue was released even though I had replaced most of my vinyl 16 years ago.

 

I'm not, of course, implying anything negative about Steve's stuff on smaller systems. I bought Vintage Music Vols. 1 and 2 on MCA at a used store in Florida and it sounded wonderful in the rental car. I guess what I meant by "best" is all the detail that comes out most effectively on a high-end system.

 

First of all, the Beatles CDs didn't appear until 1987, not 1983.

Second, the artist is many times the worst person to approve of a remaster because they have no sense of history. They rarely go back over and critique their past recordings, and they are usually never happy with what they have done or how something turns out, so they become revisionists. They are bored with what they did, so they don't care if they change something. Artists are usually focused on the new. They care more about the performance than the technical aspects of a past recording. Remember, once most artists record their parts, and maybe mix the record, they sign off on it. Then they play the hell out of it in concert. They don't care. Their hearing is probably shot too.

No doubt that the gear engineers use is million miles away better than what was used fifteen years ago, but it's what they do with it that is the problem. They use compression to make the CD LOUDER. Anyone who ever used a compressor knows that it WILL compromise the clarity of the sound to some degree. Then they EQ the thing to compensate for what the compression took away, and to make a recording sound more modern for the kiddies. Then, since a lot of people hate tape hiss, they sometimes either filter out the hiss with EQ or they use NR. In the attempt to correct the effects of these methods, they use more EQ! After all that processing, the older CDs start to sound much better, only because they weren't heavily processed to sound "better than ever".

 

BTW, the most painful EQ I've heard on any system is Stevie Wonder's box set. Great music, though.

 

My brother reacted quite angrily once to a cassette I was playing in the car of Otis Redding's Dock of the Bay, regular cassette hiss on top of the hiss of the original recording.

 

Ain't it the truth! The remastered albums are the same ear-bleeding remasters.

 

I say 80% of all remasters sound better than the originals... maybe controverse!!!

 

To be fair, there are some good remasters out there, even though they still suffer from a bit too much limiting (compression), trying to make things LOUDER.

 

The one LOUD remaster I kinda like is the Who's A Quick One stereo remix, because I like my Who (of that time, at least) LOUD.

 

Examples

Examples?

 

You didn't read his post well enough. Here's what he said:

He is, of course, referring to the Japanese Toshiba/EMI Abbey Road which did come out in 1983.

 

Funny too is that a lot of these CDs were being blamed for bad sound when it was the players apparently that sounded bad. Now the players can actually get out of the way and we are getting closer to the Master Tape.

 

Fleetwood Mac
Billy Joel
Madonna


They may be good, I can hear the limiter in each one of their remastered CDs. Chicago is horrible!

 

Also, remember, that the remasters people here really dislike get a lot more attention than ones that people like or are indifferent about. I, for one, still think remasters, on average, are better than older ones, although there are certainly many exceptions.

 

By a happy medium, what I meant was that labels spending the time to do what Steve or other good mastering engineers do may appeal to fewer people, but we don't need the extreme of compress-and-go. Clarity is good, but it's got to sound good everywhere. I use the boom box/consumer $200 stereo to test my mixes and such, but I also make sure it sounds good on other systems because Joe Sixpack isn't the only one who will buy.

Again, people who truly do care about good sound are fewer than we here would like to believe. It's the same argument with vinyl - people who love vinyl have every right, but to assume it's the best format? No, I don't agree. That's why this is all fun.

I think to some degree as I stated the proliferation of technology has allowed musicians to do things on their own, which is both good and bad. You get away from a lot of "proper" recording, do it on a portastudio or laptop with built-in A-D converters, record it loud, master it on your laptop speakers, and you've got a CD. Now, that's an over generalization but you get the idea.

 

I agree with the above quoted post.

I find the recent trend on this forum, praising early CDs as more authentic and better sounding than remasters, and therefore more desirable to a collector, a little confounding. (And yes, I understand the complaints about the loud volume and ear piercing tones of some remasters.) The same crowd that criticized CDs for not sounding as good as vinyl LPs (or different than them in an inferior manner) are now criticizing remastered CDs on the same grounds only in relation to the earlier CDs which were once despised.

There is a far greater chance that a remaster has been sourced from the best sounding original master tapes than an early CD, which probably was manufactured from a second, third or even later generation tape source. As well, many remasters contain higher resolution production (20, 24 or even 36 bit resolution - although I understand that there is a technical argument that 36 bit is essentially no better than 24).

Some remasters are terrible, even ones that have been supervised and/ or approved by the artists themselves ('Aqualung' comes to mind), but I have been pleased by many. I am presently listening to the remastered 'Rumours' and I believe that it has never sounded better.

 

I believe, there are a lot of variables at play here. It's true that in the early days of CD, many of the discs that are now spoken of in almost holy terms were often ripped by the audiophile press as being inferior to their LP counterparts. I personally think many actually were. But also, it's true that the D/A converters in many of those early generation consumer CD players left a lot to be desired. My very first player, a Magnavox, made just about every CD I stuck in it make we want to run for the hills. Today, I'm surprised at how much more listenable some of those discs actually sound on a modern player. The one area that has seemed to improve over the years is consumer D/A conversion.

On the other hand, I think there is a certain nostalgia factor with *anything* that's old being considered superior to its modern counterpart. Audio is no different. I often wonder how interesting an experiment it might be to secretly swap the discs out between old and new versions, and remove any mastering credits from all versions too. That is, the mind is easily prejudiced. Nonetheless, there certainly are some disturbing trends in mastering that really didn't rear their ugly heads until the mid-1990's. So one can't deny that many recent masterings certainly do sound worse than their earlier counterparts for a plethora of reasons.

I think over-generalizing is the biggest potential mistake a person can make. There are some nice sounding old discs...and some nice sounding new ones. There are also some recordings that remain best in their vinyl incarnations. Bottom line, everything needs to be judged on an *individual* basis using ones ears on ones own system. Just my opinion.