What exactly is the process to remaster. Not the FULL 10 page answer but just in general. What is being tweaked? Why can't I hear a bigger difference? Old recordings (through Tidal) seem to sound essentially the same as the original. But I've also not done an exhaustive a/b test either.
Anyway, do you skip the "Remastered" titles or seek them out?
Ok so, when I'm flipping through Tidal and I see both albums, I'm usually/generally better off sticking to the original.
I do wish we could take some older un-dynamic albums where things sound thin and add some oomph to them. Like, cranking up the Beatles is usually not worth it.. No slam or low bass and drums sound like my play kit I had i the garage as a kid.
You can pretty much tell what decade something was recording by the quality of the recording.
There are plenty of examples of remasters that better earlier or original masterings. That includes remasters with DRs as good as or sometimes better than earlier versions. Remasters by engineers Hoffman and Gastwirt are the first that come to mind but there are plenty of others.
A bit of research will bear this out. Any new "older" CD I buy goes through a research process that includes remasterings, dynamic range and other factors that allow me to buy the best. Often the original releases are best. But often they are not.
"un-dynamic" recordings aren't typically thought of as soiunding "thin". If anything because all vocals and instrumentation is more level-equalized it can have a "thicker" sound.
As far as telling the decade of a recording by the quality, nope. Plenty of old recordings (last 40 years anyway) equal or better newer recordings, and the opposite is also true. How do I know? I have them in my collection.
The idea behind remastering is to take the original master tapes and get a better transfer to the tapes (analog) or files (digital) that are going to be used by the pressing plants to make LPs or CDs.
Many things can and often do go awry though. The wrong tapes are used (a later generation of tapes than the master tapes, etc., a little resolution is lost each time a tape is copied). The mastering engineer may decide to make changes to the sound, boost the bass a little, for example. Sometimes the tapes have degraded since the original mastering was done.
The biggest problem is that many remasters are overly compressed. Quieter sounds are made louder. Loud sounds are made so loud that the loudest peaks of sounds are chopped off. The dynamic range (the difference between the quietest and loudest parts of a song) is lessened. In the worst cases, once enjoyable albums are turned into one loud in-your-face endurance test. This is a oversimplification of remastering, maybe someone who knows more about the process can explain better.
Yeah, ok so... I cannot find any older recording (50s 60s 70s and most 80s) that dig that low or that have "involving" bass like you might hear from albums by Celtic Women, Hans Zimmer, Celine Dion, Adele, etc.
Those albums will really test a subwoofer. When I crank up a Rolling Stones, I feel the sound is thinner or more shrill.. Like it was recorded as cheaply as possible and it's just not "rock" feeling (in general).
It seems like newer recordings are much fatter/fuller, crisp/detailed, and present.
Also, listening to old Bob Dylan albums, the guitar is nowhere near as "wow that's nice sounding" as say Mumford and Sons or John Mayer.
Recording equipment has improved since the 60s and really good modern recordings can be made these days. The cd is capable of much stronger bass than the LP. Digital files can be played and copied many times without losing detail. That doesn’t have anything to do with remastering, though. The Stones early stuff is in general pretty badly recorded.
People who enjoy classical and jazz recording techniques from the 50s and 60s will tell us that those techniques and the albums are far superior to modern techniques. Much more natural and realistic. As always YMMV.
Compression is just a small part of the process and is more a sign of the times in general than just of remastering. The rise of compression since the mid 90s can effect all releases whether remasters or new issues.
There are various reasons we (I work in the music industry, and have in the past been involved with remastering) remaster old recordings. There are also various reasons why some sound better than the original to some people, and some worse to some people. There will almost certainly be disagreement over which sound ’better’ depending on your tastes in music, your relationship with the music, how you listen to music, where you listen to music, and what equipment you listen on. You cannot generalise though, and you yourself have to listen to see which you prefer. In your post you mention liking the sound of Adele and John Meyer recordings: if this is the case it is likely that you will prefer the sound of a remastered older recording.
As an aside as you mention it: bass is one area that can be most improved through remastering as older recordings were mastered for LP which has a more limited bass capability than CD. Original CDs were often flat transfers of the final master, hence they could be light in bass as that master was designed for LP. On the subject of bass in the 70s - have a listen to a bar or two of 70s dub reggae and that should dispel any concerns that they didn’t ’do’ bass in the 70s.
Good advice and tips as above. Much will depend upon the factor(s) that a listener does not enjoy about a certain pressing(s). I am a Collector of first/original pressings on CD and SACD. I do not mind a little tape hiss or drop-out from 60's, 70's 80's Pop and Rock music. Depending on the artist/band catalog, some remasters are an improvement, while some are compressed to death. And then, there is the whole re-mixed aspect of it all...
dtximages OP Remasters - are they better? What exactly is it?
I’m talking CD’s here. To me remasters usually sound worse, because they are usually more compressed than the original. I always buy the earliest cd’s using the cat no, used on ebay, and have never been wrong when comparing them to the later compressed remastered versions
Crime of the Century is killer on vinyl. I listen to it on occasion and there is plenty of bass from a press from the mid-late 70's. One of my favorites.
I like remasters from the 90s and early 2000s, when dynamic range was preserved, I.e., prior to the Loudness Wars. Examples: Virgin Rolling Stones remasters in 1994, Hendrix remasters in the same time period, RYKO remasters of Bowie, etc., ABKCO remasters of Stones 2002, Led Zeppelin Remasters 1990 Box set and 1993 Box set, by Jimmy Page & George Marino.
You can pretty much tell what decade something was recording by the quality of the recording.
Nonsense. Like many things in life, recording quality is a bell curve.
a flat transfer of the original analogue master tapes is best, nothing added and nothing taken away
a flat transfer does not exist. Tape machines have EQ curves aligned at 3 points: 100Hz, 1KHz and 10KHz. If the original was recorded on an ATR-102 and the copy is made on a pair of Otari / Studer / MCI, the sound will change - sometimes drastically.
When I was a recording engineer, if I wanted a ’faithful copy’, I schlepped my 2T to the studio and made a ’master’ off the 2T buss.
There can be differences between CDs that are not remasters, but just later pressings. Someone decides the recording needs a little ’help’ and messes about. See an example from Fagan’s Nightfly track I.G.Y. see http://ielogical.com/Audio/#ReIssues
The recent remastering of The Beatles album Abbey Road is a good example of a clear improvement in sound
@ieales No it's nonsense to say you cannot tell around what decade a recording is from. Old recordings just sound different. They generally sound like they're being played through an old hifi system or they literally sound like a recording of an LP. There's very little slam, lots of noise, sounds like AM radio bascially.
That's NOT to say there aren't some good sounding older albums. I get that. But there's a clear difference..
It sounds like the difference is two things:
1. Older recordings were meant for "lesser" hifi systems or mediums that couldn't produce much bass or crystal clear highs so they didn't push it.
2. Remasters can be better or worse depending.. Kinda what I figured.
Again, go take any old Elvis album and see if you're shaking the rafters in your house. Then take any album of almost any genre recorded post 2000 and you'll find much more "richness" to the sound. As if everything in the recording path is just better.. Better mics, cables, mixing equipment, and MUCH better hifi systems.
I'm just not sure how someone can disagree that there's not a huge difference in the sound of older stuff vs newer stuff.. Maybe you like that old nostalgic sound.. If you do, I'd say save your money on great audio equipment though because it matters much less.
I have records and CDs that are 30 or more years old that do have lots of slam, very little noise, and definitely don’t sound like AM radio.
Not sure why you take exception to everyone who has a different opinion, including someone who claims to be a sound engineer and others whose opinions are pretty well regarded here.
Meanwhile the artists you mentioned for the most part have very compressed recordings, so it might be said that you as well could enjoy those with less than great equipment or at least don’t have to be great at handling dynamic swings. Some people like this effect, most audiophiles do not.
Maybe if you told us your equipment we would have a better understanding of your position.
To address the original question, here are some comments.
1. First, remasters are a marketing tool by the record companies to sell more copies of mature material that has fallen off the radar. By having a well known mastering engineer put out a new version the record company gets to highlight the old record and many of us will by the same album again - maybe many times over. I have at least 6 versions of CSN's first album on vinyl and CD. I don't even know how many versions I have of DSOTM.
2. For vinyl, remastering can allow the final master (please don't use the word, "mixed" - that is a completely different step) to have deeper bass and greater dynamics that can take advantage of state of the art vinyl pressing equipment and electronics. Many vinyl reissues are pressed on 180 gram vinyl and the stampers are used on fewer copies for a higher quality transfer. Several companies are also making 45 rpm lps of classic albums which allow for significantly higher dynamic range. It also takes advantage of modern high quality tonearms and cartridges. 40 years ago a cheap cartridge and tonearm wouldn't track a record with lots of bass - it would literally jump out of the groove.
3. For CDs there are several steps in the process where you can get an improvement with a new master. The first one involves the A/D converters that turn the analog master tape into a digital file. If the original CD was made decades ago you can bet that modern converters sound better. The old version may have been converted at 16/44.1 but the new version can be digitized at 24/192 or even higher - offering the opportunity to sell the record as a high resolution download. Second, the new mastering process may use a better sounding tape deck and electronics than the original version. Third, the mastering engineer may alter the gain, EQ, compression and limiting using the final mixdown tape from the recording studio. He/she can also utilize processors to manipulate things like stereo processing (sound stage width, etc.) and soft clipping of extreme transients. The goal is that hopefully the new version will sound better than the old one.
Of course, the question is whether or not the new version is actually better. Unfortunately many remasters are more heavily compressed (by using a limiter) to make them sound "modern." You may like this or you may not. For me a heavily compressed, limited recording almost always sounds worse. Limiting will likely overwhelm all of the other positive factors of remastering and make the version worse than the original.
Because of the above, buying remastered versions of older popular music is a bit of a hobby in itself. I usually check on the Steve Hoffman forum to see if the remaster has been reviewed by the members and I check the Dynamic Range (DR) database to see how compressed it is. Many vintage recordings are available in a surprising number of versions and some of them are collector's items going for collector prices. You can see this on Discogs. I fully admit that I'm a version geek and for me it's a fun part of my audiophile obsession.
Sorry for the long answer but I did try to keep it under 10 pages.
I personally find the newer recordings to be of much higher quality. They sound crisper in the highs and tighter in the bass. The vocals sound better too.
When I listen to my system it is easy to say now that is a great recording. They just seem to have a more dynamic lifelike sound. Others just sound flat and they don't show off my system.
If you were weaned on 80’s or later pop recordings, please don’t post. ~<:-P
I’m just not sure how someone can disagree that there’s not a huge difference in the sound of older stuff vs newer stuff.. Maybe you like that old nostalgic sound.. If you do, I’d say save your money on great audio equipment though because it matters much less.
There’s a huge difference in sound quality between recordings in any era. If by newer stuff you mean the moronic millennial whoop that passes for music today, then please do us a favor and don’t post about sound quality. THERE IS NONE!!!
As far as equipment, the better it is, the better good recordings sound. Systems must be neutral. If they impose their coloration, only a small subset of recordings will sound acceptable thereupon.
I have CDs of recordings going back to the 30’s. Some of them are every bit as engaging as anything recorded today. Frank Sinatra’s "Songs for Swinging Lovers" recorded January 1956 in mono emotes every bit as much as Nora Jones or Diana Krall or ??? The Andrews Sisters collection kicks the proverbial butt. Joe Pass sits front and center in the media room. Queen Will Rock You.
someone who claims to be a sound engineer
https://www.discogs.com/artist/273206-Ian-Eales I quit because I couldn’t stand the grooveless computer crap. In that era, computers were 1½ orders of magnitude worse time wise than good musicians. There just wasn’t enough shellac...
To my ears the apex of recorded sound is now Blu-Ray audio discs..... no compression and a full frequency spectrum. Oddly enough, not every recording shines as brightly on Blu-ray, as evidenced by the first Fleetwood Mac album to include Buckingham-Nicks.....to me the sound is clear but individual instruments in the mix don't sound as nuanced.... more like a "wall" (is this a secret of their popularity.....it's made for any system...including lo-fi car radios?). Anyway, to hear Giles Martin's Beatles on Blu-ray is to approximately experience them for the first time.....with dynamics so immediate I find myself involuntarily sitting upright in my seat during certain passages...not unlike a live show. Can the record companies recoup the high costs to provide this medium....I doubt it, unless the album was an enormous best seller to start with.
Not wanting to start a fight or anything Blu Ray discs oft suffer the same aggressive dynamic range compression as any other digital format, including CD, hi res downloads, SACD, whatever. Check it out on the Dynamic Range Database.
I have noticed though, that when I buy the original version, it turns out that the remaster was better. Whenever I buy the remaster, it turns out the original was better.
I have been going through a collection of 767 CD’s and SACD’s, about 400 of which are pop/rock from the Sixties onward. I am ripping them using dBpoweramp and checking their dynamic range using the TT-DR Offline freeware. The discs are listed in a spreadsheet sorted by artist, original release date, and the release date of the specific disc. It will come as no surprise that there is a definite falloff in DR--i.e., increased compression--from the mid-1990s onward, as titles were remastered and reissued. This trend is associated with an increase in the proportion of tracks that clip. It includes some artists usually thought of as exemplars of quality recording. Dire Straits/Mark Knopfler started out as high as DR15 but declined to as low as 7. Bruce Hornsby went from 13 to 6; Norah Jones from 14 to 10; Sarah McLachlan from 13 to 8; Joni Mitchell from 14 to 8; Steely Dan/Donald Fagen from 13 to 9; and Sting from 15 to 7. It has been interesting to find that some of my favorite albums are fairly highly compressed. To me, this demonstrates that the music rules, but also that compression is seductive and I am not immune to its charms. I compare it to the way that electronics stores max out the brightness of TVs and computer displays because it impresses customers. A highly compressed disc similarly "impresses" with its big bass and bright midrange. It’s fun to hear more detail than in the past, not stopping to question whether the heightened midrange is in proper balance with the rest of the music, or swamps the vocals.
It’s when I do comparisons with less-compressed discs produced from about 1984 to 1995 that I understand the price to be paid. The highly-compressed disc, assaulting the ears with relentless loudness and a measure of distortion from clipping, gets old fast. It is like listening to TV commercials all the time. The older disc is less "impressive" and may need to be turned up to be fully enjoyed (the good news being that it is less likely to clip if turned up), but it often sustains my interest much better. Over the last twenty years or so a lot of pop/rock music has increasingly been mastered for play on car stereos, mobile devices, and earbuds. Those of us who insist on listening to music on a quality system are probably now in the minority. Whether you like remastered titles may depend on how you plan to listen to them.
Research on Hoffman forum and DR DB helps make the right buying decisions. Bad side of this is when research tells you the best recording is that one on Discogs going for $100 (but sometimes cheaper on eBay if you can trust the seller).
In my opinion, many here have hit on it. Much of what was recorded back in day, as far as popular music, was recorded where much of the highs and specially the lows, were rolled off, because in general most buyers didn’t have the capacity to reproduce the sounds rolled off, so why put them on the recording. If the master tapes have the content, then the remaster process can add, what was not on the original commercial recording. As some said, Desperado and Crime Of The Century are indeed quality recordings made back in the day. Classical music, as well as some jazz, didn’t suffer from engineers rolling off the frequencies, in most cases.
Over the last twenty years or so a lot of pop/rock music has increasingly been mastered for play on car stereos, mobile devices, and earbuds.
A lot of content today is reduced bitrate. OTA radio stations 'rip' material to MP3 for smaller storage. For a visual on how bit-rate reduction distorts the music, see http://ielogical.com/Lossy/
Those of us who insist on listening to music on a quality system are probably now in the minority.
No probability about it. We always have been and likely always will.
Sadly, the great unwashed think they have a quality system, but it can be egregious. More than once, I've asked that a system be stopped or I shall have to leave. I literally become nauseous from the swirling dervishes caused by bitrate reduction. I stream reduced bitrate, but playback is mono.
A "remaster" can sound better, worse or the same as an original pressing. There are too many variables in play to give a blanket answer.
Some remasters of vintage/golden age material sound better. Back in the day, engineers had to be mindful of the (low) quality of home listening equipment. Unfortunately this often led to compression and truncated frequency extremes. Example: Verve was forced to reissue many classic titles because 1st pressing were too dynamic for most home systems. Later issues even during the Gold Age sound inferior as a result. It is only with the beginning of true high end remasters starting in the 70's that listeners could hear what was actually on the master tape. RCA Living Stereo LPs from the 50's-60's were engineered to sound great on home equipment- because EQ was applied during the mastering process. The first series of Classic Records RCA reissues cut directly from the master tape with very little EQ or change. Listeners were unhappy because they did not hear "better" versions of what they were intimately familiar with ! What they received was actually closer to the master tape, but we deemed inferior ! Classic incorporated some of the original EQ in subsequent reissues.
Some remasters sound worse. Many MSFL and other premium remasters sound different (and worse to many) because the remastering engineers applied EQ adjustments. Some sound brittle or booming, some have muddled vocals, some sound like a "smiley face".
The best remasters tend to occur when an engineer carefully listens to an original pressing to determine how it was produced, then approaches the master tape from a the perspective of recreating a better version of the original. Example: Beatles in Mono. The engineers and producers used mint first pressings as their reference. Some of the resulting mono LPs sound -better- than original YB Parlophone pressings, and the remainder sound just as good.
We are now at the point where even RnR masters are 45-50yrs old, and suffered from indifferent storage quality, and multiple playback on machines of varying quality such that the tape has noticeably deteriorated. Rather than risk further damage and to reduce costs, labels are transferring master tapes to digital files. Many were converted at 16/44 during the 80's and 90's, then the master tape was discarded because digital is "forever". It is only in the past 10yrs that we see many labels choosing a higher resolution level for digital conversion. Most labels use something between 16/48 and 24/192, with the sweet spot being 24/88 or 24/96. The resulting digital master is then used to create new CDs, streaming content, and to generate mothers for LP pressings. Digital masters are much cheaper to administer- send bits by secure line versus shipping a master tape.... Contrary to industry spin, you CAN hear a difference between a fully analogue LP remastered pressing and an LP pressing with digital somewhere in the production chain. Don't be fooled by claims of "from the master tapes" or anything similar because a DIGITAL conversion is actually taken from the original master tapes as a source !
Awesome info from everyone. For those whom I disagree'd with, I'm mainly just playing devil's advocate.
Like I wish so badly that Elvis's old stuff was a little more "oomphy".. NOT electronica hip hop fakery, but just more "crank up-ability" (im struggling for words here).
Here's an example.. Elton John "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me"....
Original recording: ehhh boring, not going to make me stand up and clap. But his newer live versions at Madison Square Garden, ohhhh yeah... It gets my adrenaline pumping.
Here's a better example yall are going to kill me for.
"The Weight" by The Band sounds bland and uninvolving compared to Marty Stuarts newer version which I actually like alot better.
On some albums, I have 6+ different versions. DSOTM comes to mind, where I have the Black Triangle CD, the Sony Mastersound. the regular CD, MoFi vinyl digitized 24/96, the 1992 remaster, the 2011 remaster, the UHQR 180 gr vinyl digitized . . . it’s nuts. Same with WYWH, Brain Salad Surgery and Close To The Edge. I keep telling myself that I am going to listen to them once and for all, determine which sound best and get rid of the other ones, but I never do <sigh>. (BTW, did you know that when MoFi originally got the analog master tape of DSOTM to do the MoFi pressing, they BROKE THE TAPE! Yes, true story). On a slightly different note, on the Hoffman Forums, someone posted a sample of each of the several DSOTM recordings and you had to download them and rank them in order. Then the OP posted what recording each number corresponded to. With DSOTM, I preferred the Sony Mastersound over all of them. It is an interesting test, because you can’t be influenced by your expectations regarding which one wis going to sound better. Definitely worth taking the challenge.
The first series of Classic Records RCA reissues cut directly from the master tape with very little EQ or change. Listeners were unhappy because they did not hear "better" versions of what they were intimately familiar with ! What they received was actually closer to the master tape, but we deemed inferior ! Classic incorporated some of the original EQ in subsequent reissues.
What idTENt decided to leave off mastering EQ?
Back in the day when the distribution media was vinyl, mix engineers backed up from the disc knowing it would add a bit of coloration.
It was sometimes a hassle with new acts because they did not understand that what they heard in the control room or a from a cassette in their car was not the 'finished' product. We called it "Fixing it in the stores"
I know there are many worthy candidates that I'm not thinking of at the moment but I have to agree with those who have mentioned Terry Jacks'"Seasons in the Sun." That is one special record.
So this is pretty interesting. I always kinda thought compression always equals "bad". Why would I want a compressed anything other than space savings?
But, I can see where compression is used in the studio to make quiet things sound louder and giving an overall "fuller" sound, whether it's actually fuller or not is debatable, but it's perceived that way.
I would generally say I like all my music as uncompressed as possible. Let me feel those dynamics, BUT, the it was really more fatness that I was after.
I don't like a lot of Classical music because it goes from SO quiet, to so loud.. Then stays SO quiet for 5 mins then gets huge.. I want to hear the quiet parts more and not have to breath softly to hear.
So am I right that in the recording world, compression is often used to make average ears happier?
The danger is always using your current system as the most reliable measuring stick there is...it may not be...and if it isn’t (a Lot more likely than you might think), then when will it ever be, if at all. How ya gonna know if you’re making the right comparisons if the rig you’re comparing them on is lacking something, tangible or otherwise??
Some music reviewers have admitted falling into this trap before, JG Holt among them.
I have lots of originals and remasters of the same title. Me?? I never throw away a disc...today’s preference of remaster to original, or vice versa, might not be tomorrow’s after an upgrade.
This is a Big reason I buy Lampizator Vacuum tube dacs for they do a great job designing digital to start with then having several tubes that are also Vacuumtube rectified it takes decent recordings and brings a lot of analog - realism bigger soundstage and image depth then their Solid state competitors. even streaming .
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