The meaning of “Remastered”


A lot of music I already have is being re-released and “remastered”.  Some of those contain new tunes or printed material and I might buy (again) just to have that.  Otherwise, what’s the value of a new master?  I remember direct to disc vinyl was said to be limited to 10,000 copies because the “master” from which copies were pressed, wore out.  Tape masters would have physically limited lifespans, too.  But in the age of digital music, what is a remaster?  I suppose a new release could have been “re-mixed” or “re-normalized”, so there may be real sonic differences which may or may not be an improvement.  Does the use of the term mean there is some actual audible voodoo by an engineer rather than just procreation of an existing audio file?
77jovian

Showing 1 response by cd318

I believe it’s mostly a marketing exercise. My experience agrees with the consensus here, they are either ’ruined’ or ’overly compressed.’

I can’t think of many remasters which improved upon the originals. Not for the Beatles (1993 Red and Blue and 2014 US Box excepted), the Kinks, the Incredible String Band, Elvis Costello or Scott Walker.

Different yes, more tracks yes sometimes, but better sound? No!

The frustrating thing is that even after cleaning up glitches and finding better original tapes they can’t resist the temptation to compress the dynamics. They just can’t.

Nor can they often resist trying a little too hard to remove tape hiss - and some of the ’air’ in the original recording along with it.

The Jimmy Page Led Zeppelin ones and the Johnny Marr Smiths ones were ok.

So were the Shout Factory ones for The Beat (or the English Beat as known in the US) and the Singer’s Singer Matt Monro Box.

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/remastered-cds-which-represent-biggest-improvement.247399/