Remastering

The AC/DC remasters that I have sound wonderful as do the Journey remasters. And all of the Intense Millenium releases. I have a few Rush remastered and the first 4 albums sound awesome. I guess it all boils down to who is doing them.

I have never heard a remaster destroy anything to me. However, Halford's "Crucible" album sounded like dogshit when it came out and the remaster made me a huge fan of that album!!!

I dont have the ear to be really picky but I like some remasters and not others. I think this years Dio - Holy Diver kills the original release for example but the original was a pretty poor effort. I would rather the companies do a good job in the first place to be honest.

I also like the Queensryche remasters, especially the EP and The Warning. Fantastic sound on those.

The Queen remasters are good as well, though I don't care for most of the bonus tracks.

We need a remix of ToB - Overlord. I'd love to hear this album with audible vocals one day!

stormspell wrote:

We need a remix of ToB - Overlord. I'd love to hear this album with audible vocals one day!

Amen!

Death's "Scream Bloody Gore"

The original sounded trebl-y with the vocals too weak/soft in the mix

The remaster sounded perfectly

RE compressed audio, how would you even notice it? Yeah sure if you take a peek thru Audacity graph chart you WOULD surely know it is compressed, but is it just a placebo effect?

I mean we all know CDs arent the best medium for the typical Audiophile, so it should be compressed , right?

EmoElmo wrote:

Death's "Scream Bloody Gore"



RE compressed audio, how would you even notice it? Yeah sure if you take a peek thru Audacity graph chart you WOULD surely know it is compressed, but is it just a placebo effect?

I mean we all know CDs arent the best medium for the typical Audiophile, so it should be compressed , right?

Listen to Rush - Vapor Trails or Sammy Hagar - Hallelujah! Live. Both of those CD's are compressed and you can tell the minute you put them in the CD player. As a result they are on the verge of distortion and the louder you play them the more distorted they sound.

I consider remastering for the sake of reissuing and/or increasing the loudness of an album morally wrong. It disturbs the work originally created by the artist, whether it's Pink Floyd or Napalm Death. It's important to try and preserve the original sound as much as possible. Digital mastering techniques has made it possible to make a bad sounding album sound better when done correctly, but this tenet seems to be lost about half of the time because remasters are done because the album is 15+ years old and hasn't been remastered yet. I still think a decent remaster sounds better than a poor original recording.

While the "Loudness War" is a very real threat to the industry (and the bane of audiophiles everywhere), I do think that it is slightly over hyped by a group of hipster-minded people who bash on loud remasters because it's the cool thing to do. When you grow up with vinyl, I'm sure the difference between digital and analog recording is much more apparent, but the music industry and culture itself has gone digital. It's similar to the exchange of vinyl for cassette, and cassette for compact disc. The age of digital media has arrived and even now continues to evolve, with the concept of owning physical media being phased out. CD's are already on the way out, and even downloadable MP3's are slowly losing steam. Streaming media is on a meteoric rise and we are no longer paying to own the medium, instead we are paying for access to it. With this new age comes new practices. I guess it's an easier sell if record companies remaster albums with more emphasis on the loudness rather than the dynamic range when music is listened to for the sake of the sound itself and not the way it sounds.

Loudness level in itself isn't part of the original work by an artist save for the dynamics per song, the overall normalization factor is a matter of both the technology and what's on the mixing board. A proper remaster is effective when it successfully ports the master recordings to their fullest potential of sound available on the superior digital medium. Loudness/normalization is a part but only one small part. A remaster can be done very poorly, just as an original recording can be done very poorly.

As far as musical storage, it's scientifically incorrect that vinyl is superior sound to compact disc or other digital mediums. The myth has a lot to do with superstition; records are larger, we look at them and think = bigger, records are not 'digital', which many people equate to coldness, sterility, "new technology = bad", etc. 'Warmth' in an LP can be anything from the speakers used to a poor master of the record. More often than not the 'muddiness' is imperfection in playback. Certain remasters may sound offensively different for their crispness alone, but one would need to fault the original recording for that, not the remaster. That 'fullest potential of sound' is what the artist, producer and so forth intend to be heard - not muddiness. The sampling frequency with digital is exact, which is not so with wax - far less so, in fact. Because digital playback is being perfected, a long way from the poor CD ports of the 80's/early 90's, there is more need to faithfully reproduce the real sound of a recording with clarity worth shelling out X amount of $$$$ for, as the download-hungry public demands.

Over-compression is a trickle-down effect from mainstream, vocal oriented music which is consistently utilized in normalized radio programming and other uses where sound quality is even less an issue..in fact, it's hardly an object at all. These people who feed solely on that type of music do not listen to music and sound the way listeners like ourselves do. The majority of that music has little dynamics, however, this is hardly a new thing, modern pop radio has been working off basically the same template since the 80's. It's just louder, and that combination makes for an earache. The majority of problems with today's sound reproduction comes with bad production right out of the gate, compression to the point of clipping as we can see on an album such as 'Death Magnetic'. "Modern" recording itself is superior in every way to all previous incarnations of sound capture and the result does not have to be too loud, compressed etc. If anyone has listened to our 'Alchemist' EP, the guitar sound is only fair in quality (rush job, it will be fixed on the full-length), but as for the mix and production itself, I personally oversaw it and saw to it that there was no over-compression, and that there was warmth, clarity, etc. Anyone who blasts it in the car can hear it, and we didn't pull a bunch of tricks like pitch correction, yet it was all Pro-Tools 10.

mikeinfla wrote:

The AC/DC remasters that I have

There are 2 remasters, the ones from 1994 who i think sound really good and the 2003 ones (released as digipak) that are too compressed and a bit too loud, i think they still sound OK compared to some of the albums that really suffer from loudness war but are aworse than the 1994 remasters.

ultmetal wrote:

I also like the Queensryche remasters, especially the EP and The Warning. Fantastic sound on those.

The Queen remasters are good as well, though I don't care for most of the bonus tracks.

the Queensryche were excellent. The Motley Crue remasters were not bad either.

The Ozzy remasters from the 90s are pretty good, the ones from the 2000s, not so much.

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RE compressed audio, how would you even notice it? Yeah sure if you take a peek thru Audacity graph chart you WOULD surely know it is compressed, but is it just a placebo effect?

If you know what to listen for, anyone could hear the difference. I remember getting the remaster of Unleashed In The East, it was immediately apparent that it no longer sounded like the same recording. For example the beginning of "Genocide" where the riffs starts out with one guitar and then when the 2nd guitar comes in that used to be "powerful" because the volume of the track increased significantly. That sense of drama is gone on the remaster because the severe compression has removed that volume difference, so now when the 2nd guitar comes in that old sense of the power truly kicking in has been neutered. I only had that remaster for about 3 days, I sold it and bought a used LP...which sounded like the recording I remembered.

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I do think that it is slightly over hyped by a group of hipster-minded people who bash on loud remasters because it's the cool thing to do.

There are definitely people out there that are like that, I run across many of them on audiophile boards, people so focused on the mastering that they aren't even paying attention to the music. However, they are a small minority and there are many others (like me) who believe there should be a happy medium ground where quality sound is still paid attention. CD technology is so out of date, why are we still limiting ourselves to 16bit audio when 24bit has been the standard for a decade now? All digital albums are recorded in at 24bit/192khz...but a CD can't handle anything close to that, so we purposely "downgrade" the recording to fit an out of date format. Then after it's downgraded we brickwall it, damaging the fidelity of the original recording even further. That drives me more nuts than anything.

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As far as musical storage, it's scientifically incorrect that vinyl is superior sound to compact disc or other digital mediums.

That's only partially correct. CDs are handicapped by a 16bit digital wordlength that even the designers of the compact disc warned wasn't sufficient to hold the full frequency range that analog tape could hold...and also wasn't enough to capture everything within the range of human hearing. Analog mediums don't have that handicap, vinyl can hold more audio information than the standard compact disc. Now...if you expand that to 24bit/96khz or higher then digital becomes superior...so a blu ray for example can sound much better than an LP. However, most albums are still being released on CD or in crappy mp3s...so until higher sample rates become the norm I'll be sticking with LPs unless a true 24bit version is available (thanks to HDTracks for making that available online now).

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"Modern" recording itself is superior in every way to all previous incarnations of sound capture and the result does not have to be too loud, compressed etc.

I don't think digital recording is "superior" in sound to analog recording, it's just different. If you record an album on 24track tape, master to 1/2 inch analog tape, then press to vinyl you can make some fantastic sounding albums that have a very different "feel" to them than digital. Certain types of music benefit from this sound...Acoustic music like jazz for instance is better served by analog and if the band is trying to pedal a retro sound like Graveyard or something then analog is a must to really capture that mood.

Modern digital recordings can be a thing of beauty in the right hands, it's just unfortunate that no matter how meticulous the detail is on the recording we end up crippling it by mastering it poorly and then porting it onto an outdated digital format.

You could still put up some ribbon mics, get the right room to throw the stuff in, and make recordings that sound every bit as warm as anything vinyl out there, Pat Metheny, Wadada Leo Smith's groups among others have done this in recent times...

Again, it all depends on the engineer, the manner of recording....the STYLE of music...and so on....

Vinyl simply has an inferior frequency response, a lot of stuff which is horribly recorded (WatchTower - Energetic Disassembly as a basic example) gains by having the imperfections masked by the 'warmth'. By far the best sounding stuff on wax, objectively, is the direct-to-disc stuff like 'The Piano' by Herbie Hancock. Digital mediums have the capability to take out the 'middleman' the way the DTD method did on wax. You play metal, you stick a Shure right in front of the Mesa, layer it, and if you don't like your tone - that's your fault, that computer is eating up 99% of exactly what is coming out of there...and especially with tracking being virtually unlimited (unless you're Wintersun), there's no excuse for someone with the right knowhow to not get a good sounding record that rivals anything out there. There are almost infinite possibilities with digital to get the desired sound and I kind of think that ironically trips people up a bit, as opposed to the almost scientific method there was in analog of recording a particular style of music. Sometimes a band might not even need to master the thing (Iron Maiden's newer albums), and it captures their vision (we also learned that sometimes Maiden's vision sounds like doo-doo). Point is, that digital isn't the enemy.

It's true that the CD bitrate is limited in comparison to even that of a DVD, but if Steven Wilson can make the King Crimson records sound the way they do on my deluxe remasters, to be honest, what more do we really want out of sound? Recording is going to continue to evolve, sampling rates will grow in accuracy...even when CD's become scarce, vinyl is never, ever going to take the place of digital, and it shouldn't. What we definitely need is good engineers to take the place of bad engineers.

As for mp3s and all-digital files, the vast majority of ears really cannot discern any difference between FLAC and a 256kb mp3 file even though the numbers will tell you it is there. I certainly appreciate the pureness of music but one also can't be very pro vinyl and anti-mp3 at the same time the way I see some people do online. It's like the refresh rate on LCD TV's...... nobody needs to be paying $100+ more because it says 240hz. You can't even bloody see a lot past 120hz unless you are an X-Man. I know that might be kind of crude to compare digital music with something like that but I just think there is only so high-def something can get...

I had another thought since I mentioned the thing about the Mesa..A lot of contributions that have arisen from what ProTools, etc offers have been out of musicians using that wonderful gift for evil....what I said about the Mesa, a lot of players don't even do that kind of thing anymore. You go into the studio, they'll tell you to run your guitar through the computer, and then you pick a preset distortion or other sound on some plugin and that's your tone, which is BS. Same with the drums or most any instrument. That method totally eliminates any personality you or your band might have and a lot of artists do that these days instead of rigging up and tuning up their stuff the way it sounds live. That contributes in a huge way to records sounding like crap because ProTools can most certainly capture a big sounding amp, but if you use the plugins, those just cannot replace it.

For the record, my band is using natural tones on the album, just peppered with some EQ. because that is the metal way. *shameless plug*

The new Storm Corrosion album wasn't actually "mastered", the final mixdown was used with no post-mastering stage. Almost no compression was used and it's one of the most dynamic albums I've heard in recent memory. Even then, the 24bit/96khz stereo & 5.1 files on the blu ray absolutely destroy the standard redbook CD, which I listened to once and haven't played since because it's obviously inferior.

Same exact thing can be said for the blu-ray of Grace For Drowning, the 24bit high rez version of the Aqualung reissue and the 24bit version of the King Crimson remasters on the bonus DVDs. In every case, the CD sounds "good", but the blu-rays crush them in a side by side comparison in ever single instance...even on a midgrade system it's obvious.

re:Pro Tools/Logic Pro recordings. You are correct, too many people are plugging in direct and it's not even close to capturing the sound of a guitar amplifier captured by a top of the line microphone in a professional recording studio room. None of that feeling of 3-Dimensional space is there. It's not necessary to go that route though, i don't mind using Pro Tools because it's very convenient and much less expensive than recording to tape...but I see it as "ONLY" a replacement for the multi-track tape machine.

Take an album like "Heritage" which was recorded using all vintage equipment, guitars with no active pickups, all analog effects, actual pianos, organs and mellotrons...no samples, so synths, no plug-ins...and the album was mostly recorded live in the studio. If you use that idea (the digital recording software is just the tape) and record your music in an actual studio with a true professional engineer (not just some schmuck in his basement with a laptop) you can still create amazing sounding recordings using digital. The key is to keep it as REAL as possible everywhere else except the medium used for capturing it.

Required Fields wrote:

If I'm familiar with the albums as they are and already own the original, I'll stick to them. If I don't own the albums yet, I'll get a remaster. Either way, as long as I own the album, I should be happy.

That's pretty much where I am on the issue. I'm not re-buying an album these days if I'm happy (re: used to) the original. I rarely notice the sound quality, better or worse. I'll bend that rule though on occasion.

The one exception is when a whole back catalog is being re-issued, like Queensryche, Priest or WASP. The ones I didn't have, I bought the newly remastered versions, then upgraded my originals. It's more for consistancys sake on my part. And the neat picture the spines create when they're all put together.

I skipped the Megadeth re-issues as well due to the negative reviews. Those originals suit me just fine.

S.D. wrote:

Take an album like "Heritage" which was recorded using all vintage equipment, guitars with no active pickups, all analog effects, actual pianos, organs and mellotrons...no samples, so synths, no plug-ins...and the album was mostly recorded live in the studio. If you use that idea (the digital recording software is just the tape) and record your music in an actual studio with a true professional engineer (not just some schmuck in his basement with a laptop) you can still create amazing sounding recordings using digital. The key is to keep it as REAL as possible everywhere else except the medium used for capturing it.

That's cool!! Actual Mellotron!?!?!?! I wonder who he borrowed that from?????

I don't remember which artist did this(might have been Kevin Gilbert), but in the early pro tool/pc days he/they would have tape as a back up just in case the computer had a problem or something like that.

chewie wrote:

That's cool!! Actual Mellotron!?!?!?!

You can see Mikael changing the tape reels on the mellotron in the making-of documentary (deluxe edition DVD).

S.D. wrote:

chewie wrote:

That's cool!! Actual Mellotron!?!?!?!

You can see Mikael changing the tape reels on the mellotron in the making-of documentary (deluxe edition DVD).

I thought this was an interesting take on the whole digital vs. analog format...

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Digital sound quality is capable of being as good as analogue recordings, says a pioneer of the CD format – but the speed of improvement depends on how soon Apple focus on enhancement.

Ken Ishiwata was an audio engineer at Marantz when the firm developed the compact disc platform before being bought by Philips.

And he admits the aim was never to equal the quality produced by vinyl – instead it was to make the format affordable.

Ishiwata tells the Telegraph: “We had great analogue sound, but our industry needs something new every 15-20 years. Back then they had cassette, but it reached a peak and they had to come up with something new.

“Sony and Philips came up with the CD in 1982. All-new quality was possible, but we decided to come up with reasonable technology for the price. We designed it to be affordable for $100.”

The result was a format which Ishiwata says has only recently become capable of giving vinyl a run for its money. And things have moved on again, to the digital platform, which has upset audiophiles further with its MP3 format.

“When the MP3 player first came out the memory was so expensive,” he explains. “But now there’s 32GB on your iPod. You don’t need to compress – the majority is still MP3 but your recording capacity is big enough to have non-compressed music.”

Market leaders Apple now offer a lossless digital format and recently began selling ‘Mastered for iTunes’ audio created from studio-quality masters.

But Ishiwata says: “I’m not sure improving quality is a benefit for Apple. Their product is not sold for quality. It’s sold for sexiness and convenience. For them it’s not the right time yet.”

So while we could all enjoy better sound now, it’s likely to be another five years before we actually have it on our mobile devices. “People always want something better, so it’s beginning to improve,” says the engineer, adding that online streaming services such as Spotify are “not bad – and in five years’ time they’ll be a lot better.”

"had to" come up with something new. I would buy that as completely being the reason IF, IF the PC (as in personal computer) was not on the horizon as what was going to be 'the thing', that's something people became fully aware of with the release of the original Macintosh. I appreciate his insight and his background but dude can't tell me it was just "we had to come up with something new - now cut to dissing Apple", in the age of cyberpunk and new wave and the Mac. And one can't blame the digital platform for something like mp3... nobody is blaming wax for how it sounds when recorded to cassette. Further, I don't believe for a second that he's unaware that a fully lossless digital source does not know what cable it's being put through, what speaker it's being put through, or what CD it's being duplicated on. Even with discs which have a larger range, 99.9% of human hearing cannot even pick up what 'additional' would be going on were a record be put out on DVD - although, obviously, on a DVD you can mix it according to a popular speaker setup be it 5.1 or whatever, and then of course it will sound quite different. But in a nutshell, the same lossless end result is apparent on everything you put digital through with the very big exception of actual ripped files which may vary in quality. He doesn't elaborate anymore on the CD thing but just discusses mp3s, which is fine, but the partial-detracting of the CD at the beginning is kind of abrupt and doesn't make much of a case.

I believe the point of the article was the CDs were engineered to be "affordable", not "the highest quality". Settling on the not-nearly-good-enough 16bit/44.1khz standard was the largest mistake.

S.D. wrote:

I believe the point of the article was the CDs were engineered to be "affordable", not "the highest quality". Settling on the not-nearly-good-enough 16bit/44.1khz standard was the largest mistake.

It's a shame that SACD never caught on/came too late. I have an SACD Player laying around and a few SACD and they sound great, Toto - Hydra sounds awesome. Dark Side of the Moon on SACD in 5.1 is an amazing experience (especially Money & Time).
Still i prever CD over MP3 but other than that, i like my Vinyls.

As for Remasters: Somebody mentioned AC/DC: I think the 1994 Remasters were a whole lot better than the 2003 ones, those were just loud. Same with Genesis and Pink Floyd which were remastered in the same year (1994 was probably the year of remastering ) compared to the newer ones.
I think the most faithful remasters are those from very big bands. Michael Jackson Remasters usually sound good, so does the Beatles Remasters (but as reports go they worked for over a year on them to make them sound right)

Other Remasters seem to change nearly nothing. Like those Blind Guardian Remasters, that sound nearly the same as the old CD releases (which made me glad, at least i didn't force me to rebuy those albums all over again)

Some Remasters are even just downright nasty like those Black Sabbath Remasters from Castle Records. Whatever they used as source, was crap. On the early albums are so many drop-outs on channels and other mistakes, it's not even funny. There is a website out there that compares those remasters to the Rhino ones (and even those aren't perfect either)

One Remaster series i really like is the Deep Purple one. You get thick booklets with lots of pictures and informations (and i just love that) and the sound is great, it's a good remaster, not loud and there's not much to fix. I compared the Made in Japan 25th Anniversary Remix to my original Vinyl release and the sound was for CD pretty close (and unlike the first CD were they botched it, they got the channels right on the Remaster)


And i have a question:
How are those Savatage Remasters?
I have the SPV/Steamhammer CD Releases and 3 original Vinyls (Hall, Gutter, Streets), are those Remasters worth buying or crap? (if they are great i would rebuy all the albums, just because i love Savatage and want them to have my money )