Remasters of CDs released in the 90s C/D S/D?

Apart from the obvious "we can sell extra copies of this record," I'd say the main impetus is that things are way louder now, and the fairly narrow volume range on mp3 players actually makes that a problem for some people.

CDs were quite loud in 1995 too. It was around 1992-93 that they were suddently starting to record CDs louder.

They are louder now, Geir.

Do you see?

They may be slightly louder now, but I can still play CDs from 1995 loud enough on my CD player, while it has serious problems playing CDs from the 80s loud enough.

serious problems playing CDs from the 80s loud enough.

try turning them up

get a new cd player while you're re-buying all that old junk. complete upgrade.

Here's the situation in a nutshell. Most really early CD masterings were made by going to the vault, grabbing a tape that was labeled "master," and transferring that straight to CD with no additional sonic meddling. The problem with this is that the tapes labeled "master" were, way more often than not, the vinyl cutting masters, which were second-generation versions that had undergone the EQ and compression needed to allow the music to be properly tracked by a stylus, once it had been cut to a record.

Sometime in the early- to mid-90's some forces in the industry made noise about this problem, and it started to become more common for producers of reissues to actually seek out the original session master tapes -- first-generation, un-fucked-with tapes that were created in the mix rooms upon completion of the album, usually with the artist(s) present. (Lots of these tapes were labeled "do not use" instead of "master." Go figure.)

Exhibit A: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Unfortunately, this was around the same time period that the loudness war, as described in that Wikipedia article, started to heat up. So instead of reissues that were made straight from tapes that had been altered many years prior for vinyl, it became common for engineers to seek out the highest quality unaltered tapes, and then introduce their own alterations for CD. As per the loudness wars, generally these alterations amount to boosting the frequency extremes (fatter bass, sharper highs) and using dynamic compression to get the average signal level much louder, while sacrificing the realism of the peaks.

Exhibit B: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ

In my opinion, a typical early CD is far more pleasing than a modern remaster in the vast majority of cases. It's likely that neither is a straight-up representation of how the recording sounded at the moment the artists/producers declared it to be complete, but the older CD made from a second-gen cutting master is almost always the lesser of two evils. Someone who listens to their music exclusively on iPod earbuds over the roar of a subway train might disagree.

There are exceptions to this, of course. The Depeche Mode reissues are a good example, because I consider those discs (specifically the UK editions, which include hybrid SACD's instead of plain CD's) to be far and away the best rock reissues I've ever heard, from any time period. The Talking Heads Brick discs are pretty great too. Both of those series' have a huge edge in detail and clarity over the original CD's, without the problems of steamrolled dynamics and overly aggressive smiley-face EQ adjustments.

There are also some early CD's that were made from straight transfers of the real original masters, instead of the second-gen cutting masters. Bob Dylan - John Wesley Harding is one of them. John Coltrane - Giant Steps is another. And anything Steve Hoffman mastered for MCA (such as The Who - Meaty Beaty Big And Bouncy) is pretty much guaranteed to be from the real masters. Hoffman is probably the industry's loudest proponent of making reissues sound as close to the actual original recording as possible, with all dynamics intact.

By the way, those "24 karat gold" CD's that they used to sell for $30 -- the selling point of those was that they were mastered from the original session tapes, by engineers who actually cared about what they were doing and would thusly only make very minor adjustments, if they made any at all. Steve Hoffman was the engineer who did all the DCC brand gold discs. The other major brand was Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab, AKA MFSL, AKA MoFi. And there are some newer labels that have made similar efforts, such as Audio Fidelity and Analogue Productions, both of which are associated with Hoffman in some way.

(MoFi actually still exists, although not quite in its original iteration. They are putting out a hybrid SACD of The Pixies - Surfer Rosa next month.)

So in response to the original post, the increase/decrease in quality of a remaster is based more around the quality of the mastering job than the time period that it, or the original recording, is from... although the general tendency is for new ones to be crap, and you should power your deflector shields accordingly.

The Depeche Mode reissues are a good example, because I consider those discs (specifically the UK editions, which include hybrid SACD's instead of plain CD's) to be far and away the best rock reissues I've ever heard, from any time period.

To my ears, the remasters of "Speak & Spell", "A Broken Frame" and "Some Great Reward" improve a lot on the originals, while I have more trouble hearing obvious differences on "Violator" and "Songs Of Faith And Devotion".

I might be noticing bigger differences since I usually listen to the SACD layers of mine. Hearing "Never Let Me Down Again" on SACD was like seeing sunlight for the first time. So much sound exploding everywhere. Stunning.

On the Talking Heads discs though, you can hear the improvements even by comparing the iTunes sample clips.

With the SACD there is the 5:1 mix too, which will of course make them sound different. I haven't been able to hear those yet, but sure will.

most remasters are simply louder - i cant notice much difference in anything else. i dont get why people would buy cds for that alone. cant they just turn the volume up? it also takes the dynamics out of the music unnecessarily. its even happening in cds from across the world too, this stupid menality that everything must be +10 is even on my new 'remasters' of indian and african cds. it sucks.

Aye, case in point being the Os Mutantes remasters from last year - they're disappointing next to the RevOla remaster of the second Rita Lee album, and the Tropicalia comp., cos they're that bit louder and less clear, and therefore less exciting.

I don't know, there are definitely cases of new remasters that do sound a lot better than older issues - when I replaced my Ramones All The Stuff And More CDs with the Rhino reissues a couple of years ago the 1st album particularly sounds a hell of a lot better, not just louder. On the earlier CD it sounds like Tommy's drumkit is made out of cardboard.

i hope the backlash against remasters - i wish more people were joining in though - means people seek out the 'original' cds more.

ya i wouldn't hold your breath.

I've only heard the 2-channel Depeche SACD layers, since I don't have a surround rig. I hear the surround mixes are amazing though.

Re: The Ramones, of course not all remastering jobs are going to be bad. Every once and again you'll run into an older CD that is totally crappy, that was made from a many-generations-down tape with dropouts or just plain bad sound, or that used incorrect takes and mixes, simply because they just went with the materials they had on hand at the time.

Rhino's "house sound" for remasters is nowhere close to as bad as it gets. They do a little bit of compression and little bit of smiley-facing, but they do it in moderation and are nowhere near as aggressive as the style of, say, EMI. The important thing is that Bill Inglot and the rest of the Rhino people are really big on the historical side of reissues, always going to great lengths to seek out the best source tapes and raid the vaults to unearth as many relevant goodies as possible. (The 2-disc Elvis Costello releases are another example of Rhino's exhaustiveness.) So while I think those Ramones discs probably would have sounded better if the Rhino boys has had rounded up all the material and then simply handed it all over to somebody like Barry Diament (another guy who's adamantly against mastering compression), there's still no debating that what we did get is pretty well done overall... and a big improvement over the originals if those were indeed so bad.

threads like this are why I read ILM.

Deej's "turn it up" joke would be funny if it weren't sad -- it works on a decent home stereo, but things like mp3 players and portables tend to have the volume range pegged to modern mastering. Every now and then I'll rip an early-90s disc and then find that my mp3 player won't go higher than medium volume on it. (Turn it up on big speakers at home, though, and it's just sweet: like, wow, I'd forgotten that things can be loud and still feel nice in my ears!)

sleeve otm. good work all.

/srsly

I guess I don't understand what the problem is. I standardize the gain on all my MP3s to 89dB and it's all good.

Clarity and space, and lack of, is the problem.

It's not just about having a consistent listening volume. The problem is that when a track gets brickwalled, the dynamic range is lost. No volume adjustment can bring it back.

Watch the YouTube video I linked earlier. It explains excellently.

Wait, no, we don't have to get into a loudness debate again -- my point actually was about consistent listening volume. Even if I had a player that let me set different gain settings for different tracks/files, I would still not really want to have to spend a lot of time fussing with that -- and more importantly, this issue is like NOT AT ALL in the heads of the vast majority of music listeners. So if you remaster something to current loudness levels, most people will think "nice, that sounds good, I can really hear it" as opposed to thinking "wait, I should find that menu where I can do gain adjustment on an old master" (which, incidentally, depending on how your software's set up, may actually wind up creating worse sonic problems than the pro limiter volume boost would).

Anyway, the central thing I was getting at was that remastering only seems valuable to people when there are aesthetic differences between today's masters and yesterday's, and right now loudness is chief among those aesthetic differences. Even mid-90s discs tend to sound fairly plush, soft, and pillowy now -- more so than they seemed in their own context -- and I can understand how if you're too stuck in today's ears they might seem somewhat meek and backgroundy: with a remaster, the volume bump alone is a big change in terms of giving something a modern-day kick. (In this sense the remaster isn't even looking to "improve" the product so much as just dress it up in today's clothes so that it fits in -- and loudness is one area in which the clothes of a lot of 90s masters is, for better or worse, no longer really in style.

haha cf colorizing movies

one thing that i think has been overlooked so far is the technological advancements since the early-1990's allow for much higher bitrate sampling. This is the reason, when it is done with respect, that there is improved separation from original issues. check out Miles Davis - Kind of Blue for one example. almost every original issue i recall owning had a "flat"/"two dimensional" thing going on that has been rectified. prime example: the Rolling Stones abcko series. but i could list countless others

Gains in bit-depth/sampling rate vs the extra 10 years of deterioration to the master tape in the interim.

nabisco -- It's true that an average listener today may very well enjoy modern brickwall-limited masterings, but it's not because that sound is "in style" in any decisive sense. It's because listening standards have dropped dramatically. In the early days of CD mastering, people listened to music on their stereo systems. Young people don't own stereo systems anymore. The standard listening situation circa 2007 is an iPod being played over an enormous amount of background noise, from traffic or the subway or whatever, and a squashed mastering won't have any quiet parts that could sink into that noise floor so it's perceived as sounding "clearer" and "punchier" when it is actually the polar opposite of both. And most people can't play that same squashed music on their home rig and hear how smeared-together everything really sounds, since the average "home rig" circa 2007 is a $50 3-piece multimedia "speaker system" consisting of 2 Dixie cups and a water dispenser jug, that can't reveal anything. So it's not that young people actively prefer bad sound. It's that they've never heard good sound, or at least not in many years. There's no frame of reference, so you have people who claim to "love music" but have no idea what it feels like to be immersed in a great music recording.

I'm glad there's at least a little subculture out there that sees these problems for what they are and has a desire to rectify and/or avoid them, and help others do so, however possible.

outdoor miner -- The newest Kind Of Blue disc is not just a remaster but a remix of the original 3-track tapes from the recording session. That, and not the data rate, is likely the big reason why it sounds so much more discrete. And in the case of the Stones, those albums weren't remixed but the biggest improvement of the new CD's is most likely that the Abcko team did their research and sought out superior source tapes than whatever was used previously.

I'm not saying improvement in A-D conversion doesn't play a role. It plays a big one. But it's not really fair to cite gear improvements as the one big reason for improved sound unless all other variables are perfectly equal, and that is almost never true. The people standing behind the gear, so to speak, are the most important link.