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REMASTERING

Am I the only person who finds the remastered version of songs that I know well an irritation to the point where they are just not worth listening to?

 

Who decides that the original version needs improvement - is it the record company or who? If its and additional version that the record company puts out why does Spotify seemingly always choose the remastered version over the well-known original. With George Martin just dying  I decided to listen to some old Beatles tracks only to find that they were all remastered to the point where they sounded like a tribute band. Some of the tracks were actually flat. 

 

The whole point of putting something like Sgt Peppers on Spotify is that people want to be reminded of what it sounded like at the time. Does the remasterer think they can do a better job than Geo Martin?

50 Replies

Ha. Couldn't have said it better myself. -pb

It's a way to sell the same album over again

It’s more complicated than that. They are trying to bring the level of the
original master up to the volume level of modern music which is much
louder. If they would only retain the dynamics of the original they could
increase the volume without ruining the relative dynamics of the original.
They think it sounds better when it’s been remastered, but we don’t.

I believe it all has to do with copyrights. And let's not exclude money.
It's like saying let me rewrite the Bible. it's a gold masterpiece it was
written in a different time, when you alter it you change everything but
that's just my opinion.

I agree with all of you about the lost equilibrium in some remastered albums. On the others way around, it unveils impressing features for very of albums (78 rpm vinyls of the beginning of 1900). For instance the composer Pablo Martin Meliton Sarasate played in 1904 but his Gramophone are too difficult to hear even the melody is suspending our breath. The remastering brings to a new vision of his music but with a wonderful freedom and other interpretations are difficult to compare to the Composer’s playing. The thing to regret is the sound of the violon which is not a Stradivarius... If it is a full fake of the original music, it would be nice to know. If it is the real digital cleaning with respected volumes and tempo, it would be interesting to know how they did it.

Thanks for this Community for helping iur thoughts. Spotify would be. Elcome to explain things and let us know if they did other restaurations line that if it is a real one!

Can you ask the record labels to not include "remastered" in their metadata? It's ruining the charts on Spotify, Deezer, Tidal, Last.FM…

@ThomWim, I'd even let them put "We finally learned how to do quality remasters and not screw with the listeners" in every title if they actually cleaned up their act, started doing proper remasters and stopped adding bazillions of useless bonus tracks. There's a reason a given producer made the album sound a given way and selected those tracks and arranged them in that order.

Remastering is bad enough but also remixing get included as remastered so you can get 5 min. of waffle or more just to extend the length, it just gets to the point that you might just as well listen to other groups cover versions because they sound better.

Soooo true,

I hate it when your favourite songs sound dull, lifeless, boring.  They remove all dynamics & caracter.

 

So I stand up & search through my CD / LP collection, even if it takes me 15 minutes to find what I want.  I'ts still better than having a remastered version in 1 second.

So what's the point of having Spotify then?

you can actually listen to all the original masters of their albums on Spotify you just gotta google search them instead of searching for them in Spotify

for example:

TDSOTM original master: https://open.spotify.com/album/4LH4d3cOWNNsVw41Gqt2kv?si=9PmjLhE_TU-Cq6wE2hHC6Q

Wish you were here original master: https://open.spotify.com/album/0bCAjiUamIFqKJsekOYuRw?

The Wall original masters: https://open.spotify.com/album/5Dbax7G8SWrP9xyzkOvy2F?si=Ld206c84T8edLamdpsai-g

so sound an awful lot like the official masters so think it's a jackpot - you can't either find them on the group's discography page

 

How long will it be before the legal eagles of each record company kill
that! 😞

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