musbyte said:
In my own opinion? Remastered is just turning into a marketing ploy at the hands of the major record labels. The word itself gets people out buying the discs. And from an engineering standpoint, many remastered discs are just "dumbed down" versions of better sounding CD issues. Dumbed down? Sure. Add a ton compression to the sound, boost that bass and treble...oh, and kill that nasty barely-audible tape hiss while you're at it. This will make it all sound great, and nice and loud, on boom boxes, iPods and $20 Delco radios. The Target and Best Buy customer thanks you, Mr. Record Label Engineer.
While in the meantime, those of us who care about the sound are buying something that sounds overly processed. It's like the old radio volume wars all over again, except the victim this time is the CD, and the unlucky customers who buy them.Don't get me wrong, though: there are still a lot of good sounding remasters out there, but it is all highly dependent on which engineer does them, at which label. The label matters because some of them are the ones who demand that the engineers "smash" the sound. The two most recent Beatles releases are horrible--"1" (the compilation) is known to be quite "smashed", and "Let It Be--Naked" suffers from noise reduction as well. That's why I like the idea of Herb Alpert going independent on his remastering projects: they can get us something that sounds as close to the masters as we can get in our homes with current technology.
And that's all the more reason I'd prefer hybrid SACDs for these releases--they'll play on all CD players, and yet give those of us with better equipment the ability to hear the music in a purer sense. If this is going to be a once-in-a-lifetime project, why not preserve all the hard work in a better format?
Abkco has done a great job with the Stones reissues, being "silent hybrids", and they don't charge any extra for it. (I'd heard that they never bothered to remaster the London catalog up until SACD came along, since they felt they really couldn't better what was out there.)I'm not as sold on remixes. If they just try to recreate the original balances, then a remix isn't that big of a deal; at best, you're only getting rid of one generation of tape. (And this may be the case with the A&M two-track masters.) But when you get someone who has to change things around, it turns into revisionism, a la George Lucas (or even Richard Carpenter, for that matter).
I can think of one example that sits on the fence: the Led Zeppelin 4-CD box set. Jimmy Page helped remix the entire Led Zep catalog, and while I don't really notice a difference, some who are very familiar with the recordings say the guitar is slightly more forward in the mix. Does it bother me, knowing these aren't the original mixes? Not really! I don't even really notice a difference on most songs. Does it sound better? Sort of. The original recordings weren't the greatest to begin with, so I figure what I have in this box set (and the "add-on" 2 CD set) is abotu as good as it's going to get. The fact that I'm on my second copy of the box set says something, too.
. I just hope that the Herb Alpert & The TB reissues won't be released in that type of sleeve. I hope the rarities disc will be available by itself and not only available in a box set. Hmmm...what could the rarities disc be called? More Delights? 
