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..Sixty tracks on two CDs ..1959 to 2008....released 29 th november.
www.amazon.co.uk/Best-Rock-Roll-Pioneers/

Question. If a record is properly made in the first place, what can remastering achieve?

Iain Purdon wrote:Question. If a record is properly made in the first place, what can remastering achieve?

Simples . . . ££££s

Money,Money,Money !
Could be a song

I can only hope, one of the compilations will be bought by a new generation....


Cheers Rob

Iain Purdon wrote:Question. If a record is properly made in the first place, what can remastering achieve?

A more cold and clinical sound than the original analogue warmth of the recordings. I have been listening to the Cliff Richard & The Shadows catalogue lately and noticed that the digitally remastered tracks on the 1996 double CD "At The Movies 1959-1974" don't sound very good at all. If you listen closely, most tracks have a sort of digital 'phasing' sound to them, which in my opinion do not do the tracks justice. The remastering is much better on for instance the 1997 4 CD box "The Rock 'N' Roll Years 1958-1963" and the six digipaks from 1998: "Cliff", "Cliff Sings", "Me And My Shadows", "Listen To Cliff!", "21 Today" and "32 Minutes And 17 Seconds With Cliff Richard".

Iain Purdon wrote:Question. If a record is properly made in the first place, what can remastering achieve?

For most of the tracks the first digital mastering has been made in the 1980s from the analogue tapes at EMI, not necessarily from the original master tapes but from tapes made for various vinyl compilations.
Depending on the quality of these mastering processes, especially considering the aging process of those tapes, a remastering can make sense.
Also if the first mastering has been made from two or four track tapes the stereo balance was in a lot of cases quite different from the original first release. With a remastering an approach can be made to come as close to the original as possible.

Thus a remastering can make sense but the result not always does.

Ulrich