eli5 why do some songs say “Remastered”?
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When song is recorded in a studio the recording engineer/producer records the instruments separately (and the singing too if there is any).
Nowadays it’s done on computer but before that it was done on magnetic tape.
Each instrument/voice is recorded on it’s own audio file/tape called a track. So if it’s a 4 piece rock band for example, that might be one track for drums, one for guitar, one for bass, one for vocals etc.
When you have all your instruments and voices recorded you want them to play altogether. This is called mixing. So if the drums are too loud in comparison to the guitars you can turn the guitars up or turn the drums down, or both. If the bass guitar isn’t sounding bassy enough you can turn up the lower frequencies, adding more low end, or bass to the sound.
When all this is done you combine all the tracks that you mixed together in to something called the master recording. This is the recording of the song that gets copied and released on vinyl, cassette, CD, digital etc.
Remastering is when an audio engineer goes back to the original recording of a song, takes all of the separate tracks and mixes them again to create a new master of the song.
This is done for a variety or reasons. Maybe the original master has been lost or damaged. Maybe the original master wasn’t that good, or doesn’t sound as good on newer formats. Maybe there is new technology to improve the sound of the original recordings, like cleaning up noises or imperfections on the tape e.g hiss.
Anyway that’s a very simplified explanation of what “remastered” means. There is a lot more to it but it’s a bit technical and has to do with waveforms, compression, signals, differences between analog and digital etc., stuff I don’t really understand.
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