– how is music “remastered”

Question

How can an audio engineer take a thirty-forty year old song that was recorded on analog tape? How is the data extracted and processed?

In: 42

Answer 1

They’re taking the original recordings and “remastering” them – that is, they recreate the same song from the same recordings using new technology. Since there is always some loss involved in processing, and since the new technology has fewer losses, this results in fewer losses in the product.

Part of the answer is that the original recordings are available, not only the product. This is also why it would be quite hard to do that using only the old final product.