What does it mean to remaster an album?
In: Technology
When a song is recorded, it isn’t typically recorded as a full band into a single microphone straight into a recorder, but as individual instruments, each with separate microphones, are recorded independently – sometimes with the band playing together, sometimes recorded in a studio one musician at a time, and sometimes even having different takes recorded in completly different studios at different times.
This means that a recorded song can be made up of numerous separate tracks, all recorded at different times on different equipment. These separate tracks need mixed together and mastered to turn them into a final recording – so the best tracks (or parts of tracks) are selected, volumes and EQ are set so that they all sound good played together and everything balances (which can vary over the course of a track), effects can be added like reverbs and various signal processing systems utilised to improve audio quality, and the final track is mastered to ensure it is suitable recorded into various different mediums and played back on different systems – so that the file is the correct volume and format to be made into a cd, when pressed as a record, or released as an MP3.
Obviously technology and opinions have changed over time, so modern mixing and mastering allows the audio engineers far greater control nowadays than they did when everything was performed using tape decks and and analogue mixing desk.
When an album is remastered, this is generally done by taking the original audio tracks (normally stored safely by a band or record company), then redoing the modern mixing and mastering process in an attempt to improve the audio quality and sound of an album.
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