What does it mean when an album or song is “remastered”?
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Imagine taking multiple pieces of different colored string and braiding them together.
If you do this with pieces of recorded sound, this is called “mixing”, and it’s how you can have different instruments or voices playing and singing together, even if they were recorded at different times.
Then, imagine that you took that rope of braided string and dipped it all in glitter so every piece all shined in the same way, even though you could still see the different colors coming through. If you do this with recorded pieces of sound mixed together, this is called “mastering.”
later on, if you found some better glitter, you could strip all the old glitter off, and dip the old braided rope of strings into your better glitter. When people take a recording that’s been mastered, remove the old mastering and master the original mixed pieces of recorded sounds with better-sounding tools, this is called “remastering.”
Remastered version is a mixed and mastered of a song track using a modern style technique of mixing and mastering. Basically, a remastered song track is just a better sounding version than the old song track version. It’s more loud and clear than the original version of the song track. You can even hear every notes played by every instruments and vocals in the remastered version of the song track.
There are so many misinformation on this thread. Mixing and mastering aren’t really easy to explain to anyone who doesn’t do music production and audio engineering. They’re very complicated process and also the last step you have to do before distributing your song/music to music distributors.
Mastering is the process of making a song loud and making it sound good. Modern mastering equipment sounds a lot better and can even repair artifacts from old recordings (like tape warble.) A remastered song is edited with modern equipment to sound better.
With the definition of “Mastering” having been changed forever over the last decade, it could mean a lot of things. It could be that the master stereo file was sent through some equalization, or not, and set to a specific level that is used for whatever form of broadcast that it’s headed for. It could be as simple as some shelving or filtering with subtle compression. It could mean that the song was remixed, with each stem (guitar, bass, drums, skin flute) has been mixed again as a totally new presentation of the original recordings. There could be new performances, there could be new settings for effects on original performances. The possibilities are endless, and no two remasters are the same.
I was going to ask this same ELI5 yesterday! And then I found [this](https://youtu.be/MtdyUhfK7EE) video, which does not ELI 5 in a textable way, but instead has an unmixed/mixed/mastered track altogether (side by side in the video). Very cool, and although I am still befuddled as to how one *does* a mastering or remastering, I get what they mean at their essence now.
Mastering is the process of taking the final mix of the recording, and creating the actual physical copy *all* other copies of the recording will be produced from. There’s a bunch of work that goes into it from simple things like determining the length of silence between tracks and making sure volume levels are consistent, to more complicated wizardy for making the audio sound best on the intended equipment.
What’s done in that process isn’t very important for ELI5 purposes, just that the outcome is the very final version, and everything after that is either a copy of it, or a copy of a copy, or a copy of a copy of a copy or so on.
Historically, the master was done on magnetic tape, and there’s always been physical limitations of the format, and often studios were slow to adopt new technology for that process. So even in the best case, the quality of that master might be a be shaky. It’s also possible the master has been degraded or lost, so all ‘current’ releases are a copy of an archived release 8 track or something, and so you’re listening to a copy of a copy of a copy of a …… which means lower quality. This was particular an issue after CDs came out since they’re far higher quality reproduction and the degradation from many generations of copying can be noticeable.
However studios try not to throw anything out, and even if the master has degraded, it’s entirely possible the final mix, or a copy made before the final master, or in worst case a low generation copy can be found. An example of the last would be a copy of the master sent over seas to be used for production there.
If so, it’s entirely possible to sit down, digitize that, and make a new master copy. You remaster the song. Ideally this means the remastered version will have far better audio quality since it sourced from something close to the original recording and gets to benefit from all the advances in tech. Unfortunately sometimes the mastering engineer can do things that entirely change the character of the recording; many things done today aren’t necessarily better but a change in style or norms (Look up the loudness war).
Of course some times this is just a shitty cash grab. Technically anything you decide to use is the ‘source’ copy and can be a master recording. There have been cases where the remaster is sourced from one of those copies of a copy of a copy of a copy….etc so there’s no real improvement in audio quality. You can do things to clean that up a little, but if you just want to make a buck, they might do something like slap some noise reduction on it, EQ it a little to up the bass, and crank up the volume. This often wrecks the finer details in the sound but people will often perceive something that’s louder with more bass as better in isolation so they’ll convince people to buy a new copy.
Finally you have the absolute lazy option for a remaster: Technically any port to a new medium creates a new master since that becomes the ‘source’ copy for that medium. Sometimes ‘remastered’ literally just means ‘we released it on CD’ and they slap remaster on there as an advertising bit.
“Mastering” is the process of making a finished album ready to be released on specific media. Originally most releases in history were mastered for vinyl records meaning the dynamics (difference between loudest and most quiet parts) and frequency range had to be limited to the dynamics and frequency range a record player can reproduce. (Both are a lot smaller than you might think- carving vinyl is *not* an ideal way to store audio.)
Later CD recordings which provide a wider frequency and dynamic range mostly replaced vinyl requiring different equalizing (frequency filtering) and compression. Many old vinyl recordings were remastered to better fit the new mediums limits. Some of these remasterings -widely depending on quality of original material as well as on effort, money and time put into the remastering process- were pretty good. Far more CD-remasterings, however, were just sent through a bunch of presets boosting the frequencies that were filtered for vinyl and compressing dynamics for maximal percieved loudness. Hence the bad reputation of CD-remastering and the legend of vinyl providing better audio quality or “wamth” than digital media.
Recording/Producing a song is like mining a diamond.
Mixing is like cutting a diamond.
Mastering is like polishing a diamond.
Lot of misinformation in this thread. Mastering, whether it’s the first time or a later REmastering, has nothing to do with mixing/remixing.
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