What does it mean when an album or song is “remastered”?
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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.
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