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