What does it mean when an album or song is “remastered”?
In: Other
Sound engineer and it doesn’t seem like any answer so far is a true ELI5 so here’s my take:
Mixing a song is making sure all the instruments in that song blend together perfectly. Say you have 8 instruments, you’re mixing them together like ingredients to make a cake batter.
You then send that cake batter to a person who has a really expensive oven and a baker who knows how to use that oven to turn that batter in to the best cake possible.
As time goes on, better and better ovens and better and better bakers who know how to use these fancy ovens pop up due to technology, and better understanding of how the technology works. So though we still have the original recipe for the batter, you can stand to make a remastered version of the cake to sell to people.
Typically the mastering engineer doesn’t have the individual ingredients to the cake batter, just the already mixed batter to work with. But they have some super fancy equipment, tons of experience, and an excellent ear/palette to know how to turn that batter in to a better cake than the original.
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