what is the reason for REMASTERING old songs? Is that due to the newer and more advanced sound systems?
In: Technology
The main reason its done is to attempt to re-sell it again. Basically, to try to make more money by re-releasing a new and improved version of the song. Its generally a monetary reason this is done, not a creative one. Remastering and re-issuing albums can result into some pretty serious money, especially for bigger, more well known artists.
From my experience, it never makes it any better. It’s probably just a way to earn another buck from them.
As well as all the post with the newer tech, there’s also the fact that some bands earlier albums were recorded on crap equipment due to lack of funds as a small band.
Now they have the funds to afford decent equipment they can remaster it to sound more how it was meant to sound.
I answered a question just like this one previously so I’ll re-use (and add onto) my other answer:
There’s been some advancement in DSP – digital signal processing – technology, which means we can do a better job of removing unwanted hisses, crackles, and background noise from a song’s original premaster record than we could a few years back, as well as undoing, or modifying, some of the waveform distortions which were inherent to the recording tools of the old days. Of course, some of those distortions are considered desirable, and ‘part of the sound’, so some of this comes down to aesthetic decisions, rather than objective measures of quality or fidelity.
Mastering also includes dynamic range compression and limiting, which changes the volume of the loud parts of the song relative to the quiet parts, and remasters will often revisit those decisions too. In these cases it’s less that we have new technical capabilities, and more that we have new aesthetic preferences. Songs which were recorded prior to the “loudness war,” often sound kinda thin and wimpy when played back at equal volume next to newer music, so radio stations would have to turn the volume on them way up to compensate, which might mean the peaks on an old song end up clipping or triggering their system’s limiter, which can sound pretty bad. Remastering old songs with ‘modern-sounding’ loudness levels makes it easier to include them in broadcast programming etc. while sounding good next to the newer stuff.
But there’s a new development! In just the past few years, many streaming platforms have standardized on playing songs back at a “LUFS normalized” volume, which largely removes the advantages of the highly compressed masters of the loudness war. Songs which are mastered super loud, the streaming platform automatically turns them down to compensate. Songs which were mastered to be as loud as possible 10 or 15 years ago now sound kinda quiet and muffled compared to stuff with gentler compression settings.
This means that a lot of publishers have now decided to re-re-release some of that old material, but with less compression and a wider dynamic range with louder, peakier peaks and a quieter overall profile – because Spotify will turn it *up* to compensate.
Also, of course, anytime they can re-sell the same material to the same customer base for more money, they’ll take the opportunity. 😉
What has been already said, but exactly the reason why you think it woukd happen. Older songs that are extremely popular compared to ones that arent will get more album and singles sales. With the new advancements, of course the music industry is going to make a remastered version, so it can sound better or at least more crisp and clear to generations that aren’t used to the old sound.
The incentive is of course money, but you don’t see just anyone remastering songs. Now that we have the technology to do it, of course it is going to be done. People will listen to a clearer sounding track or pay for a service or buy the song for it to add to songs that are newer. If the track was kept the same, then people might not listen to it as much as a newer song.
TLDR making use of new technology as well as trying to keep the business going
While it might be to make them sound better, a remastered song has its copyright renewed. It is treated as a new song. So older music is remastered to maintain the copyright and allow the owner to continue making money from it.
Gonna give a alternative answer. Firstly it’s that most original masters for music before the iTunes era, probably even well into the early 2000’s were not mastered for streaming or digital compression.
The super over simplified version of “lossy” audio compression technologies, like MP3, is that what it does is it converts the sound wave into a long string of numbers, and ‘throws away’ the numbers which human hearing is less likley to process. Video Codecs do the same thing. That means less numbers, which means smaller file sizes.
Now audio compression is rarely perfect, and like any sort of technology it has biases, it can distort or alter the quality of the sound (incidentally the appeal of a lot of vintage analog technologies is these biases and distortions are considered more pleasing than a accurate, high fidelity sound signal). And a lot of songs were released and thus mastered before MP3 players became popular may not sound as good when compressed.
Enter Remastering, which literally just means to make another ‘master’ copy that everything is copied from. Without changing the actual mixing of the tracks and the bounces, various filters and manipulations can be done to a song which will counter-act or even theoretically with the biases of audio compression. Every format requires a different master – the frequency spectrum for a Vinyl is very different to that for a CD to that for a cassette tape.
Now, there’s a totally unrelated process, confusingly also called “Compression”, this basically makes the quiet parts louder but keeps the loud parts loud, so everything is loud. Over the last ~40 years Masters have been progressively getting louder and louder, which means that the ‘dynamic range’ or difference between loud and soft is lost, and not sounding so good on your expensive stereo system. But you know where it does sound good? When you’re on the train, or walking a busy street in a bustling city, at a worksite – somewhere there is a lot of background noise. If you’re in a loud environment and not in your home, you’re probably listening to a MP3 or streaming on Spotify, which requires a different master to the original CD master 30 years ago.
TL;DR – MP3s require a different frequency spectrum to CDs which require a different frequency spectrum to Vinyls. Most people listen to music through MP3 or streaming nowadays, in loud environments, which requires different Mastering techniques.
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