what is the reason for REMASTERING old songs? Is that due to the newer and more advanced sound systems?
In: Technology
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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