what’s actually meant when an album is re-released as “remastered”
In: Technology
Not a lot of the responses here have been simple so let me have a go at it.
When CD’s first came out there were a lot of poor mastering jobs performed mainly because it was new technology. Then started the ‘loudness wars’, where albums increasingly had their perceived loudness boosted at the expense of fidelity. Then the iPod brought in automatic levels based on human perception, which removed the ‘loudness’ from being an unfair advantage, and just meant that loud mixes were removing their fidelity for no good reason.
Now we’re finally in an age where masters are starting to actually be reasonable again, where there is skill and the desire to make a sound that lets the format sound as good as it can (ie balanced). So a lot of albums mastered during the early CD days or during the loudness wars are being redone, to correct basically the previous attempts being so poor.
Wikipedia has a page on the [loudness wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war) that makes for great further reading.
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