When old music tracks are remastered, what is actually happening? How do they make the new version sound better than the version from 1976?
In: Technology
They find the original tapes that are directly recorded from the microphones. These are very good quality, they then mix it using modern techniques.
Old songs are often hard panned stereo, drum in one ear, vocals in another. This is not seen as favourable nowadays so they’ll make it more centred.
They can increase the presence of different instruments in the mix if it originally was too quiet.
Sometimes a new copy is made from an earlier generation tape. When audio tapes are copied for replication, the signal loses some fidelity with every transfer. The original master is kept in a vault and records are made from copies of it.
The sound engineer applies equalization which boosts or cuts part of the spectrum making the overall character of the sound brighter or warmer, and may bring forward certain instruments. Sometimes perceived deficiencies in the mixing equipment are corrected, such as too much bass because the speakers used at the time didn’t have enough. The adjustments are subjective and a record may receive this treatment multiple times for different tastes.
A previous master may contain errors such as an early abrupt ending or reversed channels, which can be corrected.
Often the average loudness is increased to make the recording work better on low power consumer equipment, which can’t reproduce a wide range of volume levels. With another master this might not be done, and then the recording can be enjoyed better on big speakers.
The publisher may find additional tracks that didn’t make it to the original album for whatever reason, and tack them onto the end for added value.
in the vast majority of cases: ruin the historically accurate sound to make it loud enough next to kanye. remasters are almost entirely about turning up the bass and making the track louder.
Analog vs digital recording is the biggest thing. Think of photos: a photo taken on a digital camera is made up of a bunch of individual pixels, each of which is a color. If you make the image too large, each of those pixels will be visible and the image will be blocky and blurry. A photo taken on film doesn’t have this issue, as the “natural” resolution of even cheap film is very high quality. If you convert that film to digital you lose that resolution; think about a photo your mom scanned into her computer vs the actual printed photo and how much cleaner the original is. But digital technology has gotten better, so if you scammed that original photo today it would look closer to the original picture, and in a couple years you might be able to get it indistinguishable from the original
Music is the same way. A lot of old stuff was recorded on physical media and converted to digital. Digital back then wasn’t very good, which led to grainy picture scans and ok music copies. Now that our technology is better, we can re-convert those original physical tapes into modern digital recordings with much higher audio resolution.
You can also adjust levels and how sounds come across; drums, guitar, and vocals might have been recorded on 3 different tapes so if you want to make the vocals louder or the drums less apparent you can make adjustments when you mix those tapes together into a single digital file
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