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
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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