I could be like making this up in my head but it seems like from 2016 to maybe 2022 there was a wave of remasters for albums that came out as late as the late 2000s. What suddenly changed about recording or playback equipment that made those remasters necessary?
In: Technology
2005 was the peak in the loudness war. Regardless of the quality of a song it always sounds better the louder it is. So when you listen to songs on the radio or in the record store it sounds great at high volume. But when you have bought an album and get back home and listen to it after adjusting your volume it does not sound as great. And if you listen to two songs one after the other with the same settings the louder of the two sounds better.
So in the early 90s when digital recording became standard and CD were making its way into the market audio engineers started playing around with how to make their songs louder. There are physical limits to how loud you can make a recording. But if you reduce the dynamic range making the quiet parts as loud as the loud parts you can make the song louder on average. And this peaked in 2005 but songs were pretty loud with low dynamic range all the way from the 90s until the mid 2010s. With bands such as Nirvana and Daft Punk on either end of the loudness wars demonstrating how good songs with lots of dynamic range sounds. It also helped that streaming services started setting the volume based on the average volume of a song rather then the loudest part, which also improved dynamic range.
During the loudness wars a lot of earlier songs were remastered to comply with the new loud standard. And then after the loudness war all the songs that had been mastered in this way had to be remastered to introduce more dynamic range again.
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