Richard Hawley

Whilst I can understand what's meant by the master, in recording terms, I've never been sure what's done when something is remastered. And what're the reasons for doing this, and do you lose something of the original sound?

_________________
The heartbeat doesn't change, only the faces surrounding it.

This is the original Master!

_________________
http://www.reverbnation.com/davesleney

I'm too lazy to find a pic of John Simm in DW. But i suppose he would be the remaster? Sorry Lofty, we're trivialising a perfectly good question.

_________________
There's something in the distance
a glorious existence

_________________
The heartbeat doesn't change, only the faces surrounding it.

Answering at Hawley's behest....

Remastering is when you take a master and make it into another master!

This might mean you EQ it again or compress it a bit, or it might mean you just do as good a transfer as you're capable of doing from one format to another while doing nothing at all in terms of changing the sound.

Some old masters suck (as do many new ones). Sometimes stuff got done at the cutting stage but never ended up on another tape - and where copy tapes were done, back in the bad old analogue days that meant going another generation down. These tapes are generally a bit lacking in top on the whole so some sympathetic EQ can be a good thing when it comes to reissue. In some cases you go back to mix tapes and go again from scratch, cutting out the original mastering process altogether. This can lead to a far more accurate version of what's on the mixes than was previously on offer - depends what floats your boat.

I guess the phrase "the original sound" is a conversation in itself: the original sound of the instrument, or what it sounded like coming off the mic, or off the multitrack, or the final mix, or the master, or the vinyl, or the CD? I'm just listening through to the new album (worth the wait, in my humble opinion) and we've been working at 24 bit resolution but you'll only get to hear it at 16 bit on a CD (and don't even start the vinyl chat with me...) so really the CD or the vinyl that you end up listening to is at best only a vague representation of the working version in the editor at the mastering studio. So, what you call "original sound" may well be several generations away from what I'd call it - and in most cases they're not good generations!

Are you still awake at the back? Oh OK. Night then.

Hi Duncan, Wow! Many thanks for the comprehensive answer. I guess from my 'customer' standpoint 'remastered' always sounded like ''Hello, they've mucked about with it'' But obviously not! So, thanks for removing the mystery. Looking forward to the new album even more now

_________________
The heartbeat doesn't change, only the faces surrounding it.

I guess that means there really is no such thing as a "master recording", then? When you get right down to it, the artist can say at any point "No--this is what I REALLY meant!" and change it, and that's fair.

Thank you, Duncan; I love techy stuff!

_________________
"I've been accused of vulgarity. I say that's bullshit."--Mel Brooks.

theres a great story that has done the rounds for years about Mark E Smith demanding that The Fall album Bend Sinister be mastered from the cassette that had been in his walkman for the previous couple of weeks or so, cos he preferred the 'sound' of that to the polished sound of the one in the mastering studio.


just found this...
When we were mastering Bend Sinister and the guy had just cut the acetate, Mark was stomping around saying 'That's not the mixes we had in the studio,' but he'd been listening to a chrome Dolby cassette he'd taken away and played on this little Walkman through a speaker that was distorting, and that was his reference. In the end, a lot of that album was cut from a cassette because that's the quality that Mark wanted. He was actually right, though, because that's their sound. With The Fall, the weirder stuff is what I'm most proud of rather than the attempts at singles because that's not really them.

Producer John Leckie, Melody Maker June 1995

Duncan what time zone are you in posting later than Lofty Eric?

Keep talking [posting] and that includes you CB and anybody else who has something to say this is the start of the best thread ever...

How about a vinyl chat?

When will 24 bit resolution appear?

Shit - I just killed it...