Does Digitally remastered cds sound that much better than the original? After browsing through the local record store I noticed a lot of older albums now come Digitally Remastered. I notced a lot of Madonna's early cd's now come digitally remastered, the same with Van Halen, Led Zeppelin. Those are the only ones I can think of. So is it worth buying a brand new copy of your old cd just to get the new Digitally remastered version??? I can understand the need for super old albums like Beach Boys and Led Zeppelin albums, but early 90's Van Halen and Madonna albums?? The 90's wasn't that long ago. Has technology changed that much where they can get the albums sound quality to sound A LOT better??

I want to know what you're doing in the Madonna Section!

Ha!

A guy's gotta Vogue when a guy's gotta Vogue.

I don't think digital mastering was used widely until the early-to-mid '90s. Even some of my late 80s and early 90s Rush stuff is under the "Rush Remasters", including Counterparts, which was released in 1993.

Nah, better to "Express yourself"!

(damn fine tune, BTW)

Well....after all "Madonna" does come right before "Metallica".....RIGHT Justin?

Heck, get the mashup and be done with it! Modactalla!



IMHO, remastering can significantly improve the sound quality of a lot of albums recently released.

Clipping and aggressive compression and limiting really makes for some sad tracks.

There are hearable differences between 16 bit CD's and 20 bit, 24 bit CD's. The earliest of the 16 bit CD's often lacked normalizing as well. "Remastered" is another phrase abused by marketing. It all comes down to what the source of the remaster is. If original analog tapes are resampled at 24 bit resolution, the resulting CD will be a lot better than the original 16 bit CD. If the remaster is just upconverting 16 to 24 bit, it won't make as much of a difference. Not only all of the preceeding, but too much processing (over-engineering) can ruin anything.

I think buying newly remastered CDs can be risky. The loudness wars that have been fought on radio for years have now come to CDs. Some newer reissues are so heavily processed that they're painful to listen to. Sure, we have better a-to-d converters nowadays and we can do the digital transfer at 24 bit, but what good is all that when the mastering engineer is ordered to jack the levels up to the moon through a hard limiter? In that case it's better to hang on to an older CD.

So how do you know which reissues are worth buying and which ones should be avoided? I've found good information on remasters on the forum at www.stevehoffman.tv.

Thanks scott and Andy, thats good info!
By the way I was looking for "erotica" By Madonna. They only had the clean version. Damnit, I wanted the dirty version. Can't a guy like Madonna??

No.

And there it is, nice and simple!

Can a guy pretend to not like Madonna then?

That does it!

We're all going to meet somewhere that has karaoke, a jukebox or a DJ with an extensive Madonna selection.

You guys are scaring me...first, it's the Lifetime Channel, now this.

No Madonna karaoke for me!

I'll easily do Billy Joel tho :P

Whoa. Don't go changin'...

I only do ABBA. After many libations. Bring earplugs.


"I could NEVER, EVER get up there and do that"

(Several stiff cocktails later)

"Lemme shee zat book..."

I'll bet you Fatboy owns a Madonna Cd, whether he will admit it or not is the question. Allright im going to bed. I've done enough vouge-ing to last a lifetime. I feel that it is time to Express myself, and "Cherish" the memories I have.
Hey Merkin remember "YOU CAN DANCE WITH INSPIRATION....C'MON......IM WAITING!

I wanna see Timberfake do "Like a Virgin" like that dude on American Idol did! LOL

Merkin can do Alannah Myles "Black Velvet" after drinking a bunch! LOL

I was hoping to see Mrs Merkin vamp her way through "Man, I Feel Like A Woman."

Id like to see Merkin Do "Physical" By Olivia Newton John.

Let me hear your body talk!

I'm gonna do a big mash-up of Alanna Miles/Shania/ONJ/Madonna/James Brown. It will be perfect...

...Perfectly awful, that is.

Good God Y'all!

...and we never finished that "Venus" razor discussion either!

I'm gonna do a big mash-up of Alanna Miles/Shania/ONJ/Madonna/James Brown.

Everybody sing! "Like A Physical Virgin, Man, I Feel Good Like A Woman in Black Velvet..."

Years ago, CDs were labelled "AAD," "ADD," or "DDD."

- The first letter in the code represented what recording technology was used to record the session.

- The second letter represented what recording technology was used in mixing/production.

- The third letter represented the CD master recording. This was always a "D"

After seeing these codes, it clicked in my head that "digitally remastered," at least when referring to recordings originally captured and produced on analog tape, is just marketing BS. A digital master recording is needed to make the CD, so the "remastering" is a necessary step of the process, not an enhancement (as the marketers hope that you would think). Actually, the CD "master" in this context is a sub-master; the real master recording is the old analog tape.

Mostly true but not exclusively. DDD masters have been around since Bop Till You Drop in 1978. These digital masters can be upconverted to higher resolution and software can try and interpolate existing data to provide additional info (the same thing is done in video), but the difference in these remastered from digital originals is not that great (first gen digital being quite respectable even at 16 bit) and the difference in resampling an analog master at higher res is quite significant.

Besides over compression, there is another "feature" that can ruin a reissue and that is digital noise reduction. Improperly used it can suck the "air" right out of a recording, in extreme cases making it sound like it was recorded in the vacuum of outer space with a blanket over the microphone. Not unlike the sound of marginal bitrate MP3 encoding. But, by God, it ain't noisy no more!!

I have actually witnessed this (mis)use of digital noise reduction. Some years ago, I was volunteering to help mix and record some live musical performances. The person organizing this then ran the "click & pop" reduction algorithm that was available in the audio editing software being used. This person was pleasantly surprised at the stats on how many "clicks" and "pops" the software had taken out. However, when we listened to the processed recording, my first reaction was something like, "This sounds really dry. It's as if this noise reduction actually cuts down most of the reverb."

But hey, it will make for a GREAT mp3!

You get that nice clean sound at a much lower bitrate!

bada boom!

Anybody heard any of those (horrible) rock and roll CDs on the Madacy label?

I rarely buy Madacy recordings anymore and the few that I have bought, with a couple exceptions, have all ended up in the Goodwill pile if they haven't ended up in the dustbin.

Aside from hiring the original groups to do re-makes of the original songs (as far as I am concerned, this is probably THE major Deadly Sin Anybody In Recording Can Commit) and market them as original (deception) they tend to pump the compression and volume up so high the CDs are practically unlistenable.

Now, with Madacy Classical recordings on the other hand, it's a whole different story altogether........I have come across many classical pieces on Madacy that are not only completely listenable ("Classics For Dining" comes to mind) but they trump the quality of their rock and roll CDs in practically every way.

But back to rock and roll:
Madacy released a three-CD pack of quote-unquote "60's Oldies" which probably contained maybe four songs total which were actually recorded in the 60s. (The rest was all remakes.) It included a cut of BJ Thomas' "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" which was so distorted it almost sounded like whomever was the engineer must have either been drunk, or he must have been the kid from the local high school on his internship!

All in all, it seemed right on par (if not sightly better than) a mediocre bootleg-compilation 8-track like some people used to sell in the 70s. (Wonder if M's not a bootleg CD label? Maybe doing the same as the 8 tracks then?)

They also released a two-CD set "The Very Best Of Love" by Andy Williams. Needless to say, although most in that package weren't really distorted another problem arose--apparent MPEG (or WMA) compression artefacts. It actually sounded like I was listening to *very* low-bitrate MPEG3 audio files! Not only were those nice "jingling" and "slurring" effects present but also playing through a Dolby Prologic system, we only could hear odd chirping noises out of the rear speakers.

Ergo, seems to me like Madacy recordings could be easy candidates for HD3-channel content!

(Also I am surprised nobody had brought this point up yet.....)

Motozak...Your description of the sound of the Andy Williams disc sounds like noise reduction artifacts.

I suckered for one of the Madacy oldies compilation CDs too. But just once. Live and learn!

The labels I have high confidence in are Rhino (especially if Bill Inglot is credited), Varese-Sarabande, Ace, Sundazed, and ERIC (except for the early volumes of the "Hard To Find 45s" series...way heavy on the noise reduction.) I've heard some jaw dropping stuff on some Ace CDs. Their source material is second to none, and their mastering seems very faithful to the original work. Collectables is hit or miss...all depends on who did the mastering.

Coulda very well been noise reduction. I have played around with noise reduction in my Nero Wave Editor programme with a few songs (off other major label CDs) and have achieved similar results. So that very well could have been the case.

Also, one thing I forgot to point out before: Madacy also acts as a distributor for a few outside companies, like Warner Bros. and Sony. I have a couple of compilation CDs of 80s and 90s hits that appear to be Madacy, but upon closer examination we also see the Warner Special Products and EMI stickers alongside the Madacy sticker. Most (if not all) of the time those are the Madacy comps that have the best sound quality.

But if it's just the Madacy label flying solo those are the ones to really avoid!

Incidentally, I have had the best luck with Rhino and Varese Sarabande as well. I have had OK luck with Collectables, but have come across quite a few duds on their label.

There was this one "60s Best Of" comp I got a while back on Collectibles label, don't have it any more and I forgot the specific title, but they processed the hell out of that one. Absolutely NO PEAKS when viewed in Nero Wave-Editor, in a WAV file generated by WinLAME and Digital Audio Extraction, and the (stereo) waves just looked like two long rectangular blocks. WHY do they do that? Are the engineers DEAF?

"WHY do they do that? Are the engineers DEAF?"

Time -- Quality -- Price

You have to pick two.
If you pick quick time and low price, guess what kind
of quality you get?

It may be hard to believe, but many of these discs are not made from master tapes. If you start with second and third generation analog material, plus rush the job, it's no surprise we hear a lot of crap. Then again, many of the buyers of these discs do not have quality playback systems.

Sundazed seems to put out good remastered stuff. I know the two Spencer Davis Group CD's I got from them sound far better than remasters of their material out on other labels. Whether they got a hold of better original tapes or spent the time to do quality work is something I'm curious about, but don't really know the answer to. Probably some of both.

Also, since DAW's have become so affordable, there are a lot of people doing this kind of work that probably shouldn't be. There is nothing to prevent them from taking a perfectly good original 16 bit digital master and totally screwing it up just so they can market it as "24 bit digitally remastered."

Buyer beware.

Motozak & Scott,

Have you guys heard any of the Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab "Ultra Disk" CD's?

http://www.mofi.com/

I've only got two; Dark Side of the Moon and Rod Stewart's Every Picture Tells a Story.

The audio quality is awesome. You'll hear things on there that you've never heard before.

They are getting hard to find in record stores, and they're not cheap. I think they are around $26, but if you find one and it's an album you like or want you should try one.

I have heard of them.....haven't *heard* them, but heard *of* them...........

I should inquire at Border's, 'specially regarding Dark Side of the Moon.

Me too...only read about the MoFi discs. Never actually heard one.

The Mobile Fidelity copy of Dark Side of the Moon is fantastic. The heartbeat at the very beginning will rattle windows! I highly recommend it!