the ERGO Model 1..

I'm starting to think this too. I've never been an audiophile in my life, but now... I'm starting to wonder. Former podcast guest Greg Milner's Perfecting Sound Forever has been a turning point for me.

I've tried several options of headphones myself. On the strength of a word magazine review a while back, I bought a set of shure headphones of the inner ear variety. Extremely uncomfortable with no bottom end to speak of. £160 totally wasted.

Recently I've been using the Bose headphones that fit the ear in the same way that the IPOD standard phones do but give a much more rounded sound. £70 fairly well spent there.

That said I find that even the IPOD standard are ok as long as you are surrounded by total silence (in bed usually). As Patrick says, some of the best musical experiences may well come from a very low fi source. I think the ear/brain adapts to the sound source and makes its own adjustments when processing the sound.

I own the four studio albums and this remastered Best Of. I just put the volume up on the studio albums and they sound identical to the Best Of.

I have since made a more indepth Best Of playlist from the albums and now listen to that instead of Death To The Pixies.

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Pixies 1CD Best Of

From Come On Pilgrim

Caribou
Vamos (EP Version)
The Holiday Song
Nimrod's Son
Levitate Me

From Surfer Rosa

Bone Machine
Break My Body
Gigantic
River Euphrates
Where Is My Mind?
Cactus

From Doolittle

Debaser
Tame
Wave Of Mutilation
Here Comes Your Man
Monkey Gone To Heaven
Hey
Gouge Away

From Bossanova

Cecilia Ann
Velouria
Is She Weird
Dig For Fire

From Trompe Le Monde

Planet Of Sound
U-Mass
Letter To Memphis
Subbacultcha
Motorway To Roswell

From Complete B-Sides

Winterlong

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The following is some old stuff that I always like to cart out whenever someone mentions remastering (and Stimpy thinks I'm talking a right load of arse with this):

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Old CDs sound rubbish? Not really. 80's and early 90's CDs are just quiet. All you need to do is turn the volume up. Either manually by turning the volume nob or by using the iTunes volume enhancer*.

Neil Young has the quietest CDs ever released. They were mastered back in the 80's and they seem to sound like crap. Everyone carps on about how bad they are. I did the iTunes volume enhancer on the Harvest album etc and suddenly the songs sound EXACTLY THE SAME as the versions on the loudly remastered 2004 Best Of. The old versions had just as much punch, presence and vitality to them as the remasters. It was as if I was listening to a new remastered copy of Harvest.

That's on an iPod, so I wanted to test my CDs. I played a Joy Division song called "She's Lost Control" that I have on an old 80's album CD and on a recently remastered Best Of. At the same volume they sounded pretty much 99% identical. The 80's CD sounded a tiny bit muffled on the vocals and the drums had maybe 5% less whack to them. And those were the only differences I could tell by playing them back to back with each other. Without the direct comparison I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two. If both versions came up on shuffle on my iPod two tracks apart from each other then I wouldn't be able to pick out those differences.

When a song does come up on shuffle that I have on both 80's CD and 00's remastered form, I usually make a guess as to what versions I'm listening to. I then look and 50% of the time I guess wrong.

I repeated the above with "Life During Wartime" by Talking Heads. Vocals and drums sounded exactly the same on both versions.

Remastering is nice but it's not anywhere near as important as most people think it is. You would have to be a real proper audiophile to notice the differences during normal casual day to day playback. All you have to do is put the volume up.

Compare a song from the 80's CD to the 00's remaster. Can you hear a substantial difference?

*On iTunes highlight the album.

Right click and select Get Info.

Under the Options tab there is a volume changer bar.

Drag the volume marker to the desired point on the bar.

Click Okay.

From now on every time those songs play they will always play with that enhanced volume.

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There are two ways to remaster a CD. The usual way (as in 99.9% of the time) is to feed the final mix master tapes into the digitizing machine. The second, and much rarer, way is to remaster the various elements separately and then remix them to make a new master copy with a different mix.

The advantages of remixing are that the sound will be clearer. The possible downside is that as it's a new mix it might sound different to the previous version (such as setting 10 instead of the original setting of 6 being applied to the echo on the lead guitar etc). This can be good if you want to make changes to try and hide dated sounding drums or balance the vocals more naturally with the guitars etc. Obviously a complex song with hundreds of overdubs will be a bitch to remix. If it's a very famous song that people love they might dislike any differences they hear.

The new Beatles remasters are remixes, which is one of the reasons why it's taken about four years to be completed. So the sound quality should be clearer and better sounding. The possible draw back is that the songs might sound different to how you remember and love them.

I'm not saying remastering is bad. I like remastering. I'm just pointing out that it isn't going to make that big a difference to the sound quality in comparison to older CDs that you might be expecting. And if they go the expensive and time consuming direction of doing remixes, then you might not like the end results due to alterations that clash with how you remember a much loved song (Madonna's Immaculate Collection was remixed, or at least fed through the Q sound process, and not everyone likes the work done on that?).

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/weekly_article/imperfect-sound-fo...

http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/soulseeking/imperfect-sound-forev...

http://www.barrydiamentaudio.com/loudness.htm

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http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/staff_top_10/top-ten-worst-soundi...

"Massive Attack - Collected
This is oh-so-subtle, but it’s annoying. Take your CD of Mezzanine and take your CD of Collected, and play “Angel” back-to-back from one to the other. Notice how on the original album that ominous bass fades in from nothing; sense how deep it goes; see how sharp the rimshot is; feel the air around the bass drum and the shock of the guitars entering. But from this year’s beautifully-packaged Best Of, surreptitiously remastered, the bass is jarringly there from the get go, all width and no depth; the rimshot is flabby and indistinct; and there’s no sense of air or space. It’s like that for the rest of the CD."

I agree, the original album CD does sound better. On the remastered version the bass isn't as deep and the drumming doesn't have quite as much impact. Though you would have to be a person of remarkable hearing to tell the difference without doing a direct comparison with a description of what you're looking for. The point about the opening starting with silence is just that the original has five or so seconds of nothing before the music starts, while on the remastered version the song begins immediately.

Only an obsessive who isn't listening to the song, but only the sound on a technical level, would ever notice and be bothered with these tiny piddly differences. A bass note is a bass note, no matter how deep or shallow it goes.