Re-mastered! Again!
Posted by Johan on 8 January 2008 - 8:28pm.
Van Morrison's albums were re-mastered in 1998 as part of a re-issue of his back catalogue. So I was a bit surprised to read in this month's mag that they are all being re-issued again, freshly re-mastered.
As we're dealing with master tapes which are up to 40 years old, can there really be any benefit, a mere 10 years since the last time, to re-mastering them again?
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Oh good
Another opportunity for me to remind myself that I really should own It's Too Late To Stop Now.
Cynical viewpoint
Technically, the quality could be better because the technology for dealing with high-quality audio now is better than it was in 1998. Whether that counters the 9 years of analogue tape degradation (and I suspect the Van Morrison master tapes are probably kept in good conditions) is up to you.
More to the point, Van Morrison recently signed to Polydor who got the rights to his back catalogue so they are re-issuing it with extra tracks to get some income from it.
From a practical point of view, before buying any remaster or deluxe edition of something you already own I'd recommend having a listen to it and if you can't tell any difference then I shouldn't bother if I were you.
As someone,
I think it was David Hepworth, said on the podcast a while ago, listening to music seems to be something people do on the move these days. I doubt very much that anyone listening on an ipod could tell this re-master from the last one or indeed the first time they came out on CD.
Ooh, don't get me started
on iPod sound quality. My bricklike 1986-vintage-burgundy Sony Walkman with a C90 in it still sounds infinitely superior to my spanking-new multi-squiggabite iPod. (Yes, it still works. Sony products once lasted more than two years, believe it or not.) Even with a sample rate of 320 kps, even with earbuds as pricey as they are fiddly, MP3s on the move today sound far worse than music on the move did 20 years ago. (Could that be what they mean by "reverse engineering"?)
Not meaning to get you started but...
Well that's completely fine if you don't mind only listening to as much as you can carry in cassette form. :)
I don't mind having MP3s at 160kbps when I can carry ten days worth of music with me on rail journeys. If you don't like MP3s then you could try a different compression method such as AAC or Apple Lossless, or even rip your CDs as full WAV files which will give you everything that's on the CD but will require a lot more space on your iPod.
Seriously, I tried listening to some cassettes recently (stuff I'd taped off the radio and BBC Radio Collection material) and found the hiss and print-through to be quite off-putting. Oh, and my iPod is 6 this year and works just fine.
I can't say anything about music 20 years ago because I was 5 and probably enjoying anything that happened to be on the radio at the time.
The biggest problem with cassettes
was dropout (well, dropout and your mum picking them up off the floor and stacking them in a neat pile on top of one your packing-crate-sized Goodmans, i.e. only inches away from the source of a Greater Manchester-sized magnetic field).
I'm not talking about the relative convenience of Walkmans vs. iPods - of course iPods are more convenient. But what does that have to do with them sounding so crap? Even with the EQ presets disabled their midrange is a desolate wasteland, resulting in sound that's more aggressively coloured than an explosion in a Dulux factory.
Higher bit rates...
..better sampling rates, much better analogue/digital converting, mean that yes, newer re-issue CDs sound significantly better than old ones. Does it make me buy it again? Fuck no.
I'm off...
...to the second hand record shop to find the original albums on vinyl. "You've got forty minutes Van, make it count, and make it sound good. Porky, you're up next".