Re: Can remastered CDs sound too different and modernized?
Reply #7 –
I would be very wary of making blanket statements about remasters. There are some very good and some very poor original recordings, there are some very good and some very poor remasters.
There are people who specialise in doing remasters that actually are an improvement. For instance, I have some Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab remasters that I prefer over the original. They haven’t been compressed to death, they just made good use of technological advances made since the original recording coupled with a desire to make it sound good, not to make it sell well on shoddy car stereos.
I think you have to bear in mind that recording wasn’t that easy until about ten years ago. Nowadays anyone with $/€/£1000 can make a multitrack 24/96 digital recording in their bedroom. However, there are numerous bands that now play stadiums that had to borrow money from the drummer’s aunt to buy two days of studio time in a third-rate analogue recording studio and without a good recording engineer. Many famous bands had debut albums that were made on extremely low budgets and in a hurry. Add to that that analogue recording had more (and different) limitations to digital recording and it was fairly easy to screw it up. I think it certainly makes sense to see if advanced technology and experience can bring out details that were lost/unfavourably mixed in the original publication.
All in all, I think the only way to find out if a remaster is an improvement or not is to listen to it.