listening to lots of music lately and almost every second song is “remastered”; original is often not even available anymore.
and not one single time i can hear any kind of improvement. so what does it even mean, to remaster a song?
one of the worst cases, imo is atomic by blondie.
and to add: iʼm not some kind of nostalgic puritan, plenty of songs get better after some remixing, covering and whatnot, like
The Clash - Rock The Casbah (12 inch Version)
But the remastered version?
dear god, if i wanted to listen to sting, i would listen to friggin sting.
Mastering engineer here. Remastered means that the audio has been modified to fit a different sonic aesthetic.
In general this means made louder, clearer and perhaps bassier, to make it sound “as good” as contemporary albums, as well as optimising it for contemporary consumer sound systems (which nowadays range from 5.1 kits with huge subwoofers, to a mono smartphone speaker).
It’s also an excuse to sell the same album again.
I’m not currently able to listen to the examples you’ve given, but I do believe it to be sometimes detrimental to change the aesthetic of a song and “take it out of it’s era”, because a cleaner or brighter mix might make it lose a lot of its charm.
It’s also worth noting that nowadays, the quality of remasters can vary a lot due to more (potentially less experienced) people using music-making software to create and upload their own.
Hope that helped!
