Laughing City

Will you buy the Beatles remasters?
I'm buying a box set
26%
 26%  [ 5 ]
I'll buy select individual albums
15%
 15%  [ 3 ]
No
57%
 57%  [ 11 ]
Total Votes : 19

Author Message
uncreative
Vintage Newbie


If you're a Beatles fan, or music fan in general, I'm sure you've heard that all of The Beatles' albums have been remastered in mono and stereo and are being released tomorrow. I've heard they sound absolutely amazing. I can't afford to shell out $250 for a box set, though I want to soooooo badly. Luckily my buddy is buying it, so I can, you know, do what people do with their friends CD's. Anyone else planning on buying a box set, individual CD or two, or already have it pre-ordered and are going to be waiting by the door all day tomorrow?

I imagine some Beatles fans are going to be spending A LOT of money tomorrow with Beatles Rock Band also coming out.
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Last edited by uncreative on Tue Sep 08, 2009 1:04 pm; edited 1 time in total
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johnip
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My dad was looking at it today online. Borders sent an email with 20% off so it comes out to like $210. I doubt he'll be getting it since it costs so much though.
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wilsmith
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I never bought the original cds partially because they never go on sale, they are always listed at about 17 bucks. I'll pick up the remasters of the ones I like best. Won't go into that again, I know better...

So for me, it works out well, unlike some, who will be getting Lucased (buying every release, remaster, bonus edition, special edition, digital remaster, new format version...) to the sum of thousands in the end over the years.

Wait for the blue ray 7.1 surround sound version and super thick vinyl instead Razz

Oh yeah, add a poll, I'm sure it will be super popular.

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uncreative
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wilsmith wrote:
Oh yeah, add a poll, I'm sure it will be super popular.

Good idea.
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boone
Vintage Newbie


Beings that "remastered" these days usually means "compressed to the point of ear fatigue," I'm a little wary of something like this. Especially when you're talking prices like that.

It'd be a lot cheaper -- and probably sound a heck of a lot better -- to just find the original CD releases at second hand stores and pawn shops. Even the "old master" CDs are overpriced, if you ask me. The White Album is, like, 30 bucks new.

wilsmith wrote:
Wait for the blue ray 7.1 surround sound version and super thick vinyl instead Razz

Capitol has quite a bit of their old catalog out on 180 gram vinyl already. No need to wait. Their vinyl prices are actually not too bad; I think most of them are $20.
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uncreative
Vintage Newbie


boone wrote:
Beings that "remastered" these days usually means "compressed to the point of ear fatigue," I'm a little wary of something like this. Especially when you're talking prices like that.

It'd be a lot cheaper -- and probably sound a heck of a lot better -- to just find the original CD releases at second hand stores and pawn shops. Even the "old master" CDs are overpriced, if you ask me. The White Album is, like, 30 bucks new.

I'm certainly not an expert on audio terms, but I assume compressed means a lower bit rate? If so, these remasters actually have a higher bit rate than the 1987 releases. All I can go by is what I've read, and that is that "the sonic improvements in the stereo releases" are "discernible on even mediocre playback devices." (Quotes taken from this review).

I don't think I would blindly spend $250, but I definitely want to hear these and if they are as good as I'm reading that they are, I will probably buy them eventually. I own almost all their albums on vinyl, I'd love to compare the remasters to the vinyl.
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Nightmare
Vintage Newbie


If you get any in stereo you deserve to die.
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uncreative
Vintage Newbie


Nightmare wrote:
If you get any in stereo you deserve to die.

Abbey Road and Let It Be are only in stereo, and the only way to get the mono CD's is by buying a ridiculously overpriced box set (I read it was $300 for the mono box set, which is $40 more than the stereo set that has two more albums even).

I want both...
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boone
Vintage Newbie


uncreative wrote:
boone wrote:
Beings that "remastered" these days usually means "compressed to the point of ear fatigue," I'm a little wary of something like this. Especially when you're talking prices like that.

It'd be a lot cheaper -- and probably sound a heck of a lot better -- to just find the original CD releases at second hand stores and pawn shops. Even the "old master" CDs are overpriced, if you ask me. The White Album is, like, 30 bucks new.

I'm certainly not an expert on audio terms, but I assume compressed means a lower bit rate? If so, these remasters actually have a higher bit rate than the 1987 releases. All I can go by is what I've read, and that is that "the sonic improvements in the stereo releases" are "discernible on even mediocre playback devices." (Quotes taken from this review).

I don't think I would blindly spend $250, but I definitely want to hear these and if they are as good as I'm reading that they are, I will probably buy them eventually. I own almost all their albums on vinyl, I'd love to compare the remasters to the vinyl.

No, I'm talking about dynamic range compression, in that you compress the quiet and the loud spectra of the music to make the volume more even. The Beatles did a lot of experiments with light-to-medium compression on drums and piano, and a lot of those techniques are still used in recordings today, but almost all modern recordings go through major DRC in the mastering phase (though, apparently, now it's moving to the mixing phase as well.) This is supposed to make the songs sound "louder," but in the process it makes everything sound loud, which can hurt your ears, and brings most of the song dangerously close -- or even drastically over -- to clipping, which can damage your speakers (and sound terrible.)

Remastering an album doesn't really do much anyway. Mastering is supposed to be a subtle art, and has more to with making sure all the songs work together as a whole than doing any major sound design. Remastered CDs are basically just a way for record companies to double dip, since the CD just won't be replaced as easily as any other format. Don't buy the hype; most people will say a remastered CD sounds better simply because they know it's remastered, and it's "supposed" to sound better.

Oh, and it doesn't matter what bitrate it's mastered at. It will be downsampled to 44.1khz just like every other CD, and really human ears can't detect any difference beyond 40khz anyway.

If I were you, I would just stick with your records. They were mastered beautifully, and nobody is really going to be able to top them. Take your $300 and buy a good record player with a USB output so you can put them on your MP3 player.[/i]
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wilsmith
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^ We had a thread about Dynamic compression a while back, or it came up in another thread and I posted that Rollingstone article about how it's killing music in terms of volume fatigue, good job of braking that down.

As far as the vinyl, I was sort of meaning the 180 gram remasters. I think the plus on an ideal remaster is that it comes from the original tapes, and each individual track is digitized and then the final mix of the track is mastered digital for maximum clarity and resolution. Technically they are remixing the tracks as well, but in most cases it's just a matter of of EQing, fine tuning panning, and the addition of some compression here and there. Some remasters go even farther. But in most cases, there's an effort to expand the dynamic range, not compress it, cause early run cds lacked warmth, and also produced less low end than the original vinyl.

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DRMS_7888
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This is a good example of dynamic range compression. The closer to the edge the blue wave is, the closer it is to the maximum volume a digital file can have. So, to have everything loud (which makes for convenient radio or car listening), you need to clip off the top of the already loud parts.

You can see that the Beethoven recording is essentially captured completely, without any real compression.

The Damien Rice recording is mostly intact, except for the bridge at the end (w/ the full band).

And, with Eisley, you can see what modern pop music compression looks like.

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wilsmith
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^also, you have to consider that we are now in an age where we are recording bands at MAX volume from the jump, just at the edge of clipping, so that mixing down to stereo (in Eisey's case) the track is already pretty dense and loud.

In some cases Compression will only be used on the quiet parts, and not to raise the volume of the entire track, but with modern rock the trend has been to squash the senses of the A.D.D. ridden minds of the youth like bugs with MAXIMUM AMPLITUDE Twisted Evil (if Apple had a "Speech" voice that was called Uber Metal Voice Over, that's the one to use for that last line I wrote.)

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Last edited by wilsmith on Sun Sep 13, 2009 2:09 am; edited 1 time in total
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boone
Vintage Newbie


wilsmith wrote:
As far as the vinyl, I was sort of meaning the 180 gram remasters. I think the plus on an ideal remaster is that it comes from the original tapes, and each individual track is digitized and then the final mix of the track is mastered digital for maximum clarity and resolution. Technically they are remixing the tracks as well, but in most cases it's just a matter of of EQing, fine tuning panning, and the addition of some compression here and there. Some remasters go even farther. But in most cases, there's an effort to expand the dynamic range, not compress it, cause early run cds lacked warmth, and also produced less low end than the original vinyl.

As far as I know, all the Beatles albums are already available on 180 gram vinyl. I already said that. You don't need to remaster a record, you wouldn't make anything sound better, you'd just make it sound different. That's my point with digital remastering as well.

Almost all major label CDs released in the past 6 years or so have been majorly compressed. Dynamic range is almost gone. Most of them include major clipping as well. Clipping arguably sounds nice on tape (they call it "tape saturation"), but digital clipping is very harsh. Metallica's Death Magnetic was infamous for all of its compression being done during the mixing process, so it seems like it's only going to get worse, not better.

I really doubt that early run CDs "lacked warmth." They were mastered with analog equipment onto digital tape, so it should have sounded at least as good as or better than modern CDs that are mastered on computers. The biggest difference I can find between CDs of 20 years ago and CDs of today is that older CDs have less sharpness in the highs that some may misconstrue as lack of definition, but I actually prefer. I'm not sure why everybody's in love with super sharp, ear piercing music. Probably because they listen to music on little earbuds and computer speakers and it has to cut through...

I think you're a bit confused though, because vinyl is well known for its low end deficiencies. If you master a record with too much low end, it will bump the stylus out of the groove. Most record players and/or phono preamps have a natural low end boost to make up for it. It's your stereo setup that gives vinyl those beautiful lows.
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wilsmith
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^ Okay, so I think the real issue is that the industry is using one term for two purposes. They are remixing and re-engineering these albums, and the mastering them (sometimes to expand track lengths that had to be shortened due to format restrictions on running time). This is all being labeled as Remastering these days, which is a simplification and misnomer, and I've been using the term with the expanded understanding in this convo.

As for the Vinyl vs. CD discussion, the low end issue had more to do with the Digital versions of Vinyl releases early on that weren't taken from the original tapes and cleaned up, but from post mixes or worst case scenarios, consumer copies of the material. That's what happened with the Funkadelic albums on Westbound records, the first cds are basically pulled from old worn vinyl records as opposed to from the original tracks, at their highest signal to noise ratio and clarity, with only the most basic eqing possible.

Records that were recorded for the digital format didn't have that problem, but it's the first ones that went from analog to digital that suffered. Back then there was a lot less margin for error (early 80s) given software and hardware restrictions. As a result there was a move to reduce volume and get it to be more subdued and less piercing digitally. I think that was more because of a lack of adequate control (along with a lot of screechy guitars and synths being all over the music then).

So, I don't disagree with your taste or info, I just think we may be talking about different segments of the recording industry and it's history. Peter Gabriel's Early stuff from back then (the 3 S/T albums) were recorded digitally and loses nothing, but for CCR's records, they just threw them out there without a thought to make sure the were using the original masters or just whatever they could find. In those cases the Remasters brought the cd versions up to speed with the original vinyl pressings.

Then there's the unfortunate reality that a lot of the masters of some of these recordings have been lost or stolen (or a label that held the rights refuses to surrender them) so the original tracks have to be used to create a new master, thus they have to be labeled Remasters.

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boone
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I think it tends to be a bit more cut-and-dried than that. "Remastering" has been turned into a buzzword that allows record companies to double dip with albums. When asked why CDs used to cost more than cassettes, people would just say, "Well, these are digitally remastered," as though: 1) that was something special (since CDs are digital, they're digitally mastered, duh); and 2) it was somehow more expensive than tape or record mastering. Now it's used to make you think you ought to throw away your old CDs, and buy these new ones, because they make Elvis and Led Zeppelin sound as "modern" and "in your face" as Coldplay and The Jonas Brothers.

I think you're talking about in the way, way early days of CDs. Maybe the early 80s, back when CD players were $500 luxury items. Most of the CDs you'd be able to find at a second hand store would be from at least the early 90s, when digital mastering pretty much hit its stride.

So I see no reason to spend so much money for blatant double dipping, especially when it just might sound like crap. If we can agree on that, the rest of this is just splitting hairs.
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