what’s actually meant when an album is re-released as “remastered”
In: Technology
*As per /u/Eightohm’s response below, my post here is largely talking about mixing rather than mastering. *
When a song is recorded, typically each instrument is recorded separately, as are the vocals. If there are multiple singers, each would ideally have their own microphone, and end up with their own recorded track.
The point of all this is to give the most versatility possible for the next part of the process.
Once that’s done, the artist sits down in a studio, and those various tracks are mixed together to create the final ‘mastered’ track or mix, which is what ends up on the CDs, vinyls, spotify, what have you.
If a song is Remastered, it means they go back to the individual recordings of the instruments and vocals, and re-create, re-mix the master typically slightly differently. A certain instrument might be more pronounced than it was before in the mix, or the equalization on the track will be different, or…well anything really. The point is the resultant track will be a different interpretation than the original.
It means that the original mix has literally been mastered again hence ‘remastered’. Once a band, artist and producer have finished a track or mix (usually a mono or stereo recording of their work) it is then mastered, a process that is carried out in a specialist studio that prepares the mix for its various mediums and broadcasting (CD’s, records and mp3s all have different sonic specifications) volume levels are optimised and tonal flaws are carefully tweaked out. This then becomes the ‘master’ that all duplicates are copied from. Remasters often involve going back to the original tape mix and re-optimising them for or with today’s technology. Some would argue that original masters are often more dynamic and nuanced due to the ‘loudness war’ going on in the music industry (tracks being competitively heavily compressed to make the quieter parts louder and their loud part louder creating a consistently loud, heavily saturated, Un-dynamic mix that will play well out of cheap small speakers and headphones like phones and laptops).
the mastering and perfecting of audio has come along way in recent years, so they revisit old classic albums and tune the tracks and EQ them give a more expansive sound quality.
Not a lot of the responses here have been simple so let me have a go at it.
When CD’s first came out there were a lot of poor mastering jobs performed mainly because it was new technology. Then started the ‘loudness wars’, where albums increasingly had their perceived loudness boosted at the expense of fidelity. Then the iPod brought in automatic levels based on human perception, which removed the ‘loudness’ from being an unfair advantage, and just meant that loud mixes were removing their fidelity for no good reason.
Now we’re finally in an age where masters are starting to actually be reasonable again, where there is skill and the desire to make a sound that lets the format sound as good as it can (ie balanced). So a lot of albums mastered during the early CD days or during the loudness wars are being redone, to correct basically the previous attempts being so poor.
Wikipedia has a page on the [loudness wars](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war) that makes for great further reading.
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