Ugo
Group: Members
Posts: 5495
Joined: April 2000 |
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Posted: June 16 2012, 19:00 |
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I'd like to add one more comment of mine about the remasters matter (old or new? who knows!  ). I generally don't trust present-day remasters, meaning everything that's been reissued as remastered versions from 2008 onwards. This is because 2008 is when the so-called "loudness war" started. And since it started, most new CD releases (both entirely new albums and reissues of old albums) have been (re)mastered to sound incredibly loud (with all of the original recordings' dynamics flattened out), so that even the crappiest recordings sound good when they're ripped into iPods and listened to on those goddamned devices (which I hate). All major record labels dove head-first into the war. The results haven't always been bad, of course: on the old CD edition of The Alan Parsons Project's Ammonia Avenue, you could hear the piano at the start of the title track only if you cranked up the volume - and then you were forced to turn it down in the middle of the track, where it gets really loud! In the 2007 remaster the piano rings out clearly at a normal volume level and the loud section is still loud. But that was 2007. In 2008, Billy Joel's The Stranger was given a 30th Anniversary remaster by its original producer Phil Ramone, and it got incredibly loud. I've never heard the original album (until very recently, when I bought Billy Joel's Complete Albums Collection, I only had his live stuff), but in the newer release the bass drum in the "Brenda and Eddie" section of the lenghty song "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" just thumps away - thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. thump, thump... - all through that section and also in other parts of the song. And the saxophone sounds like the saxophonist is right in your face. Were those instruments really supposed to sound that way? I have no idea.
Anyway, I think we can consider ourselves lucky that none of this has happened to Mike's stuff so far. TB, HR and Ommadawn are all remixes (as opposed to remasters), so they manage not to sound excessively loud, you still hear all of the dynamics. Incantations 2012 does sound a little louder than the previous CD, but the new incarnation is clearer, and omits all of those hisses, whines etc. which were a minus on the old release, so I don't really mind about the volume level having been increased a bit on that release.  If the remasters we're getting right now are indeed the 2000 remasters, then we still can consider ourselves lucky, because I've got two (Exposed and Amarok) and to me they both sound much better than the original releases, and not louder. So I see this as a good chance to get that stuff for people like me, who didn't manage to get it the first time around. What the heck, they're still pre-loudness-war digital remasters, so let's not bitch too much about them. 
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Ugo C. - a devoted Amarokian
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