The Beatles Remasters - Some Sound Really Great

[Soopafresh]

Got a chance to listen to them all. The most noticeably improved is Abbey Road - you should hear quite a difference even on low end stereo equipment. Pepper also sounds great (although I don't like the songs on that one as much). Rubber Soul is also worth re-buying. Certain songs sound like they're a tape generation newer than on the older CDs. Every album has added "oomph", especially in the bass and also in the overall volume. Reportedly, the remastering engineers wanted to make it so you didn't have to turn up the volume when a Beatles track came up on your iPod so they added peak volume limiting. Finally, all noise reduction that was performed on the 1987 releases has been removed for the 2009 versions.

[yoda313]

Reportedly, the remastering engineers wanted to make it so you didn't have to turn up the volume when a Beatles track came up on your iPod so they added peak volume limiting.

You know I've noticed this on some albums. Whichever album the Phil Collins version of "you can't hurry love" comes on is really soft. And that was downloaded with my ZUNE pass in wma 192kpbs. But any newer album like something from the Killers or Daughtry sounds nice and crisp in wma 192.

Some cds I have that I rip are like that too. Strangely soft on my zune while others are perfectly normal. Hard to figure it. I don't know if its relagated to a certain era when the masters were recorded and the transferring just wasn't up to par????

[Soopafresh]

[quote="yoda313"]

Some cds I have that I rip are like that too. Strangely soft on my zune while others are perfectly normal. Hard to figure it. I don't know if its relagated to a certain era when the masters were recorded and the transferring just wasn't up to par????

Not so much that, but rather that "modern" music has become associated with "in your face" loudness and lack of dynamics (the difference between the soft and loud parts of a song). Metallica created a different master for their Guitar Hero and CD release - the Guitar Hero one reportedly sounding better (because it wasn't dynamic range compressed).

The top is the Guitar Hero version (see how there are loud and soft parts?). The lower is the CD release (all one volume)

[drjtech]

I grew up in the era when dynamic range was a good thing. Nowadays dynamic compression is considered "normal". I agree with the Wikipedia article that marketing led to the "loudness wars".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_compression

Marketing

With the advent of the CD and digital music, record companies, mixing engineers and mastering engineers have been gradually increasing the overall volume of commercial albums. Originally they would just push the volume up so that the single loudest point was at full volume, but more recently by using higher degrees of compression and limiting during mixing and mastering, compression algorithms have been engineered specifically to accomplish the task of maximizing audio level in the digital stream. Hard limiting or hard clipping can result, affecting the tone and timbre of the music in a way that one critic describes as "dogshit". [10] The effort to increase loudness has been referred to as the "loudness wars".

-drjtech