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Paying close attention to it, I only notice a slight difference in the quality of sound here. Are my ears going bad or am I the only the who thinks "re-mastered" is not much more than a sales tactic?
Hi, It kind of matters what is remastered and from what source. On vinyl it can be rather dramatic of a difference. Sometimes much better if done well. More often than not worse. If it has been remastered from analog for use in digital media all sorts of things may be different. This can be particularly true if the remasterer wanted to make it "brighter" or quieter. Perhaps your ears are fine, it is the source material that you listened to and the system you play it on that are masking the differences.
Yeah, it all kind of depends on how well the original was done in the first place. If you have vinyl from the 60's that has been re-mastered you're probably going to hear a big difference. Something from the 90's though, not so much because the recording equipment then was more upgraded and closer to the technology we have now.
Remasters can be better, but not always. I don't always notice the difference, honestly, but frequently I do. For instance, it drives me crazy when they compress the audio and you lose all the dynamic range.
There have been some remasters that I thought sounded better, especially when you're talking about music from the 50's and 60's. More recent music, say from the 80's for example, actually seems to sound worse to me.
Many remastered CD's sounds considerably worse than the original. Bob Marley's Legend is a good example. A couple of bonus tracks were added (good), but lots of compression was used on the original tracks, increasing the level and reducing the dynamic range by about 6dB (bad).