Tony Tune-age wrote: ↑2010-01-23 01:45
As a result of this thread, I've been listening to a few older original albums and the newer audiphile versions for comparison. Although I'm still conducting comparisons, I have noticed some differneces. Not all of the audiophile records sound better, or even as good as the older original records. It will be awhile before I know if this applies to just a few of the newer albums, or most of them.
In any case, it was my understanding that audiophile albums were created from the original master recordings. If this is true, I'm not sure why there's a problem.
Just came across this thread, and interestingly, so far nobody pointed at the issue of magnetic tapes wearing out over time. How can I know? Two sources:
1. personal experience: As a student I did data processing at my research institute as a part time job. I processed tapes of the GATE experiment, which had been lying around since, not in a climatized tape archive, as the university did not own such a luxury. The S/N was abyssally bad, and a lot of data was just lost.
On a side note: We introduced the new penalty of "tape spooling" in my department, once we understood this ;-)
2. from personal communication with Speakers Corner I have it, that they ditched some of their projects, because the quality of the old masters was too poor.
Resume: We have a balance of various factors here. Worsening masters, hard to find refurbished mastering equipment, and lack of experienced technicians on one side, better mixing technology on the other side.
And then there are those original records, which just weren't made with care, leaving room for improvements today.
Vinyl proved to be the most stable storage medium for music of the pre-digital era. That's my take why carefully produced original issues can only be better than re-masterings.
I also gathered from reliable sources, that the Led Zeppelin re-issues are better than the originals. The LPs are reportedly even a tad better, than the digital files.
It's good, that companies stand to their "L", and invest in improving the technology to assist our LP enthusiasm ;-)