Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo I'm Just Gonna Say It

I may be turning this into truth or dare, but last year I (re)bought Paul Revere and the Raiders greatest hits, as well as the Turtles greatest, the Rascals and the Raspberries.
Davey, Dozy, Mikey, Beaky, Mick and Tick are still on my get list. Oh, and Sopwith Camel.

If I can, I prefer to bypass the greatest hits and get the originals. There's just something about greatest hits albums I don't like. Perhaps it's because they played it over and over when it was popular, or because I sometimes like the less known stuff they did better than I like the more popular stuff. The last one I bought was Chicago's greatest hits. I just don't like this CD, but I do like Chicago.

I agree.

But I don't like Chicago.

I'm probably there too, just didn't realize it. Was blaming it on the CD.

Yep.....too cold and windy.

I agree, Cat. But, thing is, there will never be cd re-releases of so much of that 60's, 70's stuff.

If all that's available (and, hopefully, remastered--decently) is a greatest hits, then there's not much choice. Luckily, lots of 'em do sound better than the original LP's from which they were taken.

Maybe that's why I get so disappointed in the CD's I buy of older music. I also noticed that on the double CD's of stuff I buy, the older music is on first CD and newer on 2nd CD. CD #2 always seems to sound better.

Better or louder?

I started buying the Tears for Fears remasters that came out a while ago. But after comparing the new Songs from the Big Chair to the original CD release, it was louder, but lost a lot of dynamics. Just wish I could find an original The Hurting now.

I did some comparisons of original cd's vs. their remastered counterparts with audacity and as Chris mentions, they are just louder but with the cd's I looked at the dynamics were still intact. An overlay of the waveforms were mirror images, just one was a few db louder. Unfortunately not all remasters are of this quality, it is very much hit and miss.

Yeah, there's no harm in someone loading the data from the full disc into ProTools and picking normalize at -6 dB. That'll make playback louder for the same volume setting, but leave the dynamics intact.

All too often before that step they'll increase the compression. That'll make the playback level louder still, but sacrifice dynamics. So many of the "remasters" are done that way.