How are "Audiophile remasters" different than a "regular" remasters? How is the process different?

caesar · Apr 11, 2017

Very recently, Mobile Fidelity released the Band's Last Waltz. And a few months ago, Rhino released the 40th anniversary edition of the Last Waltz. The latter was remastered at Sterling Sound, where many of the audiophile remasters are done as well.

Does anyone understand the process for creating an Audiophile remaster product by MoFi, Analogue Productions, Audio Fidelity, etc., vs. something that would be done for the mass market? Do they use better people, superior / different equipment, or apply some other secret sauce? Or is it all marketing?

Thank you

Bruce B · Apr 11, 2017

Better ears, equpment/room and more time...... plus, they know their target audience.

caesar · Apr 11, 2017

Bruce B said:
Better ears, equpment/room and more time...... plus, they know their target audience.

Thanks, Bruce. Sorry for the ignorant question, but what are the benefits of taking more time? What are some of the things these guys focus on and "fix" that others rush through?

Bruce B · Apr 11, 2017

caesar said:
Thanks, Bruce. Sorry for the ignorant question, but what are the benefits of taking more time? What are some of the things these guys focus on and "fix" that others rush through?

As you know with anything, preparation is the most important part. The old saying " Fast, Cheap or Good.... pick two" is really the deciding factor. Major labels choose "Fast and Cheap". Their eyes are on the mighty dollar. Labels don't have time to send the masters out to be auditioned by the artist or client to make revisions. They are pretty much on an assembly line. With Audiophile Mastering, we take the time to try different equipment, cables, even different heads/tape pre's on tape machines. The first Wilson tapes that we did, think it was about a dozen, took me about 2 months. Normally it takes me about 2 days for a tape master.

caesar · Apr 11, 2017

Bruce B said:
As you know with anything, preparation is the most important part. The old saying " Fast, Cheap or Good.... pick two" is really the deciding factor. Major labels choose "Fast and Cheap". Their eyes are on the mighty dollar. Labels don't have time to send the masters out to be auditioned by the artist or client to make revisions. They are pretty much on an assembly line. With Audiophile Mastering, we take the time to try different equipment, cables, even different heads/tape pre's on tape machines. The first Wilson tapes that we did, think it was about a dozen, took me about 2 months. Normally it takes me about 2 days for a tape master.

Wow! Thanks for the reply - and for the hard work! That event at RMAF a few years ago was incredible!!!

ddk · Apr 11, 2017

Bruce B said:
Better ears, equpment/room and more time...... plus, they know their target audience.

The Deaf

? I haven't heard a MOFI reissue that's not dead and boring. In comparison the mass market original while not always perfect is at least enjoyable.

david

Believe High Fidelity · Apr 11, 2017

ddk said:
The Deaf ? I haven't heard a MOFI reissue that's not dead and boring. In comparison the mass market original while not always perfect is at least enjoyable.

david

I second this. I have tested a few re-issues to the target audience and it is mostly worse than better.

jeff1225 · Apr 11, 2017

ddk said:
The Deaf ? I haven't heard a MOFI reissue that's not dead and boring. In comparison the mass market original while not always perfect is at least enjoyable.

david

David,
I was lucky enough to get an original (120 gm) MoFi pressing of one of my favorite albums, Little Feat's Waiting for Columbus. I compared this original MoFi to the new (180 gm) MoFi of the same album and it was not even close. The new MoFi sounds slow, clouded and boring compared to the original MoFi.

caesar · Apr 11, 2017

Bruce, do you know what is done to bring out the bass on one remaster vs. the drums in another vs. the midrange in the third - instead of overall clarity in all areas across the board? Using Led Zeppelin as an example, the drums are more prominent in the SHM remaster, while the bass really comes through in the latest high res Zeppelin remasters. They didn't remix, according to Page.

What levers are there for the mastering engineers to pull that result in these differences? Thanks

Sa-dono · Apr 11, 2017

caesar said:
Very recently, Mobile Fidelity released the Band's Last Waltz. And a few months ago, Rhino released the 40th anniversary edition of the Last Waltz. The latter was remastered at Sterling Sound, where many of the audiophile remasters are done as well.

Does anyone understand the process for creating an Audiophile remaster product by MoFi, Analogue Productions, Audio Fidelity, etc., vs. something that would be done for the mass market? Do they use better people, superior / different equipment, or apply some other secret sauce? Or is it all marketing?

Thank you

It can be a little of both. Some of these "Audiophile remasters" still use some unneeded compression, and I've had one that couldn't even be bothered to avoid digital clipping. In the end, if the artist and/or producer/s aren't still alive, you're getting one person's (or a few people's) interpretation of the music.

ddk · Apr 11, 2017

Bruce B said:
As you know with anything, preparation is the most important part. The old saying " Fast, Cheap or Good.... pick two" is really the deciding factor. Major labels choose "Fast and Cheap". Their eyes are on the mighty dollar. Labels don't have time to send the masters out to be auditioned by the artist or client to make revisions. They are pretty much on an assembly line. With Audiophile Mastering, we take the time to try different equipment, cables, even different heads/tape pre's on tape machines. The first Wilson tapes that we did, think it was about a dozen, took me about 2 months. Normally it takes me about 2 days for a tape master.

As a consumer it's impossible for us to know where the mastering or remastering stops and production begins Bruce. I find myself disliking many audiophile versions of music I love, wether it's XRCD or the current Toshiba discs, I find them goosed at frequency extremes and very hifi sounding. Major labels are also guilty of some of the same kind of tweaking, easy to hear when you compare early commercial analog to digital transfers of some recordings without any remastering (manipulating?) which sound great compared to the smaller worse sounding 16 bit even smaller sounding 24bit remasters; many Sony titles I own share the same downward spiral with each remastered generation, why is that?

MoFi & Rhino reissues including many Classic 180g & 200g vinyl reissues I find them dead and bland sounding, I can't even sit through a single track with these pressings. Then you have a 3rd category of so called audiophile labels, the ones like RR, Sheffield Labs or Wilson who do their own recordings. RR & Wilson's releases aren't dead and in fact are extremely dynamic but wether it was the recording, the mastering or both I find the overall balance of the final product skewed towards hifi & audiophile fireworks than the actual performance. This is specially true of Lew Johnson's recordings, you'll never hear an orchestra in any hall sounding the way his recordings do. It's all about loud & quiet bits and hollow depth with him rather than the actual piece of music, you hear one, you've heard them all; so F'ing boring ZZzzzzZzzz Snore.....! Sheffield Labs seem to be all over the place from bland and dead to hifi and dead. What these "Audiophile" labels seem to have in common is their interest in sound and hifi over music, some even fail at hifi too. I bought my audiophile labels at a time when I was more interested in sound than the music, probably some of it had to do with systems that simply couldn't play music with any kind of emotion and part because of my own ignorance of the music but I used to read the Absolute Sound and buy into HP's bullshit back then too

!

david

Bruce B · Apr 11, 2017

ddk said:
As a consumer it's impossible for us to know where the mastering or remastering stops and production begins Bruce. I find myself disliking many audiophile versions of music I love, wether it's XRCD or the current Toshiba discs, I find them goosed at frequency extremes and very hifi sounding. Major labels are also guilty of some of the same kind of tweaking, easy to hear when you compare early commercial analog to digital transfers of some recordings without any remastering (manipulating?) which sound great compared to the smaller worse sounding 16 bit even smaller sounding 24bit remasters; many Sony titles I own share the same downward spiral with each remastered generation, why is that?

MoFi & Rhino reissues including many Classic 180g & 200g vinyl reissues I find them dead and bland sounding, I can't even sit through a single track with these pressings. Then you have a 3rd category of so called audiophile labels, the ones like RR, Sheffield Labs or Wilson who do their own recordings. RR & Wilson's releases aren't dead and in fact are extremely dynamic but wether it was the recording, the mastering or both I find the overall balance of the final product skewed towards hifi & audiophile fireworks than the actual performance. This is specially true of Lew Johnson's recordings, you'll never hear an orchestra in any hall sounding the way his recordings do. It's all about loud & quiet bits and hollow depth with him rather than the actual piece of music, you hear one, you've heard them all; so F'ing boring ZZzzzzZzzz Snore.....! Sheffield Labs seem to be all over the place from bland and dead to hifi and dead. What these "Audiophile" labels seem to have in common is their interest in sound and hifi over music, some even fail at hifi too. I bought my audiophile labels at a time when I was more interested in sound than the music, probably some of it had to do with systems that simply couldn't play music with any kind of emotion and part because of my own ignorance of the music but I used to read the Absolute Sound and buy into HP's bullshit back then too !

david

Which leads me to another soapbox discussion.
Most of us mastering engineers have our hands tied when it comes to creative decisions. We get paid by the clients/labels and it is they, who approve of the masters. There have been a few releases from audiophile labels that we did that I was not proud of. We did several revisions until the paying client was happy.

Another thing. I went to a few of the mastering houses in Japan and all of the rooms that I visited were as dead as a door nail/theater. RT60 was probably ZERO!! I would assume masters that came out of there were probably very "hifi" sounding with a mid-range in your face!

We remastered the Sheffield Drum and Track album for FIM. The first thing we did was bring out the ambiance, as the label thought like you, that it was too dead.

ddk · Apr 11, 2017

Bruce B said:
Which leads me to another soapbox discussion.
Most of us mastering engineers have our hands tied when it comes to creative decisions. We get paid by the clients/labels and it is they, who approve of the masters. There have been a few releases from audiophile labels that we did that I was not proud of. We did several revisions until the paying client was happy.

Another thing. I went to a few of the mastering houses in Japan and all of the rooms that I visited were as dead as a door nail/theater. RT60 was probably ZERO!! I would assume masters that came out of there were probably very "hifi" sounding with a mid-range in your face!

We remastered the Sheffield Drum and Track album for FIM. The first thing we did was bring out the ambiance, as the label thought like you, that it was too dead.

Thanks for sharing Bruce! Seen many pictures of Japanese studios with great speakers in them but never been in one and I know exactly what you're talking about about deadness, I've been in mastering rooms that were so dead I nearly lost my balance walking around. From the Japanese audiophile labels I find Denon's pressings right up there with the best, usually very natural and well balanced.

The drum record was always touted as an audiophile classic but aside from lacking ambience I never thought that they captured the snap and dynamics of the wack of a stick hitting skin, happy to know that Mr. Ma felt the same

!

david

Lagonda · Apr 12, 2017

ddk said:
The Deaf ? I haven't heard a MOFI reissue that's not dead and boring. In comparison the mass market original while not always perfect is at least enjoyable.

david

So true ! So many of the MoFi reissues sound like crap. Maybe because they often work from bad masters, if the master is crap, please don't do a reissue. Billy Joel 52'nd Street should be from a analog master tape, they made it sound like early digital, dead with drums sounding like drum machines. Why release this turd as a 45 RPM double album. The 45 RPM Dylan releases sound truer to original, with increased dynamics. Desire especially is better than the original. Analogue Productions are in general better, with a slight tendency to bloat the mid bass a little, going for that golden tube sound.

microstrip · Apr 12, 2017

ddk said:
(...)
MoFi & Rhino reissues including many Classic 180g & 200g vinyl reissues I find them dead and bland sounding, I can't even sit through a single track with these pressings. Then you have a 3rd category of so called audiophile labels, the ones like RR, Sheffield Labs or Wilson who do their own recordings. RR & Wilson's releases aren't dead and in fact are extremely dynamic but wether it was the recording, the mastering or both I find the overall balance of the final product skewed towards hifi & audiophile fireworks than the actual performance. This is specially true of Lew Johnson's recordings, you'll never hear an orchestra in any hall sounding the way his recordings do. It's all about loud & quiet bits and hollow depth with him rather than the actual piece of music, you hear one, you've heard them all; so F'ing boring ZZzzzzZzzz Snore.....! Sheffield Labs seem to be all over the place from bland and dead to hifi and dead. What these "Audiophile" labels seem to have in common is their interest in sound and hifi over music, some even fail at hifi too. I bought my audiophile labels at a time when I was more interested in sound than the music, probably some of it had to do with systems that simply couldn't play music with any kind of emotion and part because of my own ignorance of the music but I used to read the Absolute Sound and buy into HP's bullshit back then too !

david

David,

Although some audiophile label recordings are dead and bland sounding I disagree with such generalization - the labels you refer have excellent recordings that do not sound hifi and highlight the performance not the sound. For example Reference Recordings chamber music recordings with the Chicago Pro Musica, the Ebony Concerto with John Bruce Yeh and DePaul University Jazz & Wind Ensemble are some of the most natural recordings in its genre I own. Some Wilson recordings of chamber music are excellent, not hifi like at all. Surely you need an adequate system to play them at their best, and here preference takes the lion share. Most of my Sheffield Lab recordings sound great, with plenty of emotion.

Audiophile recording bashing is a fashionable sport in many audiophile groups. Although many recordings deserve such bashing, IMHO many of them represent great moments of great emotion, recreating in our systems great music experiences. Surely no label, audiophile or not, has only excellent recordings.

BTW, some of them sound really good in digital and I only gave them the correct value in this format. But this a story for another thread!

ddk · Apr 12, 2017

Hi Francisco,
I'm glad you found some you like. I have nothing to do with fashion in audiophile groups nor was I generalizing audiophile labels, I named specific ones and said based on the ones I own from those labels. With some I own nearly their entire catalog or what it was at the time and others maybe a dozen or less, stopped purchasing after hearing a trend. I own the Ebony Concerto you're referring to and I agree that the tonality is very good as it is on other RR records, at least on the original pressings, but that's not what bothers me with RR it's the balance and formula they use for their recordings that I found repetitive and boring. I never hear music in a hall sound the way orchestra is generally presented by RR, this one like others has the same signature loud and quiet passages with that eerie hollow depth that I find very distracting. You might like the effect, matter of preference like you said but that's not how an orchestra sounds in any hall I've been to, even when sitting on stage in he middle of the orchestra.

Aside from the obvious my impressions are based on the vinyl I have on hand I don't own any RR, Sheffield or MOFI silver discs, we might be applying different standards

.

david

microstrip said:
David,

Although some audiophile label recordings are dead and bland sounding I disagree with such generalization - the labels you refer have excellent recordings that do not sound hifi and highlight the performance not the sound. For example Reference Recordings chamber music recordings with the Chicago Pro Musica, the Ebony Concerto with John Bruce Yeh and DePaul University Jazz & Wind Ensemble are some of the most natural recordings in its genre I own. Some Wilson recordings of chamber music are excellent, not hifi like at all. Surely you need an adequate system to play them at their best, and here preference takes the lion share. Most of my Sheffield Lab recordings sound great, with plenty of emotion.

Audiophile recording bashing is a fashionable sport in many audiophile groups. Although many recordings deserve such bashing, IMHO many of them represent great moments of great emotion, recreating in our systems great music experiences. Surely no label, audiophile or not, has only excellent recordings.

BTW, some of them sound really good in digital and I only gave them the correct value in this format. But this a story for another thread!

microstrip · Apr 12, 2017

ddk said:
Hi Francisco,
I'm glad you found some you like. I have nothing to do with fashion in audiophile groups nor was I generalizing audiophile labels, I named specific ones and said based on the ones I own from those labels. With some I own nearly their entire catalog or what it was at the time and others maybe a dozen or less, stopped purchasing after hearing a trend. I own the Ebony Concerto you're referring to and I agree that the tonality is very good as it is on other RR records, at least on the original pressings, but that's not what bothers me with RR it's the balance and formula they use for their recordings that I found repetitive and boring. I never hear music in a hall sound the way orchestra is generally presented by RR, this one like others has the same signature loud and quiet passages with that eerie hollow depth that I find very distracting. You might like the effect, matter of preference like you said but that's not how an orchestra sounds in any hall I've been to, even when sitting on stage in he middle of the orchestra.

Aside from the obvious my impressions are based on the vinyl I have on hand I don't own any RR, Sheffield or MOFI silver discs, we might be applying different standards .

david

Perhaps you have a point on large orchestral pieces in the RR label - I do not own any of them. Curiously I never felt attracted by them - I listened just to samplers and did not enjoy them. Probably by the reason you outline... But on small orchestra and chamber several of their recordings really remember me of a life performance, including a realistic perspective when played in the proper system.

One of my strangest experiences with RR recordings was listening to the Eileen Farrell CD's - I do not remember which anymore. I always have considered them to sound bland and too full bodied lacking detail. However, more than once I listened to them sounding like a life performance - drama, holography, tone, breath - all the main characteristics needed for a very enjoyable performance.

Surely my best experiences with Sheffield are still with some of their great sounding (IMHO

) direct cuts I own and play from time to time.

bonzo75 · Apr 12, 2017

I had both RR and Living Stereo Scheherazade. The former had better recording, but something about it was less engaging and I always kept coming back to Living Stereo. But that is just one data point so don't have much to go by

microstrip · Apr 12, 2017

bonzo75 said:
I had both RR and Living Stereo Scheherazade. The former had better recording, but something about it was less engaging and I always kept coming back to Living Stereo. But that is just one data point so don't have much to go by

Perhaps you are just listening to Fritz Reiner / CSO versus Jose Serebrier/LPO ... In what sense do you consider that the RR had better recording?

bonzo75 · Apr 12, 2017

microstrip said:
Perhaps you are just listening to Fritz Reiner / CSO versus Jose Serebrier/LPO ... In what sense do you consider that the RR had better recording?

Yes those two. I forget now, but IIRC RR had more air, sounded smoother and more fluid. More dynamic range.

How are "Audiophile remasters" different than a "regular" remasters? How is the process different?

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