Are there some albums that are so badly recorded that no matter how much better you try too make them they will allways suffer from mediocrity?

this most often occurs with movies.

its usually a waste of money however for Yellow Submarine it was very very well done.

i bought it on DVD a couple years ago. loved watching it as a kid.

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Of course.

I've tried the remastering route on my Mac a few times (using Soundworks, T-Racks, Cubase), and usually only wound up mucking up the recordings even more when I went back to compare the finished to the original track. Mastering recording is a damn art form!

i'm still working on a way to restore dynamics on heavily compressed rock recordings like "ok computer". by putting a track into cooledit, you can see where the producer's compressor chops off the dynamics--it shows up a straight line in dynamic peaks. usually they are using some form of soft-limiter, so some louder transients (drum hits, bass) will poke out above the compressed area. then i use the de-compressor filter in cool edit and set the values right at where the compression squashed the dynamics. it is very hard to get it just right without making the drum hits jump out too much, but i am still working on it.

for recordings where for whatever reason the eq is wrong (like "tin can cymbols" and thin watered-down bass) i can usually tweak the eq to fix it. again, it is very hard to do right, and often it can sound worse than before if you screw it up.

redshifter, if you ever find out a good, easy way to restore dynamics to compressed recordings, please let me know how to do it!

After seeing "save our sounds" on the history channel I feel like with enough care and patience, just about anything can be restored to a reasonable quality.