Around year 2000 (+/- several years) I had acquired 3 different CD versions Jethro Tull's Benefit. Who I saw at the Los Angeles Forum once, maybe twice. Great.
Back to the CD's. One was an early version, another come a few years later, and the last one was "Remastered." I bought the remastered one because, well, if it was remastered that meant it was perfect, with no problems, right?
The three CDs all sounded different. Not a little different. All did somethings better, worse, of just different than the other two. The bass guitar on one was "flubby-tubby tubey-toobey. Too much. The bass on another one was incisive, taunt, tight, fast, articulate, tuneful, but etched and clinical. Also a bit too much, but the flubby bass was too much. The bass on the third was too low in volume. The vocals on one CD were waaay recessed. Maybe an abolute phase issue; maybe reversing speaker polarity? There were weird left/right balance issues on one, the list goes on.
As I said in the beginning, the really aggravating aspect was that all three did some things really good but other things really bad.
After reading the article on Mr. Wilson and what he has, or anyone, has to do to do real honest to gosh remastering, my hats off to him. My sympathies to anyone else who remasters recordings.
I'm seriously considering ditching all recorded music and getting into live acoustic music as my only music source. Kinda like a paleo diet, but this would be a pre-electronic age diet.
I have had similar experiences with different CD issues of the same album; some sound awful.
One of the great things about Qobuz is that it is often possible to find several versions of favourite albums and give them all a try to decide which sounds 'best'.
In my experience, the differences are huge. The worst sounding are almost always the 'High Resolution' versions.
All of the Steven Wilson albums I've listened to have sounded really, really good.
I also love live acoustic music, and it is very hard to recreate. Fortunately, I have many recordings which sound really 'natural', but I had to look hard to seek them out.
A great DAC, like the Yggy, certainly helps to recreate lifelike music, as do really good speakers, but none of the kit matters a jot if the recordings are rubbish!
I have a '70s album by a British band called Blue. I bought this debut album on vinyl when came out in '73. It didn't sell very well, but it is a great album.
It went out of print in the 90s and was unavailable on CD, so 12 years ago, I paid for a Pro Recording engineer to transfer my vinyl to CD as I no longer have vinyl playback.
I recently found that the album is available on CD (but only direct from a company connected with the songwriters in the UK,) so a few weeks ago, I bought a copy of this 'remastered' CD.
I bought it direct, so at least the artist got something back. .
To my amazement, my old CD which was made from a vinyl transfer, sounds waaaay better than the new, remastered CD.
This is after the convoluted process of coming off an old vinyl record, going through an ADC to get it on a CD, and then a DAC to get it back to analogue!
I think this just demonstrates that recording differences, including mastering/mixing, really do have a huge impact on sound quality.
