Music 1 - Richard Cook on the minutiae of remastering
It took the better part of a year to get here, but I finally received my turntable for playing so-called 78s a few weeks ago. Since most pre-1920 recordings actually spin correctly at anything between around 60 and 95rpm, you need a proper varispeed deck to hear them "right". Now I can hear the great Victorian comic Dan Leno doing his 1903 monologue "The Hard-Boiled Egg and the Wasp" without him sounding like a peevish chipmunk. But if you heard, say, one of the many exuberant ragtime records of a similar period at a few revolutions either side of what they really were, would you know the difference?
That kind of minutiae seems like the preserve of either the scholar or the fanatic. Yet major record companies are trying to make us all into the same kind of sonic nitpickers, if their steady insistence on upgrading their old records is taken at face value. Everyone knows that CD was the unrepeatable boon that revitalised decades of moribund catalogue: suddenly, all your scratchy old records were new and unblemished again and would be for ever and ever, thanks to the medium's durability. But that immortality has its business downside: now we have our CD libraries, we don't want any more, thank you.
So we are being persuaded that the perfect can be made more perfect by remastering again. And again. It's scarcely an exaggeration to say that the first ten years or so of CD remastering have now been generally dismissed as a botched job. We were only learning the technology, goes the wisdom, so now we have to do it again - and we think you should buy it again, even though we told you that you wouldn't have to do that sort of thing any more. The key to it seems to be the rate of analog-to-digital resolution, and the magic word is "bits". If you are up to 24-bit resolution, then you are that much nearer hearing a truer copy of the original source, the master tape. In an attempt to make buffs of us all, consider the attractions of the jazz label Blue Note's "Rudy Van Gelder Edition". Proudly trumpeted as the label's newest, 24-bit series, the current reissues have enlisted the aid of the original engineer, Van Gelder, who has used the latest processes on the records he himself taped the first time round.
I've spent fruitless hours arguing with more than one Blue Note admirer about the merits of the original vinyl against subsequent reissues, on CD and LP alike. Since Blue Note epitomises the jazz tradition for many collectors, its unique sound , as realised by RVG, is almost the sound of the hard bop legacy itself. The middle-distant horns, the oddly weightless piano and the ringing certainty of the rhythmic pulse - these are the counterfeit-proof currency of a whole era of jazz. Diehards are quite prepared to be disdainful about all but the finest original deep-groove vinyl pressings for their ability to release that sound into the atmosphere. I suspect it depends mostly on how much you spend on your hi-fi, but there's no denying the punch of the old LPs.
How do RVG's own "new" versions sound? The only album I have in US vinyl, "old" CD and the new 24-bit model is Dexter Gordon's splendid Go!. The vinyl still suffers from surface noise and inner-groove distortion, but it sure does go. The 1987 CD is nice and clean, if a bit muffled and recessed. But I still liked it, and there's no scratch or furry edges. The new CD starts with a shock: it's tremendously loud. When Billy Higgins begins to stroke his ride cymbal on the opening "Cheese Cake", it almost fries the ears at the same volume I had set for the previous CD. There's no question that the sound here is fuller and brighter. But it's also restored all the original tape hiss and, after ten minutes, it began to feel a bit tiring to listen to.
Do we need music to be made better and better? Whatever we heard first time around must have been pretty good: everything in the "RVG Edition" is something of an acknowledged classic anyway. It might sound that bit stronger and cleaner, but this is not the same as cleaning up a disfigured old master. As one executive told me about some old rock albums being transferred for something like the third time: "If we're going to sell these apples again, we're going to have to put them in a different bag this time."
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