[78-L] Remastering

[DAVID BURNHAM]

Well, they have to justify their six-figure salaries, don't they? So when they are presented with anything "old," naturally, they have to "fix it" (with visions of Academy Awards swimming in their heads). Then you'll see them on the Discovery Channel, explaining how their miraculous work restored a piece of history, giving them a good, nice, warm glow all over.

Cary Ginell


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I don't know who in the business earns a six figure salary, but it is true that many remastering engineers don't recognize when to stop.  Obviously, if you have a CEDAR system with all the bells and whistles, you sometimes feel that the only way to justify having it is to ring every bell and blow every whistle.

One of my favourite sayings, (which I made up myself), is "Invention is the mother of necessity."  If you have a console sitting in front of you with 64 input channels, you feel rather silly only using two of them, even if that's all you need.  Equipment which you absolutely can't do without now was never missed a few years ago before it was invented.  As even a cursory comparison will tell you, the recordings made in the 50s and 60s by Mercury and RCA Victor, with only a handfull of mikes are arguably amongst the finest recordings ever made.  I know this sounds like the rantings of an old man but I have done such comparisons with young engineers and music lovers, blindly so that they don't know which one is which, and invariably the older recordings have won out.  

People hear what they want to hear.  I know a currently active musician who is a fanatic supporter of LPs over CDs.  I brought some CDs and their LP equivalents to him in a studio so he could point out the advantages of vinyl.  He did so quite eloquently but then I told him that since the LPs had been transferred to CDs before the comparison, any weakness, (noise, distortion), that that medium introduces would be present on the LPs we were listening to.  

I know, however, that vinyl does offer some distinct advantages over CDs but that's another story.