Are you on board with remastered music?

[The Curmudgeon]

I won £100 of vouchers at work last week, so instead of buying like, food and shit, I spent the whole lot on CD's.

Maybe it's a hint of my advancing years or the fact there's barely any new music worth investing in, but most of the records I bought were remastered editions of music I already owned.

Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness 2014 remaster. Every Blur album remastered. And there's always that nagging voice in the back of your head saying you're part of some Emperors New Clothes experiment and you can't actually notice any difference..you just THINK you can because you WANT to hear the difference.

Of course, one listen to the difference between the first disc of the remastered "Modern Life is Rubbish" Blur album from 1993 and then the original untouched audio of the second disc of b-sides was enough to prove that, yes, remastering definitely is more of a thing than putting the same album in a nice box.

But do you think it's worth investing in? I'm now of the mindset of getting my top ten ever albums in a remastered format (I'll have to wait for Prince to get in on the act) but is is something you bother with at all?

[trashcanman]

I don;t rush out to buy every new edition of every album I like as a rule, but some classic music really does need to be remastered. A lot of amazing music was just kind of thrown from cassettes onto discs in the 90's and it shows. Old school punk, metal, and hip-hop albums especially need the remaster treatment. Records like Paul's Boutique, It Takes a Nation of Millions, and Damaged would probably sound fucking incredible remastered, but we've been stuck with low rent audio for all these years on some of the best music ever recorded. I just bought an Anthrax remastered box set of albums I had previously owned, but they were on tape originally so it was a damn good buy. I waited a long time for those remasters.

[The Curmudgeon]

Yeah I don't automatically snatch up any remastered records, just sit and look longingly at them on the shelf. I would seriously love the Nirvana albums again..

It is odd the albums that do get the remaster treatment and the ones who don't: I'm not 100% sure the Pixies albums have been rereleased yet but they should surely be in the pipeline. And Prince - get with the fucking program, dude.

So any albums besides the ones you mentioned that you're seriously waiting for a better release?

[trashcanman]

I wouldn't say "waiting" since I'm not really following music releases very closely, but I haven't bought any old Testament albums since I bought their "best of" and the sound was shit. If they rereleased The New Order or something, I'd snap that up for sure. Husker Du's catalogue could absolutely use some serious remastering too. Pretty much anything pre-90's that hasn't been remastered yet should be.