Icarus wrote:Everything is compressed, it's almost the same volume level during all the track.
I apologise for the wall of text, but I've been analysing and listening to (and much more) these remasters for many, many weeks, so I have a lot to say about them.
The compression is the least of the problems with the new remasters. I've only just registered here, specifically so that I can comment on the quality of the new remasters. In general, they are terrible. It's not a complete loss though.
There are good things about the new remasters: imaging is better (ie. being able to pin-point where in the stereo "stage" a sound is coming from), bass is cleaner and seems to extend lower, and there is real high frequency content (which probably contributes to the better imaging). The live albums have expanded stereo (not sure if simulated stereo, or just an expansion of what was already there, by reducing the commonality/increasing the difference between channels). It's subjective whether this is good or bad (in the case of the Introduction on Destination Docklands, it's bad, assuming that's why the main sound seem missing and it all sounds like echo), but overall I like it.
But there are so many things wrong with them: the bass is waaaay too high. It overpowers everything, and that's what contributes to a lot of the DR loss (along with limiting, probably needed because the bass has pushed everything so loud). Also frequencies around 1kHz are boosted (which is also the case for E&R, but not to this level), which makes it sound like it was recorded in a tin can (to quote someone else here) - which is very obvious on Magnetic Fields Parts 2 and 4 - and the balance of the frequencies are all over the place. There are pops and clicks all the way through Oxygene and Equinoxe. It may be that they were always there, but very subdued due to the duller high frequency response of all previous releases, but whatever the reason, no attempt seems to have been made to remove them. There's an obvious tape drop-out in the left channel at about 4:37 into Oxygene Part 6. Much like the '97 remasters, the channels seem to have been randomly swapped - most noticeable in Equinoxe.
As an example, here is the spectrum (produced in Audacity) of the 'rolling and crashing waves' sounds between Oxygene Parts 5 and 6, specifically one of the higher frequency ones (is that a wave coming in to shore, or is it the water pulling out before a new wave crashes in?).
Here it is from my earliest CD version:
and here it is from the new remasters:
What's not so obvious there (due to the linear frequency scale) is the bump at 1kHz. It's meant to be filtered white noise, so in theory it should be fairly flat, like the first version. You can see a slight dip at around the 5kHz mark, or alternatively a slight boost from around 10kHz up, with a noticeable ramp up at 12.5kHz (more so than the earlier version). Anything above that, it's hard to say what it really should be - the really high frequencies could be dominated by noise or dither.
I expect that it's all been "mastered for iTunes", where the massive bass and 1kHz boost are designed to compensate for crappy standard iPod/iPhone headphones, and the excessive dynamic range compression helps with bad listening environments. I still don't understand why that kind of thing can't be left for what's sold on iTunes, and the CDs be left alone. I have a
very good sound system, and all the flaws are immediately obvious. When you have speakers that are larger than the average person (mine are 6' tall - taller than I am), with the volume to reproduce clean bass, all the boosted bass gets reproduced just fine and, as I said, overpowers everything. With a smaller set of speakers - such as bookshelf speakers, or even most headphones - you might not appreciate how much of a boost around 40-50Hz there is. If you're unlucky to have bass-reflex ported speakers tuned to around 100Hz or so, everything will sound just horribly boomy.
However, it's not a complete loss. The good thing about the new remasters is that they're consistent. That was the biggest issues I had with the '97 remasters - I didn't mind those versions of Oxygene and Equinoxe, but for example Magnetic Fields had stupidly loud low frequency bass (around 50Hz) in some tracks (eg. Part 4), while other tracks were fine. In a fit of "fury" over how terrible the new remasters are, but given the consistency of them, I decided to do something about it and I attempted to "fix" them.
Unfortunately of course, I only have access to 44.1/16 ripped from my CDs, but I used the best linear-phase equaliser I had, processing at 24bit, and went about "correcting" them. I used things like the filtered white noise between Oxygene Parts 5 and 6, and frequency sweep tones in Orient Express, and similar rising scales in the middle of Magnetic Fields Part 1, and various other things, to try to flatten out the response a bit. The second half of Magnetic Fields Part 1, and both Magnetic Fields Parts 2 and 4 were good references for how the ~1kHz boost needed attenuating. I had to pull the bass down around 3-4dB, drop around 1kHz about the same, push up frequencies around 5kHz. The trickiest part was removing the 1kHz boost without removing too much around it, and trying to remove enough bass to stop it all sounding muddy, without leaving the sound too lean or cool. I've probably listened to all the remasters all the way through about 100 times now, just going through this process.
So after tweaking, and tweaking, and tweaking some more, I eventually got something that I'm mostly happy with. There is still the issue of dynamic range compression, which unfortunately does cause some melodies that should (or used to) stand out from the rest, to just blend in too much, but still, in many respects what I've ended up with I like better than previous issues.
Just as a reference, here's a waveform of "The Emigrant", the last track of Destination Docklands, to show a before and after my equalisation:
And look at that, you can actually see a little detail in the waveform now that it's not dominated by bass!
With my re-equalisation, an album like Equinoxe, which sits mostly in the mid to mid-low frequencies, didn't change much in terms of sound or dynamic range - it being affected mostly by the 1kHz attenuation. It and Oxygene are fairly "wet" albums to begin with (lots of background "ambience" and echo/reverb, etc.) so they would likely never score really high DR values anyway - though of course they should be better than they are. Magnetic Fields is a much drier album, and its frequency content is spread across a much wider range and so it is affected much more by my equalisation, and shows some reasonable DR score improvements because of it. Destination Docklands is probably the worst for DR score, and benefits most from the attenuation of bass to a more natural level, and ends up with a decent DR bump because of it.
Clearly limiting has been applied, and that's produced a lot of the DR reduction. But the frequency balance and horribly boosted bass contributes a lot of the DR reduction too.
If people here could prove they own the remasters, I'd send them my versions, but that's impractical, if not impossible. Instead, I'll give you a small snippet of what the differences sound like:
Equalisation Comparison
This contains a small section of the white noise "crashing waves" between Oxygene Parts 5 and 6, a small bit from the beginning of Magnetic Fields Part 2 looped, and a small bit from the beginning of Magnetic Fields Part 4 looped. Each of those contains my re-equalised versions first, followed by the normal 2014 Remasters versions. I fully understand you might not like the sound of what I've done for re-equalisation, but I hope that it highlights the 1kHz problem at least.
Special thanks to Kanta/Jarregirl, who either set up what was required to get registrations allowed again, or prodded someone on my behalf to do it.
