Song You Loved Until You Try It On Your End-game Headphones

In my experience this is not rare. I see it as following from a few things:

  • Until the 1990s and the arrival of home PC recording tools, it cost a fortune to book hours in the top studios and pay the best engineers to record your music. See the documentary Sound City (2013) for the economics of the era. Studio time was a hidden cost during the LP, cassette, and CD era as the profit margins were huge. However, if you followed emerging, second-tier, or independent artists they’d often have to work with inferior equipment and/or staff.

  • Contemporary streaming sources contract for access to master digital files. These are obtained from archives and have perfect quality. Per my comparisons with old CDs, the studios seemingly execute de facto ‘remastering’ to get fresh copies or clean up old tracks. Even if nothing was changed, the new files don’t have to suffer degradation with media transfers.

  • I recently compared Tidal, Qobuz, and Amazon HD. Of the three, Tidal has a slightly creamy, dreamy sound quality. This can indeed be pleasant and smooth out the rough edges from some releases, but it isn’t true to the originals either. In some cases I like it and in other cases I don’t.

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I had an unusual experience with this recently. When I first heard Billie Eilish’s “when the party’s over”, through AirPod Pros I loved it. Then I made the mistake of listening to it on my headphone system, and … oy! Terrible! A complete mess, clearly mastered to sound good on really shitty gear. I was so disappointed. Fast forward a few months to earlier this week, after my new headphones arrived, I was looking for things to listen to, spotted that track and decided to see if it was as bad as I remembered Then I noticed that Tidal have a new Master version. "OK, " I thought, “let’s see if high-res crap sounds as bad as CD-quality crap”. Hit play, and got a huge surprise. They’ve remastered it! And it actually sounds really good on high-end gear. I guess winning a Grammy or six means studios care what your music sounds like.

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Thanks for the clarification :slight_smile:

Didn’t mean to derail the topic.

Back in the day, liked tears for fears, especially album ‘the hurting’ and Depeche Mode and the Cure… Now a lot of it just sounds flat and lifeless and monotonic.

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All good! Thank you for sharing :smile:

Excellent content. Really great stuff. I like to listen to some older stuff from the 60’s and 70’s and oftentimes hear some hiss that gets cleaned up on different versions of the recordings.

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You’d think they’d have figured out a way to remove that by now but its probably too ingrained in to the original music that removing it would likely alter it. A lot of classic jazz recordings are plagued by tape hiss and it brothers me to no end.


I know some folks here dread the term “remastered” but I would wager the term “mastered for iTunes” is even more cringe inducing. Actually I have come across some remastered stuff here and there that does sound OK. Most recently some Tracy Chapman (absolute legend IMO).

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Not a fan of hiss myself and I would choose a remaster one a crackle hiss ridden track if i had the choice. I love Tracy Chapmans stuff. Such a great voice along with great songs. She’s done some catchy tunes.

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