80s/90s atlantic/atco remasters...
ako
https://soundcloud.com/a-ko 3,419 Posts
the other day at goodwill i found a sealed cassette of The Mar-Keys "That Great Memphis Sound"...but it was from the early 90s atlantic/atco remasters series. while most of the album sounded OK, it was all drenched in this gross stereo delay shit that just kinda killed it. and the second track the drums sounded like the good ol stax drums with a 909 snare instead or something. disgusting.did anybody buy these new and get sorely disappointed? i cant believe they'd do this on these recordings...
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wow.
my friend is a big ragtime piano fan. he bought a Scott Joplin CD one time and it was fucking MIDI re-creations. and with an awful "piano" sound too. we both just thought it was really funny.
i know the feeling though. my friend had some 2-disc reggae comp where a good 70% of the tracks had AWWWWWFUL midi backings. sometimes the same backing on multiple songs.
midi sax on a reggae track?
For some releases, the original CD pressings that came out in the late 80's were a lot better than what came out in the 90's and 00's. Reason? It seems remastering engineers did a lot better when they weren't aware of the potential of compact disc technology, most of them just did flat transfers of master tapes, or tapes that were readily available, and that was that. Once companies started using noise reduction systems like NoNoise, and better editing technology was possible, it seemed to change the quality of the recordings themselves. Some are better, some are just louder, but some are just awful.
The Atlantic/Atco remasters were generally good, I'm not sure who remastered those but I know Bill Inglot and Doug Hersch did a lot of great work for Rhino, and both of them did a fare share of WEA-related reissues back then before Warner Bros. realized they should just buy Rhino and use it as their reissue division. As for the extra reverb, if it's a stereo mix, maybe it's the nature of the mix itself, with effects that aren't in the mono mix. Fans were realizing for the first time that the stereo mixes made, often times done years after the mono hit version was released, were not as good as what they grew up with. Who is credited for the remastering on your CD?
i cant remember who was credited, id check but i left it at my parents house. the reverb was definitely added, but luckily thats the only change on most of the tracks. the one with the drum-machine sounding snares was one of the worst things ive ever heard though. wonder if that lone track was remastered by a different person?
One of the worst things like this I ever heard was some ZZ Top. Apparently when they first released their back catalog on CD in the 80's for some reason they thought it would be a good idea to go back and re-record some of the stuff on the albums. The really egregious part about it is they were using that shitty MIDI drum set in the 80's so all that gritty old ZZ Top music now had crappy MIDI drums and horrible 80's reverbs and such. This is from their entry on Wikipedia:
"In 1987, they released the three-disc set, The ZZ Top Six Pack. When Warner chose to remaster six select albums from 1970 to 1981, they (along with the members of ZZ Top) remixed the back catalog to make it sound like their new music output. All the drum tracks were re-recorded and other random digital effects were applied."
The first time I ever heard "It's Only Love" by ZZ Top I loved the drums on it so I searched online for an mp3 of the song. This was back in the days of Napster or Audiogalaxy or something. The mp3 I downloaded was one of those 80's remixes/re-recordings and it blew goat balls. If I can find an mp3 of it somewhere I'll post a link so you can see just how craptastic it is.
this is kinda how the mar-keys thing seemed. i dont remember which track had the horrible sounding drums, but it was only one song on the whole tape. there was gross 90s sounding reverb over most of the album, but only one song seemed like it was REALLY fucked with....
please do!!! i really wanna hear this. i cant even imagine that song with midi drums.
Since then, I seem to remember reading that the original Z.Z. Top albums have been reissued again with the CORRECT drum sound.
Hmmm, you sure about that?
My copy of the Contours' Do You Love Me is an eighties "reissue" too, but the title track is the hit version we know, with no retouching. If anything, I will add that the track selection is not quite the same as the original. Some songs have been replaced by other cuts that came out AFTER "Do You Love Me" (like "It's So Hard Being A Loser," which wasn't on the original album). But apart from this alteration...sounds alright to me.
As many reissues of old soul joints as I bought in the eighties, I have YET to hear any MIDI-ed remixes...I thought that kind of thing only happened with foreign reissues of old Mexican rock & roll bands from the '50s and '60s.
Yes - from what I recall the results were horrendous.
I heard a CD of the pre-Motown J5 material in the late 90s that was all synthed-out too.
yes, they redid the drums on all of their classic LPs for that series of CDs, gross...the drums on the OGs sound amazing...Terry Manning (the engineer on those classic LPs) is the great unsung when it comes to recording/mixing drums....a true master..check out Led Zep III, or his own solo LP "Home Sweet Home" on enterprise for top shelf non-ZZ examples of Terry's prowess...
Holy shit, I grabbed the Manning LP randomly and love it, had not idea he producved that stuff... !
Yeah, I just bought that CD at a flea market for $5 last summer. Highlight: "A Change Is Gonna Come," where the 1990's band has a hard time keeping up with the 1960's band, who sound like they don't have the faintest idea what the chord changes are. Best comedy album I've heard since Electric Mud.
not producer but engineer...ZZ Top started recording all thier shit at Ardent here in Memphis, starting with their 2nd LP...Jimmy Page had Led Zep III mixed by Manning at Ardent as well...
Well, here it is... It's not really MIDI drums. It's real drums, but they used 80's effects to make them sound similar to the ZZ Top sound from the 80's. Basically, the drums are drenched in a horrible 80's sounding digital reverb of some sort, and the drums are re-recorded and lack a lot of the funky groove the original had, and they definitely lack any punch whatsoever.
WOW.
awful.
during the break, you can hear the original shining through, the snare rolls sound pretty much untouched, but the main snare hits sound like somebody dropping a matress in a gymnasium....disgusting.