Last week was really all about Ethan and Kelly’s wedding so a good chunk of my energies were there starting with the rehearsal dinner. (The Al Gore movie review had been pieced together earlier, the Friday morning before the wedding was when I got around to completing and posting it.) With the festivities out of the way, now it’s time to blather on about the other cool development from last week.
I am a HUGE Split Enz fan ever since I bought the album Waiata (the US title forCorroboree) way back in 1985. When I bought my first CD player, the first disc I purchased was True Colours. I managed to purchase their entire catalog over the years but the biggest coup was acquiring the two Australian 1993 boxed sets containing all ten of the studio albums with two additional CDs of B-sides.
When my friend Chip at Waterloo Records told me about the new Split Enz remasters released to coincide with their Summer Reunion Tour, I had to have a set. He pulled through last year on Adam Ant’s remasters, so I knew he’d take care of me. I also have the remasters of the entire Eagles, Police and Talking Heads catalogs, most of Queen and a scattering of Peter Gabriel, INXS, Simple Minds, Sparks, Gary Numan, Eurythmics, David Bowie, Roxy Music, and Duran Duran. These are more than just CDs repackaged with an extra track or two thrown on and the volume cranked 20 dBs. Previous pressings (and usually any CD manufactured before the mid Nineties) were lousy compared to today’s standards because these were just direct transfers. Remasters are literally re-mastered recordings with time and effort expended in making these CDs sound “cleaner,” more clear and louder. Often the re-mastering is supervised by the original artist or in Split Enz’s case, the band member with the most technical expertise, Eddie Rayner. Skeptics would reply with a chorus of “so what” and “the improvements are only perceived” since there have been remaster scams in the past like the gold CDs or vinyl pressed from the master tapes. But I did some quick analysis with mine and I wanted to share my findings to make sure I wasn’t rationalizing these import CDs being $23 a piece.
The graphic below is a screen shot from the application Amadeus II showing the first verse of “Take a Walk” from the 1993 pressing. The sound peaks or waves are rather mediocre. When listening to it in Amadeus the song was rather low, almost muffled until the volume was raised 10-20 dBs.
Now the next graphic is Amadeus showing the same section of the 2006 pressing of “Take a Walk.”
Not only are the waves and peaks close to double of the 1993 version, Neil Finn’s vocals stand out over Eddie Rayner’s keyboards. As I looped these sections against each other, it became more apparent that the earlier one had a muddied quality to its sound. Thankfully Amadeus was more useful at making the differences more audible than iTunes.
I feel pretty vindicated over any skeptic who says differently about remasters. Now all I need is a huge cash windfall to get the XTC remasters and hope that Kate Bush re-masters her catalog.