On: Investigating Rock Radio with Rick Beato

[at-fates-hands]

"It’s hard to imagine now just how much money the label industry made from reissuing its back catalog on $18.98 list price compact discs."

He forgot to mention they didn't even try to improve the quality of those reissues either. The labels put disclaimers on every one of those CD's that said all the original music was recorded on analog equipment so the "reproduction" may not be perfect.

I still vividly remember replacing my old U2 tapes (War, October, Boy) with their CD's and then being disgusted to find they sounded worse than my tapes did.

[elzbardico → at-fates-hands]

And then, a few years later they would make more money from this back catalog by selling "re-mastered" versions of the same albums again.

But, at least it seems that by now they had learned how to correctly do a CD from analog sources, so it was usually not a complete rip-off.

[shiroiuma → elzbardico]

The problem there was that some re-masters were really good, while others were even worse, with massive compression and clipping.

[hondo77 → elzbardico]

Then the deluxe versions.

Then the 24-bit remasters.

Then the flattened remixes (which are actually pretty nice).

Etc.

[mixmastamyk → at-fates-hands]

While I know many albums didn't get transferred to CD with great attention to detail in the 80s... they'd had to have gone out of their way to make the CD sound worse than cassette.