I was recently checking out the new version of London Calling that came out a few years ago. This edition is marketed as remastered, but after replaygaining it and listening to it and the original back to back I was surprised to find it was exactly the same as the original cd mastering. The only change is the album gain of -2.68 dB on the original versus -6.54 dB on the remastered edition.

I've noticed this with some other cds as well. Have I stumbled on some vile marketing conspiracy? Anyone else have examples of other albums that do this?

Is the pope catholic?

It's an extremely well-known issue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

I am familiar with the loudness war. I had thought that was a cd was marketed as remastered that it meant that had a gone in and messed with the levels of original master tapes in relation to each other as opposed to just taking what they had now and just turning the master volume level up.

Just think, if everyone used replay gain the loudness war would look pretty silly and record labels would abandon it.

Remastered usually just means that it's compressed to compete with current CDs in loudness.


They would need brains to realize that, but if they had brains they wouldn't have started the loudness war in the first place...

I don't like compressed music. But I can't understand one thing. Why are all old records on CDs made with peak level at about -10 - -15 dB? Isn't peak level realy peak? Why not to adjust it to 0 dB? Why not to get better signal/noise ratio? Where is my mistake?

You're right with that, that's how a good remaster could be. But in reality remaster == dynamic compression to raise the percieved loudness during playback.

Maybe... It would defeat the purpose to some extent. But, ReplayGain doesn't undo compression.

ReplayGain and loudness-wars compression are actually doing similar things! The record producers are trying to make every part of every song equally loud, and ReplayGain is trying to make all songs have equal average/perceived volume.

P.S. I'd better clarify before I get flamed.. I'm not saying ReplayGain is evil like compression. ReplyGain is linear and it does not mess-up the dynamics of the performance!

I haven't checked all of my CDs, but I think most CDs (even older recordings) are normalized to 0dB overall. There is usually one or more 0dB peaks somewhere on the CD, but some individual songs on the album are intended to be louder than others.

[quote name='DVDdoug' date='Feb 12 2008, 15:47' post='546997']
[quote]. . . but some individual songs on the album are intended to be louder than others.
[/quote]

Yes, for example Dire Straits - On Every Street. Very big difference in loudness between some tracks.

Regarding peak level of old CDs - you can check your EAC logs.

These are two very different things. Dynamic range compression is changing the volume over periods of milliseconds. Replay Gain is changing the volume once per song (3 minutes or so)

Are you sure that you've measured the unaltered (no dsp) audio levels ?
In my experience the peak levels on "old" CD's are pretty close to 0 dBFS.

Could it be that you mistake peak level with something else (average level?).
A clear mistake is to say all old ..CDs

I have come accross CD's (made in the 80's) with peak level around -4 or -3 dB, but never as low as what you mention.
And BTW some of these "analog recordings" sounded much better when they were "remastered" 10 years later (the 90's). In that time "remastered" became synonym with improved. The record companies keep releasing "remasters" even now (as was said) they often totally miss the point of sound quality.

I know of a few "24-bit digitally remastered" CDs that are actually remastered from the previous CD release. Whether that's due to laziness, or because the master tapes were unavailable or unusable, it still seems like a scam to me.