What do you mean? They were remastered, and the sound quality is fine.
Yes i know they have been remasterd in 1993 jjs , but have'nt things have moved on since then ? I recently got Dennis Wilson's "Pacific Ocean Blue" on CD and the sound quality on this newly remasterd CD is far superior to Paul's CD's .
I remember reading how much work Paul put into recording the song "Penny Lane". The instruments and vocals were recorded and re-recorded until he got the precise sound he was looking for. He was a perfectionist in the studio, with his (as well as John's) songs. Then I listen to 'McCartney' and I hear a collection of unfinished 'White Album' and 'Let It Be' rejects, songs that are both lyrically and musically incomplete, amateurishly recorded, and wonder what the hell he was trying to do.
This is Paul from a 1974 Rolling Stone interview with Paul Gambaccini:
Seeing that Let it Be was released basically after the fact, do you wish it had not been released?
Oh, no. I don't wish that about anything. Everything seems to take its place in history after it's happened and it's fine to let it stay there.
It was the first album to have the little bits on, like the type that also a appeared on McCartney.
I rather fancied having just the plain tapes and nothing done to them at all. We had thought of doing something looser before, but the albums always turned out to be well produced. That was the idea of the whole album. All the normal things that you record that are great and have all this atmosphere but aren't brilliant recordings or production jobs normally are left out and wind up on, say, Pete Townshend's cutting floor. It ends up with the rest of his demos.
But all that stuff is often stuff I love. It's got the door opening, the banging of the tape recorder, a couple of people giggling in the background. When you've got friends around, those are the kinds of tracks you play them. You don't play them the big finished produced version.
Like "Hey Jude," I think I've got that tape somewhere, where I'm going on and on with all these funny words. I remember I played it to John and Yoko and I was saying, "These words won't be on the finished version." Some of the words were, "The movement you need is on your shoulder," and John was saying, "It's great! 'The movement you need is on your shoulder.'" I'm saying, "It's crazy, it doesn't make any sense at all." He's saying, "Sure, it does, it's great." I'm always saying that, by the way, that's me, I'm always never sure if it's good enough. That's me, you know.
So when McCartney came along I had all these rough things and I liked them all and thought, well, they're rough but they've got that certain kind of thing about them, so we'll leave it and just put it out. It's not an album which was really sweated over, and yet now I find it's a lot of people's favorite. They think it's great to hear the kids screaming and the door opening, it's lovely.
Yes i know they have been remasterd in 1993 jjs , but have'nt things have moved on since then ? I recently got Dennis Wilson's "Pacific Ocean Blue" on CD and the sound quality on this newly remasterd CD is far superior to Paul's CD's .
Either I don't understand this, or you don't understand what's involved in "mastering". "Mastering" involves equalization, level matching (so that some songs don't sound louder than others), compression (to reduce the difference between loud and soft sounds), limiting (to avoid clipping i.e. saturation) and noise reduction (to reduce hum and hiss).
All audio that was originally intended for vinyl (or tape) must be remastered for CD, because the equalization and compression (among other things) is optimized and best suited for that particular media. For example, Vinyl can't handle a huge dynamic range, so music mastered for vinyl tends to be more heavily compressed than it would need to be for CD, which has a much larger dynamic range.
There are situations where the initial remastering for CD was quite poor. My first copy of "All Things Must Pass" was poorly remastered for CD. There was tons of hiss from the source tapes, and quite a lot of missing high frequencies. The songs sounded hissy and dull. Remastering of these poorly remastered albums was a necessity.
But Paul's remastered recordings were properly remastered, and short of simply "modifying" the sound with equalization or unintended harmonic enhancement, there's not much you can do to "improve" the sound. No, there isn't that much difference between now and 1993, as far as digital audio goes. Digital is digital.
"Remastering" in the context that most people are used to, is nothing more than the recording industry's way of separating idiots from their money. Especially when recordings are "remastered" that were originally recorded digitally and released on CD (DDD). This is a plain waste of money. Save yourself the hundreds of dollars you'd otherwise spend, and learn to use your graphic equalizer. The results will be pretty much the same.
Now... REMIXING is another thing entirely. I'd like to see all of Paul's (and the Beatles) recordings remixed and re-released. As far as the Beatles goes, If you have the Yellow Submarine re-release, those songs were reconstructed from the multitrack recordings and remixed for true stereo, while remaining as true as possible to the originals. I'd love it if all their albums were re-released this way (with the original versions too, for the purists).
I'd like to see Paul's 70's stuff remixed, bringing the drums and bass and guitars a little more forward in the mix, as well as being re-EQed and processed. Perhaps 5.1 or surround mixes?
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