I find it crazy that some people actually prefer their old CDs rather than a brand new, remastered, edition of the same CD. I bought a collection of Grace Jones' old hits on a newly remastered anthology, and I've discovered many things I didn't notice in the original first-print CDs. When a song is remastered it sounds a lot better in my ears, and I think it's strange that some people actually prefer older editions of Compact Discs.

Which do you prefer?

Well, I can see where you're coming from definitely, though I don't think it's that weird to prefer older versions of the CD. If we could bring vynal into the subject, I'd choose high-quality CDs over vynal most of the time, but if it's something like jazz then I prefer it on vynal, I love that warm sound. So, basically I think it's down to what type of music it is really.

I actually prefer vinyl when it comes to a certain kind of music as well. Disco has made a game out of releasing this outrageous "picture disc" LPs, and they always come out looking amazing.

So, yeah, I suppose it depends on the kind of music you're listening to.

It also depends on when the originals were recorded and how, and how good of equipment they used when remastering it. Since music used to be recorded through analog tecniques it's not as simple to just transfer it to digital. The sound waves on an analog recording are smooth and and can capture even the smallest details that digital recording can only come close to by using a shit ton of bandwith. The sound waves on digital are "blocky" I guess is a good word to use. Just like any images you see that are digitally made if you zoom in close enough you can see all the squares and straight lines made up to make the bigger picture. Digital breaks the sound into binary, analog is a continuous flow. If you record something in digital right off the bat, you don't have the problem of losing stuff because you recorded it digitally and if you record it well in digital, the sound will be better than analog and not miss out on the smallest details. If you record poorly in digital you'll be missing some of the smallest and fainter sounds. And if you transfer from analog to digital you change that smooth wave into a blocky one and naturally lose some information. So the questions are what kind of sound is being remastered, and who is doing the process and what equipment is being used to do it? Sometimes it's better to stick with originals (if they were recorded well, because analog deteriorates over time). And, there's the nostalgia factor...if you grew up with the album as a kid back in the 70s and they remaster it on digital today, it doesn't have the same exact sound even if your copy was shit, it's what you grew up with.

personally, i don't care, as long as it's actually available. although i know people were kicking up a fuss about the remastering on the new beatles album, saying it sounds much better, so you know, whatever?

I can understand how some people can settle for original sound quality, and sometimes there isn't much of an option to upgrade. But if I can angle towards getting a remastered version of any album, I'm going for it. It sure as hell beats continually fiddling with the volume, so that the next album I'd pull out doesn't blow my fucking brains out of my head, due to amplified volume needed for the original pressing.

Sometimes remasters and remixes etc are genuinely worse, case in point: Megadeth's Rust in Peace