RE: Mothership vs Remasters question etc.

[Steve Thomson <zeppelin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It's too early to tell how John Davis's Mothership
remasters will sound compared to the early 90's Marino
remasters (sometimes referred to as the Page remasters
since he sat in on some of the sessions. George Marino
at Sterling Sound actually did the work). The initial
samples online are not the best indicator perhaps but
they seem to be quite good. One of the keys to good
remastering is locating the absolute best master tapes
and then using the proper playback equipment to get
the most sound out of them (plus the tape machine
needs to be set up properly). Ice magazine a few years
back claimed that the original master tape for Led
Zeppelin II was lost back in the 70's when someone
supposedly left in the backseat of a car or something.
I don't know how true that is. I've also heard that
Jimmy Page has the absolute original master in his
collection so the one lost was an Atlantic copy of it.

I just hope David resists the temptation to overuse
digital compression to try and make the Zeppelin CDs
sound loud and amd/or boosting the upper
midrange/lower treble to try and make the recording
sound clearer. The only way to make a CD sound loud is
to compress the music, which squashes the waveforms of
the music. In Zeppelin's case, it means that those
incredible drum transients would cease to sound like
real drums. Plus, compressing the music increases its
overall density making everything less distinct. To
compensate, the mastering engineer has to crank the
treble and upper midrange, which in turn increase
listening fatigue.

I did see a graphic of the waveform from the
Mothership version of Communication Breakdown posted
on the Hoffman forum. It didn't look too bad at all
for 2007 standards. There was some obvious digital
compression that removed some of the loudest
transients but there was still some space in the
music, so overall it should sound good.



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