Rov_Scam
3hr ago
I've believed for a long time that conspiracy theories in general are a cope to deal with the fact the people who are in charge of our institutions are just people, like everyone else, and even when competent, they simply aren't capable of being perfect all the time. When there's universal agreement that things like presidential assassinations, mass shootings, and terrorist attacks shouldn't happen, and shouldn't be able to happen, it's oddly reassuring to blame them on the malevolence of a shady cadre of global elites because if this is the case, then the solution—getting rid of the malevolent actors—is simple. If instead such tragic events can happen despite competent, well-meaning, hard-working people doing their jobs, this lack of control makes things much scarier.
I don't want to dwell on dark subjects, so I'll go back to media remastering, which is about as low-stakes as you can get. For the past decade or so, I've made a habit of chasing down the best-sounding versions of audio recordings I want to add to my collection. In a rational world, this would mean simply finding the most recent releases, since one would normally expect that the continuing improvement of technology and best practices would yield increasingly superior results. Of course, you don't have to get too into the weeds to know about the "loudness wars" in CD (and now digital) mastering has hobbled sound quality since the late 90s, leading some to believe that the earlier versions when they didn't do this must be superior, but even then the answer is not always clear cut. And even going back to the original vinyl doesn't solve the problem. With any given release possibly having dozens of unique versions, finding the best one through trial and error would be expensive (especially if you're trying to get your paws on rare or foreign issues), and there are no quick and dirty rules you can follow.
The best resource for researching this is the Steve Hoffman forum, hosted by the namesake mastering engineer known for his high-quality audiophile issues. While Mr. Hoffman's warm, buttery sound is controversial, his forum attracts people from the industry, and there's a lot of inside baseball regarding the way things actually operate, a lot of it coming from Steve's own recollections. While things have changed in the recording world since the introduction of the compact disc and subsequent changeover to all-digital recording, an explanation of how the process worked in the vinyl era is instructive on the pitfalls of trying to remaster older recordings for CD.
Say an album is recorded in 1975. The band recorded that album to multitrack tape. Once the recording was finished, the engineers mixed the album down to a two-tack stereo tape, called the studio master, at which point their role in the process ended. But the tape still had to make it onto a vinyl record. The studio master, or a copy, would be sent to a mastering studio where this conversion was done. The limitations of the format required that bass be cut and treble boosted on the record according to a standardized formula, the end user's equipment reversing this process during playback (this is why a special phono preamp is required to use a record player with a stereo). The mastering engineer would also make other adjustments so that the recording would fit within vinyl's physical limitations and make large scale adjustments to ensure that all the tracks had similar volume, equalization, etc. This resulted in a "production master" which the mastering engineer would use to cut a wax "laquer" (more adjustments were made during this process; the art of cutting vinyl is mostly lost and most modern reissues sound like crap because of it), which was plated with metal and thus became a "mother". The mother was used as a mold to create "stampers", which were sent to pressing plants for the manufacture of the final disc. It should be noted that copies of the studio master would be sent to foreign labels or distribution arms in other countries, and these would create their own production masters and laquers for their domestic releases. Both the mothers and the stampers wore out with use, and popular albums would need to be cut again for reissues.
Fast forward ten years and you're a young mastering engineer who just got a job with Major Label. Both you and your employer are excited about the burgeoning digital revolution and they want you to put together a CD release of the 1975 album, which was very popular. Since compact disc doesn't require the same compromises that vinyl did, you want to use the studio master to ensure the best possible sound and as accurate a representation as possible of what the original engineer intended. You quickly realize, however, that this will be impossible, since the record was a British release and you're working for the American label that owns the rights to it, and with your deadline you don't have time to make inquiries to see if you can get the tape on loan. To make matters worse, a series of mergers and acquisitions in the past decade means that even at home, tapes have been stashed hither and yon and no one seems to have any idea about where everything is or even what anything is, since nothing is clearly marked with anything other than a track listing. Some tapes are nth generation copies that sound terrible, one was split up oddly for an 8-track release, one has interesting mastering choices that make it sound wholly different than any version you've ever heard, several are okay, several are Eq'd for vinyl and will require processing to make usable, and one has "DO NOT USE!" written on the box in magic marker.
Of course, the one with cautionary language was the best sounding by far, and in your time crunch, you don't have time to ask questions so you just ignore the warning and master the album without asking any questions. You find out later that this was indeed the copy that had been sent over from the UK, and it was marked Do Not Use because it wasn't a production copy with RIAA equalization and if it had been used to cut a lacquer it could have ruined an entire pressing. Six years later no-noise is invented and the label wants to release a "better" version that takes advantage of the new technology to eliminate the tiny amount of tape hiss audible on the CD issue you made. But by this time you've moved on and the engineer, in a time crunch, takes the warning literally and uses an inferior copy that requires him to crank the noise reduction up to 11, absolutely killing the recording. Your original remaster was fine, and any benefits of additional noise reduction would have been dubious at best, but this new improved version supersedes the old one and is now the only thing available in the US market. Then ten years after that the British label decides to do a global deluxe edition touting that it was "from the original master tapes", which was true, except by now the loudness wars are in full swing and the whole thing is compresses to shit.
Meanwhile, back in 1986 the British label exec decided that the CDs should sound as close to the original albums as possible, and specified that the production masters should be used. The Dutch couldn't find their own tapes, so they requested the master tapes from the British label, and were given the actual master tapes for their 1989 domestic release, which is clearly superior to every other available release, but they started using the US mastering 2 years later. So now you're looking to buy the CD and you're confronted with a bevy of options. The 2002 global release is available in any store but sounds harsh and overcompressed. It's an ear-bleeder. The 1991 US version is readily available on the used market but sounds even worse. The old British version is easily available and sounds okay but not great. The original US version is kind of hard to find and sounds better than the British version but still has its problems. And the 1989 Dutch version is obviously the best, but it was only in production for 2 years and used copies go for top dollar.
The point of all of this is that no one intended for there to be a whole bevy of crappy releases. Record companies had discovered a gold mine in reselling albums their customers had already bought, and to do so they had to tout some improvement over the previous sound. So they latched on to anything they could find that was technically true, regardless of whether it was the best possible version or even an improvement over the original vinyl. I highly doubt the Mad Men errors were part of a cynical ploy to drum up publicity through a fuck up, because I don't see what they have to gain. The show is from 2007 so it's not like anything is going to require a great deal of restoration. The whole 4k thing is a marketing gimmick because the benefits over 1080p are dubious to begin with on most televisions, and are completely obviated by whatever lossy compression algorithm they're using. As long as it's technically in 4k they haven't lied, and the goal is to get the product out as cheaply and quickly as possible. They probably sent out the wrong files to production, or raw, unedited files, and asked for a conversion into 4k, and didn't bother to verify anything. This isn't a restoration that's done frame by frame but a combination of computer upscaling and rescanning film at higher resolution. They weren't paying anyone to pick over all 100 hours or whatever with a fine-toothed comb.
So there were obvious mistakes, but they'll be fixed in a week, and nobody will care or even remember after that. I certainly don't think a significant number of people are going to subscribe to HBO Max now because they didn't know about the 4k version of Mad Men, at least not enough to doubling production costs.
My cousin works for Verizon and says no. He says that what's going on is that Facebook is just showing you the same ads as your friends, which could happen if they search for something you were talking about and you don't. There's selection bias here, too; nobody accounts for all the times they talked about something and weren't shown an ad for it.
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