Most people are not that bothered about which particular remastering they get. If you’re listening to Olivia on a phone with earbuds, feel free to skip this as lunatic fringe material, and enjoy the music ;) Some people do care, so the differences matter to them. Particularly if you are buying CDs secondhand, then read on. If you know that you care, then just skip to the remasterings listing. The vast majority, I'd guess 95%, don't care and enjoy Olivia as she is. If that's you, it doesn't make you less of a fan, and your life is a little bit easier. Stop right here and listen to Olivia, as you were. Some people are just a little bit obsessive ;)
Overview
Olivia reached the high-water mark of her commercial success with the Physical album in 1981. The audio Compact Disc was introduced1 in 1982, so this places the bulk of her commercial success in the days of analogue vinyl LPs and analogue cassettes. Olivia did, of course, continue to record for four more decades, but future releases were released digitally, starting with 1985’s Soul Kiss. For anything after this, the first released CD2 will be what Olivia and her recording engineers meant you to hear.
The sound from analogue tape degrades rapidly as copies are staged on from another, even with professional equipment. Greatest Hits recordings involved more generation loss 3 because you needed to copy the songs to make the tape from which the album was cut. The generation loss problems went away with digital recording.
Analogue tape slowly degrades with time, just minding its own business sitting on a shelf, hopefully in a controlled environment. You have to transfer the analogue tape to digital to make a CD. The MCA CD issue MCAD-1676 of Have You Never Been Mellow in 1987 will by definition be from a younger analogue master (12 years old) than the Festival digitally remastered version D21046 in 1998 if we are to believe the implication 4 that they went back to the analogue master tape, which would be nearly twice as old by then.
Confusingly, mastering can mean either getting the final stereo mix from a multitrack recording session5, and the track sequence of the album, or taking such a stereo master tape, which is as close as you get to the definitive version of the album, and adjusting this for a medium such as vinyl, or for audience taste and commercial success. I will use remastering for this second process. Thus:
Remastering usually means taking the definitive stereo master, and changing something about it before making the CD. In the case of Olivia’s work, digital releases of her music originally released on analogue formats are remastered, from a digital copy of the analogue stereo mastertape.
The limitations of vinyl
The mechanical process of making and playing vinyl records imposes some limitations on what you can record. Some things that were done with CD just couldn’t be done with vinyl - the loudness war6 wasn’t really allowed on vinyl by the technology. Vinyl couldn’t reproduce everything on a professional quality stereo master tape. It usually needed some equalisation and some processing - for instance vinyl has problems with sibilance on ‘s’ sounds. In the days of vinyl, mastering for vinyl involved compensating for these aspects of the medium, sometimes emphasising higher frequencies towards the inner grooves of the record, which had a lower linear velocity and were more prone to distortion. Mastering for a decent result on vinyl was more art than science, by all accounts.
Not all Olivia fans grew up listening to the same sound
Olivia fans who followed her musical career as she released her albums will have grown up used to the sound of her vinyl albums. By definition, if you grew up listening to Olivia on vinyl releases, you are probably at least middle-aged or indeed coming up to retirement age, because Physical, released in 1981 is over 40 years ago ;) You probably replaced your vinyl records with CDs, from the first wave of releases, the MCA issues.
Other fans may have come across Olivia more recently. You will be more used to modern remastering practice, which tends to be for a reduced difference between loud and soft sounds, called audio compression. This tends to make a track sound louder, and in a commercial environment, a louder track is usually favoured. Music is also listened to on the move a lot more now, some audio compression can make it easier to follow in a noisy environment like public transport or a car. This was something that you just couldn’t do with vinyl, there simply was no 33 rpm LP Discman ;) You will be used to a different type of sound, and you may prefer a different remastering.
why some people get het up about this
The trend towards more audio compression was taken too far with CD, particularly after 2000. This resulted in ‘brickwalled’ CDs where the music was relentlessly loud7. Audio compression is a form of distortion, and what has once been lost can never be regained. This reached its low-water mark with Metallica’s Death Magnetic. Once a CD has been remastered that way, you can't un-remaster it to get original differences between loud and soft passages back. This can be wearing to listen to. Olivia gets some of her expression by the dynamic contrast between soft and loud, and this matters to some of her fans.
Streaming saved us from this battle, as they level8 playback to the same subjective level - as unlock your sound say
back in the CD days, it was common practice to master something beyond its potential just to compete. The problem now is that those songs are being turned down by the platforms. What was a loud song yesteryear is now just an over-compressed one that’s no louder than anything else. If it still sounds great, that means it was the right loudness and dynamics for the song. Often, it was not.
When it comes to Olivia’s work, there are several tranches of CD remasterings. You may prefer one series over another.
- Wikipedia “It [CD] was then released in October 1982” ↩
- There may be some variation in CD mastering for different countries’ tastes, but that’s a rabbit-hole I don’t want to go down here. For the sake of argument, the first-release US CD will do. ↩
- Colinu on SHF “Back in the days of analog, greatest hits compilations were assembled from copies. This meant that they were an additional generation away from the master.” ↩
- An alternative interpretation of digitally remastered is ‘rebalanced, and, by 1998, possibly more compressed to suit 1998 expectations’ but sourced from the 1987 digital transfer. I don’t know the details. There’s speculation the analogue tapes were re-transferred in the 1990s ↩
- Bob Katz Mastering Audio describes mastering, in both senses of the term ↩
- Sound Guys has a more in-depth description of the loudness wars, the Wikipedia article is an overview ↩
- See this post on the audiophile-oriented SHF “brickwalled ===> hearing fatigue ===> headache ===> losing interest in music ===> irritability ===> turning off your stereo” ↩
- Spotify for artists - loudness normalisation ↩