Genesis Box Set 1970 - 75 (longish rant, skip if you're squeamish)
Got this box set, which contains remixes of the five arguably most important Genesis albums. It has been hailed as the Holly Grail of the prog rock, and some people responded to it as if it was the Second Coming.
I've learned about this only recently, and got super excited. But upon listening to the remixes, I've made a complete 180 degrees turnaround, and am now deeply depressed.
The issue, for me personally, boils down to remixing (not necessarily to remastering, brickwalling the dynamics, or any of that jazz). Yes, the new remixes have been tampered with using liberal amounts of compression, limiting, and otherwise EQ-ing the original tapes. But bad as that is, it's nothing compared to how they managed to sus all life out of these marvelous albums by remixing them.
I've already been disappointed once with a remixing affair, when they remixed some of the Beatles tracks for the refurbished Yellow Submarine DVD. It was clear even then that any attempts to go back to the source tapes and then repeat the mixing process cannot possibly end well. Luckily, Apple Corp. corrected their erroneous ways by releasing the remastered Beatles catalog last year -- remastering is indeed the right way to go.
With Genesis, I'm not sure why they decided to go with remixing. They should've done the same thing as Apple Corp. did with the Beatles catalog, and just painstakingly remaster the Genesis catalog.
Instead, they went back to the source tapes (8 channels, I suppose), and worked their way from the ground up, remixing them and then boiling them down to the final masters. The results are, at least to my ears, atrocious. All the magic and the soul and life is now gone from the Genesis music. What's left is just a pile of generic tracks, sounding as if some neo-punk band recorded them last year.
There obviously is something unique that transpires in the recording studio once the band decides that they're done with laying down the tracks, and when they move into the mixing stage. There are so many volatile factors that come into play at that stage, and these factors cannot be replicated at some other time. But what these volatile, transient factors do is contribute to the flavor and the texture of the mastered tracks.
When they went back, 35 years later, into the studio and pulled out all those source tapes and started mixing them down, they could not approximate, couldn't come even close to the original vibe that was prevalent during the early '70s sessions. Consequently, the resulting products sound stillborn.
Maybe I've got it all wrong in my head, but at this point I am highly skeptical that it would be possible to produce respectful remixes of any of the classic material. For example, I'm convinced that no one would be able to successfully remix the Beatles "Tomorrow Never Knows". If this teaches us anything it is that, in the future, we, the consumers, should demand better remasters, not remixes.
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Originally Posted by magiccarpetride
